Architecture students from IIT Kharagpur and America's MIT will soon conduct a joint study on how to preserve the heritage of Rabindranath Tagore's abode in Santiniketan.

The department of architecture and regional planning at IIT Kharagpur has tied-up with the School of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a course to study urbanisation in the current developing world. A group of 6-8 students, at graduate and undergraduate levels from each institute, will come to Santiniketan this October for their research work.

Officials said during this period they will make a proposal regarding an integrated site management strategy for Visva Bharati university. They will also suggest guidelines to control the scattered and unsystematic development in the university campus and tailor it in sync with Tagore's ideology behind the inception of the place.

Visva Bharati university authorities have been unsuccessfully trying for the past few years to get the tag of a World Heritage Site from UNESCO. A group of faculty members and researchers across MIT-Harvard Boston community and IIT Kharagpur would be guiding the students. They will also come up with a strategic plan for environmental stewardship and watershed management of the nearby 'Khowai' (canyon created by water and wind erosion and an intrinsic part of Bolpur), officials said.

Soil loss, decreasing erodibility, change in morphology and loss of flora and fauna are some of the major issues of this sensitive ecological region. The primary reasons for these problems are often attributed to unstable soil structure, lack of vegetation, climatic condition, proneness to natural disasters and human intervention in an unplanned manner.