India has talent but needs appropriate environment to nurture it to make it world class, President Pranab Mukherjee said today as he conferred an honorary degree upon god particle research pioneer Rolf Dieter Heuer.
Addressing the students of National Institute of Technology on its fifth convocation here, he said the country commanded supremacy in education from sixth century BC to 13th century AD when universities like Takshashilla, Nalanda, Valabhi, Sompauri were considered seat of learning across the major civilisations of that time.
"The talents are there but what is required is to provide an appropriate environment and there comes the role of the teachers and faculties," he said.
During the function he conferred Heuer and Bikash Sinha, well-known Indian nuclear scientist, Honorary Causa D. Science.
The degree for Heuer was received by Rudiger Voss, Head International Relations, CERN, Switzerland on his behalf. Heuer is the Director General of CERN, the facility which houses Large Hadron Collider and discovered Higgs Boson, since 2009 and leading the research.
Expressing concerns over quality of education being imparted in the country, Mukherjee asked why India has to wait for 83 years for getting a Nobel.
"Sometimes I feel sad we had to wait for 83 years and we don't know how many more years we shall have to wait to get a Nobel prize working in an Indian University. The last one was Sir C V Raman," he said.
"It is not that Indian students do not have talent. In the contemporary period, four graduates of Indian universities obtained Nobel Prize -- Amartya Sen, Chandrasekhar and two others."
He also said he was disappointed to see rampant atrocities on women and questioned whether society has forgotten values of our ancestors.
"Atrocities on women and children are never permitted in any society which calls it civilised. The first landmark of civilisation is to respect the women and particularly in our country we praise women as deity but when they are subjected to humiliation, repeatedly on different occasion in different parts, we are not able to prevent that. It doesn't speak well of us," the President said.
He said time for introspection and revisit our "time-honoured" values has come.
He said India has done well in terms of economic growth between 2003-04 to 2012-13 with an average growth of 7.9 per cent as compared to developed countries.
Earlier, he dedicated to the nation a 726.6 MW gas-based power plant of ONGC Tripura Power Corporation Limited which is likely to bring 1.62 million carbon credit points because of green technology used for power production.
