"We always had a dream to do this," the director of Manipal University, Dubai, Dr B. Ramjee, said about creating a permanent campus in Dubai International Academic City.

At the ground-breaking ceremony for the new campus, the facilities and design of the university were unveiled. Anand Sudarshan, CEO, Manipal Education, described the design of the new building as being fully interconnected — in order to provide a strong foundation of technology for students to access different types of materials.

The construction of the first phase of the new university is expected to be completed by May 2011. This phase will cover an area twice the size of the current campus and once construction of the entire university is completed by 2013, the total campus area will cover a capacity of around 300,000 square feet.

The university, which is now located in a block in Dubai International Academic City, currently has 1,600 students. Phase 1 of the new campus will be able to accommodate more than 2,000 students and after the completion of the entire campus, the new location will be able to host more than 5,000 students.

State-of-the-art facilities available in Phase 1 will be extensive in terms of extra-curricular and other activities. Students and faculty entering this part of the campus will be provided with 50 classes, 60 laboratories, a library that will store more than 30,000 books and a diverse range of journals, along with a common food court and a sports complex with indoor and outdoor facilities.

Sudarshan said the new campus will also house EduNxt, an internet-based learning platform created by Sikkim Manipal University that supports technology for higher education.

"The content repository of EduNxt alone will have more than 1.2 million cases, articles and journals all of which [will be] seamlessly accessible to our students."

Dr Ramjee said the university already has fixed transportation for students. As for accommodation, he is hopeful the university will be able to have its own housing for both men and women in the next two years.

While new courses will be announced for the new batch of students this autumn, students entering the academic year of 2011 will continue their higher education in Phase 1 of the new campus.

Of the dignitaries present at the ceremony, India's Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal was the chief guest. He congratulated Manipal University for its new expansion and said one of the challenges the university should embark upon is to figure out whether it can be built in the context of a 21st century city. He added that "sitting in Manipal [University], in the midst of a new centre, there are many conquests yet to be made" and as the university moves along in the knowledge economy it will have to meet those challenges and address them.

"We don't know what technology is going to bring to us 10 years from now…and the only way to discover is to ignite young minds in institutions like this nature [Manipal University]," he said.

— The writer is a mass communication major at the American University of Sharjah