NIIT announces scholarships to meritorious GNIIT students

New Delhi: NIIT, the IT training pioneer in India, has announced the GNIIT scholarships for the academic year 2003-04, to help students gain competitive edge in IT careers. This scholarship programme is exclusively for NIIT's flagship GNIIT programme, which trains students on latest, state-of-the-art technologies preparing them for a career in IT.

To be eligible for the scholarship, applicants need to be class XII pass or equivalent and pursuing their graduate studies. The scholarship test will be held on 20 July 2003 at all the NIIT education centres across India.

Says Pradeep Narayanan, the head of NIIT Education: "The GNIIT scholarships will reward and recognise excellence among meritorious youth and enable them to acquire industry relevant IT skills and contribute to India's trained IT manpower base."

Commenting on the prospects for IT training, Narayanan says India's ICT majors are providing fresh impetus to their hiring plans. The country's largest IT services and IT-enabled services companies such as Wipro, Infosys, GE, NIIT, Satyam and a host of other leaders are expanding their operations and on the look out for relevant manpower.

According to a study, the hiring of professionals by India's top eight IT companies has gone up by 36 per cent for the year ending March 2003 as compared to same period last year. The IT-enabled services sector, in particular, has created a major pull for skilled professionals. While the value of scholarship will be determined by an individual's relative performance in the entrance test, the least value of scholarship, for GNIIT, will be Rs 18,000.

GNIIT is a three-year programme aimed at creating global IT professionals and is based on the feedback from leading corporate regarding their expectations of a complete industry-relevant IT professional ensuring that GNIITians become the first choice for every employer.

GNIIT students from NIIT who come with one year of industry experience have been lapped up by the IT industry. A glance at the top 15 recruiters of GNIIT students during October 2002 to March 2003 throws up names like Citibank, Colgate, Dell, HCL Technologies, ICICI, Kanbay, L&T Infotech, Mphasis BFL, NIIT, Polaris, Ramco, Satyam, Scope International, Spectramind and Wipro. On an average each of these companies hired 85 GNIITians in the six-month period. This number is higher than the same period last year.