In collaboration with the International Solar Alliance (ISA), the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) will offer three Open Distance Learning (ODL) courses on solar applications from the coming session. The courses will target international students. ISA is an international alliance of 120 ‘sunshine countries’ (abundant in sunlight) with a focus on solar power utilisation.
It was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in November 2015, at the CoP21 climate conference in Paris, and has its headquarters in Gurgaon.
“All of the courses will be available on the international platform. They’ll be translated into French, Spanish and hopefully also to Arabic. For Spanish and French we already have the facility, but for Arabic it may take some time,” said IGNOU vice-chancellor Ravindra Kumar.
Kumar said the university had formed a committee to work on the modalities last week. The government has already said that the first 300 students enrolling in these programmes will not be charged any fee, although a formal announcement on the same is yet to be made. By and large, all of the 300 students will be from outside India.
Source: indianexpress
