India needs to pay more attention to education, according to VIT Chancellor G. Viswanathan. Speaking at The Hindu International Education Fair 2019 on Friday, he said, “As a country we are lagging behind in education and quite a lot needs to be done about the quality of school education.”
“There are 80 countries in the world that spend more than 5% of GDP on education. So far, we have never crossed 4%. This means wherever the government spends less, the parents have to spend more,” he said. He also spoke about how The Hindu had always given importance to education and the student community.
Mukund Padmanabhan, Editor, The Hindu, said ever since it was founded, the newspaper had sought to expand the horizons of readers’ minds, get them interested in areas that they were perhaps not very interested in and invite them to engage in a range of things that stimulated thought and prepared them for life.
“We are living in a climate where more and more people are going abroad for higher education and there are countries where education is regarded by the government as a market or seen as [something important] for the economy. This is where this fair plays a vital role,” he said.
Many universities and institutions have put up stalls at the fair, being held at Hotel Hyatt Regency, Teynampet, on January 25 and 26.