Professor Satoshi Watanabe
IJEP Coordinator

India is undergoing dramatic development and is becoming a superpower with a diverse culture and social structure. India is also becoming an increasingly important partner of Japan, which is reflected in, for example, a one trillion yen investment from Japan to India deployed to the railway sector for official and private development assistance. On the other hand, a wide variety of technical, management, and policy issues must be solved in India. India and Japan must cooperate and make considerable contributions to solve these problems.

The India-Japan Education Program (abbreviated as IJEP) is a collaborative industry-academia-government linking effort that was adopted by the School of Engineering and the School of Information Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo as part of the Re-Inventing Japan Project (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology) in 2014. The purpose of this five-year program is to foster human resources capable of being globally active and to internationalize higher education while assuring quality. The theme of the program activities is “Go Global,” as proposed by the University of Tokyo.

IJEP offers educational programs, collaborates with several schools (including Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), and the Indian Institute of Management), and works in cooperation with government agencies and related companies. It aims to contribute to the advancement of high-quality human resources who are qualified to lead Indian development. For Japanese students, collaborative learning with excellent students from the IITs is expected to strengthen the sophistication of the University of Tokyo’s education. As IJEP is also a consortium with Japanese and Indian governments and companies, the program promotes not only human resource education, but also the establishment of a win-win relationship between India and Japan. Extensive cooperative development is anticipated.

The IJEP is composed of five subprograms: railway, infrastructure, innovation, technology management, and information science programs. These subprograms cover almost all the fields in engineering. Students involved in the IJEP program, in addition to completing courses and accomplishing research at the host university, can establish personal contacts and networks between India and Japan through valuable experiences such as field work and internships in both countries.