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"If we do want to achieve our rightful place, if we want to be a first-class power, we must have first-class facilities, first-class academic institutions and first-class colleges," the President said.
He was addressing students and faculty of the K C College here on the occasion of the institution's diamond jubilee celebrations.
The 'QS World University Rankings' showed that no Indian educational institution featured among the world's top 200 institutions. "I really feel sad when I find that in international rating agencies, when they are upgrading and classifying institutions worldwide, in 200 top international institutions, I do not find the name of a single Indian university," he said.
With respect to the Nobel prize too, Mukherjee said that it was 87 years ago that India last got a Nobel prize, in C V Raman. "It is not that there is a lack of talent in the schools. In the contemporary period, as many as four Indian students who graduated or post graduated from Indian universities -- Amartya Sen, Har Gobind Khurana, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan -- got the Nobel prize. But unfortunately, they got the Nobel prize when they were working outside India in some universities of USA, UK or somewhere else," he said.
