The Chandigarh Administration on Wednesday cleared the decks for setting up of an Education City at Sarangpur Institution Area, by signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with three parties.

Present on the occasion, UT Administrator S F Rodrigues said the project of Education City had been conceived to create world-class educational infrastructure, with the main focus on empowering children and sharpening their skills to make them professionally competent as well as confident individuals.

“Special emphasis has been laid on providing assistance, in the form of scholarships and low-cost quality education to committed and intelligent students belonging to the disadvantaged sections, who cannot afford to pay normal fees in other institutions,” he said.

The three companies whose representatives signed MoUs with UT Home-cum-Education Secretary Ram Niwas included NMIMS (Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies), Chitkara Education Trust Chandigarh and Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Limited.

Sources said the Education City also has effective linkages with the Rajiv Gandhi Information Technology Park, Film City, Theme Park and Medicity to share infrastructure support.

Rodrigues said being one of the mega projects to come up at the Sarangpur Institutional area on the UT’s periphery, Education City will help in making Chandigarh a regional hub for extending support to the people of the region.

“Chandigarh is emerging as the regional hub to extend support to 60 million people of the region with its various new projects like the international airport, Mass Rapid Transport System, a super-fast train service between Delhi-Amritsar via Chandigarh and a modern terminal market for agriculture in the pipeline,” added Rodrigues.

Dr N M Kondap, Vice Chancellor, NMIMS, assured to play an active role in various societal endeavours for building a prosperous life in the region.

Besides eminent educationists, Sanjay Kumar, Finance Secretary and Vivek Atray, Director Tourism and Public Relations were present on the occasion.