Need to enhance quality of graduates: President Pranab Mukherjee

President Pranab Mukherjee Saturday said determined efforts needed to be made to enhance the quality of graduates so that the overall skill pool is employable.

"The India Skills Report 2014 has revealed that only 52 percent of engineering graduates and 34 percent of our overall skill pool are employable. This situation must change," Mukherjee said at the 36th annual convocation of the Indian School of Mines (ISM). "We must make a determined effort to enhance the quality of our graduates," he said.

The president also called upon Indian institutions to nurture innovation for the benefit of the common man and said research pursuits help redefine the frontiers of a discipline. "Our institutes of higher learning must take up issues relevant to their social and economic context for in-depth research. ISM is located in a region rich in scarce mineral resources. So they should concentrate on developing technologies that increases the efficiency of resource extraction," Mukherjee said.

He said he was happy to see many Indian institutions among the top in world rankings. The president also said the ISM should introduce resource-conserving industrial processes as that would be a key step in the direction of sustainable development. "India does not have significant proven resources of a number of minerals that are very essential for modern industrial economies. India is deficient in gold and the platinum group of elements, nickel, rare-earth elements etc. "Geological formations in India are similar to those of the African and Australian continents. Use of advanced exploration techniques could lead to discoveries in India comparable to that in these continents," he said.