New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) has made the announcement of commencing a culinary institute very soon in India. The decision to launch the institute at IGNOU's campus came after the university's Board of Management and Academic Council gave its approval to the plan.
The culinary programme will include comparative studies of other cuisines, courses on different aspects of restaurant management, the hospitality sector and tourism. The courses will be full-time classroom courses and the experts in regional cuisines will deliver lectures to the students. The faculty will include chefs and managers of hotels and restraunts.
V.N. Rajasekharan Pillai, IGNOU Vice Chancellor, said that the introduction of the new courses will help in the documentation, preservation, development and the promotion of India's regional cuisines. Further, he said that all states and regions in India have their own unique cuisines. Most of the authentic recipes of all these cuisines have been lost or are dying with the passage of time and need to be documented.
Moreover, Pillai told that, IGNOU will be offering PhDs, MBAs and other specializations in Indian cooking along with professional courses such as certificate course. Further, he informed that the institute would be committed to the study of Indian culinary skills and would also conduct a wide range of documentation and research programmes in social and cultural anthropology as well as other sciences related programmes.
IGNOU is currently planning to collaborate with several Swedish universities and institutes such as University of Gothenburg, Chalmers University of Technology, Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology and others for the new programme. IGNOU’s Officials informed that the Open University will be a part of the School of Tourism and Hospitality Services Management and the courses would commence from the 2011-2012 academic session.
