Dehradun: Uttarakhand governor Baby Rani Maurya laid the foundation stone of National Institute of Technology (NIT) Uttarakhand campus in Sumari village of Srinagar in Pauri Garhwal along with Union human resources development (HRD) minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank and CM Trivendra Singh Rawat on Saturday.

HRD minister Nishank said that the campus will come up within two years’ time in a 300-hectare land parcel provided by the state government, and Rs 1,000 crore has been sanctioned to make the campus a state-of-art one. He assured to soon bring back the NIT students, who had moved to Jaipur last year following an agitation in which the students had refused to carry on at their temporary campus which was housed in a polytechnic, terming it as “very unsafe.”

Nishank added that “now students of NIT Uttarakhand will not have to go outside the state.” “They can live here and avail high-class education. We will try to bring back all the NIT students from Jaipur next year,” said the HRD minister, adding that the government is also planning to construct a Kendriya Vidyalaya in Sumari so that “the teachers of NIT don’t have to worry about schooling of their children.”

The ceremony was also attended by state higher education minister and MLA from Srinagar Dhan Singh Rawat, state BJP president Ajay Bhatt and Pauri MP Tirath Singh Rawat.

The agitation by NIT students in Uttarakhand had erupted last year in October when the students began demanding that the institute be shifted from its current location along NH-58 to a safer place after two BTech students met with accidents while commuting from one campus cluster to another.

Irked with the poor infrastructure and lack of safety, students had then approached the high court (HC) and boycotted classes demanding a permanent campus of the institution. On the orders of HC, over 700 students of BTech were subsequently moved to NIT Jaipur.