Revamp higher education to meet today’s needs: Venkaiah

NT NETWORK

PANAJI

Vice-President of India M Venkaiah Naidu on Friday called for revamping the higher education by introducing skill-centric academic courses to make graduates self-employed and job-ready.

Speaking at the fourth convocation ceremony of the National Institute of Technology-Goa in the presence of Governor Mridula Sinha at the Kala Academy, Panaji, on Friday morning, Naidu underlined the need on the introduction of certain courses to meet the needs of industries.

“Our universities need to overhaul the syllabi and the teaching methodologies to make the courses relevant to the needs of the industries. I also feel that engineering students should be made to work as interns for some weeks every year to enable them gain firsthand experience,” Naidu emphasised.

Strongly pitching for revamping the higher education by factoring in the contemporary needs, the Vice-President said, “We simply cannot continue to have lakhs of engineering students graduating without basic employability. This undesirable trend must stop.”

Naidu said, “The need of the hour is to impart skills to the youngsters to enable them find gainful employment or become self-employed. The Skill India programme is a step in that direction. The government can’t provide employment to everyone. If everybody is employed in government to serve people then to whom services will be provided,” he said.

Naidu maintained that India is the fastest growing economy and its GDP is expected to grow at 7.3 per cent next year.

According to rating agencies, India is expected to become the third largest global economy in near future, he said adding that “we have to surmount many barriers and achieve faster growth”.

With the improvement in the ‘ease of doing business’ rankings, India has become an attractive destination for foreign direct investments;   the World Bank has stated that private investments are expected to grow by 8.8 per cent in fiscal year 2018-19, he said.

India will become a high middle-income country by 2030, and hence there will be a lot of opportunities for the youth in different sectors, Naidu said adding that the IT sector continues to be a leading employer even as India remained the third largest hub for technology startups.

Exhorting the engineering graduates to become self-employed, the Vice-President said that students should come out with innovative ideas to make the best of the opportunities available under new initiatives such as Clean India, Startup India, Digital India, Skill India, Stand up India, Amrut Mission and Smart City Mission.

Naidu presented degree certificates to 133 students of the NIT-Goa at the convocation ceremony. These include 86 students of B.Tech, 42 students of M.Tech and five PhD scholars.

He lauded the talent in the state by highlighting the fact that three out of five gold medallists of NIT-Goa are Goans.

“It’s a milestone for the beginning of a new chapter. It is heartening to know that 65-70 per cent of degree recipients are girls, which is a positive sign for the country,” Naidu added.

The Vice-President said that climate change and global warming are two of the biggest challenges the world is facing today and all nations have to step up their efforts to protect the environment and reduce carbon footprint.

“I have always maintained that man should not tamper with nature, but coexist in harmony with nature for a greener, life-enhancing future. We need innovative ideas for safe, secure, healthy and sustainable life with the help of technology and whatever experiments are done in the lab should come onto the land,” he said.

Advising the graduates to get back to their roots, he asked them to preserve India’s rich cultural heritage and nature.

‘Share and care’ is the core of Indian philosophy and we should preserve that philosophy. Let us give up the colonial mindset, he observed.

Naidu said that as the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha he has effected small changes in the upper House.

“I have done some small changes in the Rajya Sabha. When a minister wanted to lay paper on the table he/she used to say ‘I beg to table’. I asked: begging whom? I said we should say ‘I submit a paper or lay on the table’.

“Indians should greet people with ‘namaskar’ rather than with ‘good morning’, ‘good afternoon’, and ‘good evening’. ‘Namaskar’ is our ‘sanskar’ (values) in India. This gesture comes from the heart,” he maintained.

Stating that English mindset inherited from Britishers has left Indians mentally ruined, Naidu said that English mind is an illness, and not the language.

The Vice-President said there is nothing wrong in learning English or any other foreign language.

“We have beautiful languages. We should always respect them. Try to converse within the family, society in mother tongue. We should discuss and debate in our mother tongue,” he emphasised.

“Somewhere I was speaking about protecting and encouraging the mother tongue and some section of the media wrote that I said that English is an illness. I did not say English is an illness. I said that English is not illness, but English mind is an illness which we have inherited from the Britishers,” he clarified.