President puts stress on innovation, quality of education

President Pranab Mukherjee today said that India needs to "strive harder" to promote innovations which can drive the country's growth.
Addressing the 4th convocation of Indian Institute of Management (IIM) here, he also said that quality of education must be ensured while the country expands the educational infrastructure.
"It is the innovation due to which industrial enterprises show high growth momentum and keep themselves ahead of their competitors. As per a 2014 international survey, there are only five Indian firms amongst the world's hundred most innovative companies. We have to strive harder," he said.
"Our academic institutions and industry have to engage with one another and benefit mutually from partnerships in joint research, curriculum development and setting up of chairs, incubation centres and research parks," he added.

"Setting up of more and more institutions to impart higher education is important. It is however equally essential that with the physical expansion of educational infrastructure, the education imparted to our students should also be of a high quality," the President said.
The institutions of higher education must promote a culture of excellence and develop core competencies. They have to expand capacity to cater to more students and at the same time uphold the quality of instruction, he said.
They also have to resort to technology tools like e-classrooms to enable sharing of ideas and intellectual resources like lectures and tutorials, Mukherjee said.

The government is taking proactive steps to ensure that students receive the required knowledge and skills, and an important decision taken recently in this regard was the setting up of National Ranking Framework for higher educational institutions, he said.