A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has been signed by Ministry of Railways and PEC University of Technology for setting up of ‘Kalpana Chawla Chair‘ on Geospatial Technology for Indian Railways at PEC University of Technology, Chandigarh. The MoU is a unique collaboration between the two organizations which will help in developing applications to remove day to day engineering and technological problems and geospatial solutions to Indian Railways. He stated that this is very historic partnership which will ascertain smooth functioning of the Railways.

Salient Features

• This academic chair is being instituted in fond memory of Late Kalpana Chawla , an Indo – American Astronaut and Alumnus of PEC during the year 1978-82.
• Indian Railways would provide a corpus of Rs 10 Crore to PEC University of Technology, Chandigarh towards setting up and to meet the running expenses of this chair.
• The objective of this chair is to encourage research activities in Geo-spatial Technology and to strengthen Indian Railways especially Railway projects where use of remote sensing data , global positioning system (GPS) and Geographical information System (GIS) is predominant.
• This will immensely help Indian Railways to develop in house solutions to the problems which are often outsourced to western countries.