 "Immediate challenge to bring growth back to 8%: Pranab Mukherjee")
The immediate challenge in front of the country is to bring the economy back to the eight% plus growth rate which it used to clock in in the past, said President of India Pranab Mukherjee. He added the need of quality education, innovation and growth in technology in order to take the country to the higher growth levels.
Speaking at the inauguration of the 28th Indian Engineering Congress, he said, "Our economic growth declined during the last two years. At five% in 2012-13, it was the lowest in the last ten years. Our immediate challenge is to reverse the deceleration and nurse our growth path back to the eight% plus levels often clocked by us in the past".
He said that the positive factors such as continuing rise in per capita incomes, expanding middle-class consumers, and a young and energetic workforce gives me confidence that as the global economy revives, we will be able to secure a faster growth.
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Engineering has played a pivotal role in the great economic transformation the country witnessed in the last few decades and engineering and technology in the country have to be driven by competent engineers and scientists.
Engineering is a preferred discipline accounting for one fourth of the total enrolment in higher education and the annual enrolment in engineering tripled during the course of the Eleventh Plan period. We have a formidable set-up of engineering and technical institutions in the country. However, many of them are low in terms of the standard of education imparted.
"Our educational standards must be geared to international benchmarks. Every engineering and technical institution in the country must make an all-out effort to help India develop a large pool of proficient scientific and technical manpower," he said. The Institution of Engineers (India) must think of establishing an Institute of Excellence in Engineering and Technology to create synergy between industry and academia through high quality engineering education and innovative research.
While inaugurating a the Loyola College of Commerce & Economics, he said that the higher education infrastructure in India comprises over 650 degree awarding institutions and over 33,000 colleges and despite this, the country is short of good quality institutions to meet the increasing demand. The National Knowledge Commission had remarked about the falling standards in higher education as a ‘quiet crisis that runs deep’.
"Sadly today, our universities are nowhere in the top global rankings," he said. The universities should make increased use of technology solutions like e-education to address problems of accessibility, quality and faculty shortage. Using e-classroom technology, important lectures can be transmitted to students in different locations.
While India’s higher education system is the second largest in the world but the enrolment rate for the 18-24 years age group is only seven%. Compared to this, it is 21% in Germany and 34% in the US. Greater access to higher education, especially in remote areas, is the need of the hour. To make higher education affordable for meritorious students belonging to socio-economically difficult backgrounds, measures like scholarships, student loans and self-help schemes are necessary.
He added that the higher education institutions are short of good faculty and the country must place top priority on filling up vacancies and building capacity in teachers. China and the US are at the forefront of innovation in the world with over five lakh patent applications each, filed in 2011. Sadly, India, with only 42,000 patent applications, lags far behind countries like China and the US.
"We must improve our systems to encourage and generate innovation. We must put in place a system to attract Indian researchers working abroad to return work on short-term projects in our country," he said. He added that the private sector can do a great work in innovation, similar to the universities in the developed countries do, though education must be taken up for public service and not private profit.