The University has a mission “to promote symbiotic relations with industry, academic and research institutions and community to meet the expectations of various stakeholders.” In keeping with this mission, the University endeavors to promote, support and seek linkages and collaborations with external entities in addition to the MOUs that are signed for mutual benefit and exchange. The frequent interaction of faculty and students with experienced, learned teachers from other institutions and the sharing of expertise from our institution with the fraternity all add to promote symbiotic relations that nurture talent, expand knowledge, share experiences and data and create a network of like-minded learners. Such a network generates training to build competencies, a key necessity of academic institutions. The learner centric efforts are skill-based, application oriented and provide scope for new concepts, innovation and creativity. Knowledge never grows in isolation. This academic year saw 41 collaborative events organized in our University campus with other bodies ranging from industry, academic institutions, research institutions and social organizations. Participation in external academic events goes beyond the attendance. Last year 50 of our faculty served as resource persons in 39 events organized by other bodies at International (1), National (15) and State (23) level apart from local events within the town. In the academic year 2019-2020 Community activities through the year involved 66 Gram Panchayat, 48 social organizations and 22 educational institutions collaborations in the district of Kolhapur. These collaborations symbiotically provided experiential training and behavioral modelling involving totally 2920 students. This year, the Kolhapur Floods in July and again the COVID pandemic from March-April provided the backdrop against which the University made great efforts to work with the government and elected village bodies where the faculty, staff and students of the institution provided the much needed health support and healthcare while the demonstrative and experiential learning of health challenges, the psychosocial impact on health and the action-orientation needed at such times, provided our students with an experience that will stand their future and the nation’s future in good stead. The COVID pandemic from March 2020 formed a unique experience where the symbiotic relations with the local government authorities provided optimized health care to the local population with rational use of resources and manpower, distribution of the workload and creation of new facilities within our hospital to meet the needs of the local administration. During the two months of Floods and relief operations, the hospital conducted 84 health camps in flood-affected areas and interns, students and residents all manned these facilities along with senior doctors. Fifty-three Students participated in Corona awareness campaigns and also participated in the Health Survey of the local population to identify high-risk or at-risk population, the data shared with the government authorities. From running a Flu OPD for local population, providing quarantine services, admitting COVID affected patients, dedicating the ICU and later the entire hospital to COVID efforts and providing home swab collection services the mutual understanding and cooperation with local administration provided a striking example of public-private partnership yet again.
