IIHS Vision and Mission
India’s urbanisation is the largest rural-to-urban transition in human history. By the middle of the century, at least 800 million Indians will live in cities and they will constitute more than half of India’s population. This is not just a demographic transition. Urbanisation is fundamentally changing India’s economy, society, culture, natural and built environments, as well as politics. Our national development now hinges on this transition being handled with wisdom.
Launching a set of core urban missions in 2015, including Smart Cities, AMRUT, PMAY, HRIDAY and Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, ‘It would have been very beneficial if we had recognised urbanisation as an opportunity 25–30 years earlier and treated it as a foundation.’
In an urban century, this is a timely realisation for India and the world. Yet, two core challenges stand in the way of this urban transformation—the need for:
- A new generation of interdisciplinary urban practitioners, innovators and scholars, and those who have the right knowledge, skills and perspectives to tackle the problems of 21st-century urbanisation, via cutting-edge practice, teaching and globally benchmarked research.
- New knowledge that they can use to find solutions to these apparently intractable challenges; and adapt, scale and replicate them across a nation of over 1.5 billion people, transforming the everyday lives of people and the economy, society and the environment, as we know it today.
IIHS is launching a new university to address these challenges.
The IIHS (Institution Deemed to be) University is premised on this need to transform the current nature of urban education as one of the most important drivers for India’s national development and sustainable global futures. It will do so in two key ways: (a) by undertaking interdisciplinary research and practice to help build new global knowledge; and (b) by training a new generation of urban professionals through the delivery of a set of transformative interdisciplinary academic programmes.
The University takes urbanisation as the core of a new knowledge paradigm that provides the scaffolding for a new, interdisciplinary, 21st-century knowledge institution.
IIHS, the Sponsoring Body, is a Section 8 company under the Indian Companies Act, established in 2008 by eminent Indians who have distinguished themselves in various fields, including the government, private sector and civil society. They came together for a common cause, to set up a university, i.e., the IIHS (Institution Deemed to be) University.