President Pranab Mukherjee on Friday sought concerted efforts to arrest "declining standards" of education and said top institutions like IITs and NITs must produce professionally competent personnel who can take an aspirational India to greater heights.
Addressing the first Convocation of the National Institute of Technology here, he said there is a need to provide greater impetus to the ratings process of educational institutions and develop competition among them.
"While we have a few reputed engineering institutions, it is also a fact that they lag in international rankings. There is a need to provide greater impetus to the ratings process.
"At the same time, there is a need to arrest declining standards in a vast number of institutions. A sense of competition has to be developed amongst our higher level institutions including NITs," he said at the event which was also attended by Arunachal Governor Nirbhay Sharma Arunachal and Chief Minister Nabam Tuki.
Situated in sylvan surroundings in this beautiful township, NIT Arunachal Pradesh was set up in 2010. With 35 faculty members and 400 students enrolled in programmes ranging from graduation to PhD levels, it offers mainstream engineering disciplines as well as emerging subjects.
He expressed happiness over the initiative to develop a national rankings system, saying this will propel the educational institutions to do better. Honorary Doctorate of Education was conferred on Prma Thinley Vice Chancellor of Royal University of Bhutan at the event.
Observing that renewed focus on inter-disciplinary approach in course curricula and research was necessary to improve quality of higher education, Mukherjee said beyond the academic domain, institutions including the NITs have a larger role to play in the progress of the regions in which they are based.
"They have to establish connection with stakeholders, identify problems hindering the development of the regions, and use their academic and research expertise to find solutions," he said.
Mukherjee said there was a great responsibility on the engineering institutions, most notably the IITs and NITs, to "produce socially conscious and professionally competent personnel who can take an aspirational India to greater heights".
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