Prof. D. S. Rao is the Pro Vice Chancellor of GITAM, Hyderabad campus. He is an experienced institution builder with a demonstrated history of working in the higher education industry. Prior to starting his academic career, he worked in the industry for 18 years and held various leadership positions in various organizations. He has worked as a Vice President for one of the largest engineering conglomerates in the country, DGP Windsor in Mumbai. Some other companies he has also worked with are Atlas Copco, Kirloskar Group, and ITW.

Prof. Rao started his academic career in 2001 with ICFAI Business School Hyderabad and held the position of Vice president for FLAME University till 2017, and later with Amity University as a Vice-Chancellor. Dr. Rao holds a Ph.D. from Sri Krishnadevaraya University,a Master in Management from the Asian Institute of Management – Philippines and a B.Tech in Mechanical.

GITAM Hyderabad

You have worked in various prestigious institutions throughout your career. What is something about GITAM that excited you to come along with the institution on the journey?

Even before getting into the education sector, I was in the industry for about 18 years. Prior to that, I was Vice President of one of the largest engineering conglomerates in the country, DGP Windsor in Mumbai. I worked with companies like Atlas Copco, Kirloskar Group in Pune, and ITW in Hyderabad. I moved to academics in 2001, when I joined ICFAI Business School, Hyderabad as an Associate Dean and eventually moved up to the positions of Dean and Director. I worked at IBS, Hyderabad for around ten years before moving on to FLAME University as Vice President. I was there for about five years and then worked with Amity University Mumbai as Vice Chancellor for a term of about three years.

I joined GITAM in the year 2020. What is exciting about GITAM is its multidisciplinarity in terms of the vast disciplines that are available. Though GITAM started with just engineering, it got into Management and the basic sciences, the humanities and social sciences, pharmacy, law, medical, nursing, and paramedical programmes. Very diverse kinds of disciplines are available within the university. Also, the three campuses provide an opportunity to serve students from across the country.

How do you make sure that the needs of various stakeholders of the university are taken care of properly to create a positive and inclusive environment within the organization?

I think the way to establish a positive environment in the college is to understand the purpose of the university. The purpose of the university is to create knowledge and disseminate knowledge. The players in this are obviously the faculty members and the students who are the primary stakeholders. The parents, staff, and others, including me, are a support system. So creating an academically strong and positive environment for the students and faculty members so that they can focus on their areas of interest and pursue them.

Can you enlighten us on the kind of significance that is given to the infrastructural development at GITAM University?

Creating an environment and the infrastructure for the students and faculty members to be able to pursue their interests is very important. We have invested about 50 crores across the university in the last year for research infrastructure. We also have a larger chunk invested across other areas as well. For the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Hyderabad campus, we invested close to three cores in setting up the media labs. We run a programme in mass communication and visual communication, for which we have 20 high-end Apple systems for the students to be able to use for editing videos and films. We also have a multi-camera studio, a dance floor, and multiple sports infrastructures for the students. There are ten professional sports coaches and students are required to take up one sport in one semester. For faculty members, we subscribed to a huge number of research databases and they have access to High Performing Computing Systems.. We have one of the best infrastructures available in this part of the world, not just in academic infrastructure but also in terms of classrooms, auditoriums, seminar halls, computers, and research labs.

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Can you describe to us the USP or the unique approach that GITAM is following in its academic structure compared to other institutions or Universities in the country?

As soon as the new education policy came into existence in 2020, we started multidisciplinary education in four of our schools. The School of Technology has been our largest school and backbone for the last 40 years. The School of Business, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the School of Sciences provide degrees on their own with open electives. In 2021, we implemented Minors in all the programs. If you are a Business School student who is doing a BBA programme you will have access to close to 25 Minors that they can take from across the other schools including the School of Sciences, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the School of Technology as well.

We offer close to 600 different combinations of Majors and Minors in the undergraduate program. In 2023, we brought all three schools together and started admitting students into a common undergrad program with the first-semester undergrad curriculum being the same. Here, the first semester has exactly the same curriculum, so they all go through the foundation courses in liberal education, sciences, business, humanities, and social sciences. In the second semester, students choose a major and a minor. Students have the flexibility to decide on their majors and minors in the second semester. Even if they join a defined programme like a BBA, a B.Sc., or a BA they can change their degree at the end of the first semester after having gone through the foundation courses.

Can you throw some light upon the special initiatives that are happening with the GITAM School of Business?

The Gitam School of Business has been in existence for the last 40 years. Over the last few years, we have been trying to make the school more student-centric. The student is the center of the learning process. We have introduced the case method of teaching and have tied it up with the HBS publications for the Harvard cases. We have also taken full licensing from IIM Ahmedabad to access all their case studies and map those cases with our curriculum. This year, in 2023, we have also set up a Bloomberg lab with 12 terminals, which is maybe one of the largest labs in terms of the number of systems for which we have Bloomberg licenses. Bloomberg has access to the entire economic data of the world and also corporate data, which is all available to our students and teachers. These are the important learning aspects that we have brought into the School of Business students and the faculty members are trained to handle the case studies and also to guide the students in Bloomberg. We are also upgrading our MBA classrooms to world-class standards using the latest technologies and infrastructure.

Can you describe what is the challenging part of being a Pro Vice-Chancellor for a University of this Scale and how you successfully manage it?

We are an institution with 40 + years of history and the world was different back when it was established. For an institution of our size and magnitude, it is a challenge not only to keep up with the changes in the curriculum but also to train the faculty members. Students are again the easy part because they don't carry any baggage. They are fresh, and they come with an open mind to the institution, whichever higher education institution they join. 

However, the continuous training of the faculty members and keeping them up to date is extremely important and that is why we have been investing so much in faculty research and training. 

The other big challenge that we've taken upon ourselves over the last three years has been the introduction of multidisciplinary Liberal Arts programmes. Providing such a vast combination of majors and minors of 650 plus to 20,000 plus students and running an academic calendar and timetabling is not an easy job. We obviously use technology for this.

As GITAM has a long-term vision of becoming the top 100 university by 2040. What is your main emphasis for the coming years as a short-term vision?

As our President Sri Bharath keeps emphasizing and reminding us in everything that we do making this vision a shared vision of everybody who is working in the university, starting from the senior person, the Vice Chancellor, to every student”. All actions that we take every day should contribute and move in that direction. Be it the way that we design and review our programmes or the way that we make our investments in research and development, all should contribute to our vision. The way we recruit our faculty members, the way we admit our students, the organizations with which we work, and the placements and internships that we generate for our students are also part of it. 

Giving an excellent learning experience and learning environment to the current batch of students is a very high priority. The student must experience the best learning experience and have an environment of opportunities to explore their full potential.