N R Narayana Murthy suggested investing $1 billion per year to train 10,000 retired highly accomplished teachers from the developed world and India in STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). According to Murthy, this course is insufficient on its own.
“We must show much respect and pay better salaries to our teachers and researchers.
We must also provide better facilities to our researchers. We must honour them. They are role models for our youngsters. That is why we instituted theInfosys Prize in 2009. It is our small contribution to further the cause of research in India”. he added.
One possible way of accelerating NEP’s (National Education Policy) outcome is to invite 10,000 retired highly accomplished teachers from the developed world and from India in Stem areas to create 2,500 “Train the Teacher” colleges in the country’s 28 states and eight union territories, Murthy said.
He said that 100 primary school teachers and 100 secondary school teachers can be trained annually by each group of four trainers.
“We will be able to train 250,000 primary school teachers and 250,000 secondary school teachers every year by this method. These trained Indian teachers can themselves become trainers over a period of 5 years.”
“We should pay about $100,000 a year”, he said
He said the twenty-year programme will cost India $1 billion a year and $20 billion over twenty years.
“Our nation, targeting a GDP of $5 trillion soon, will not find it a big financial burden”, Murthy said.
Murthy, who is a teacher’s son himself, stated that India needs to treat its educators and researchers with more dignity and better compensation.
He went on to say that India should aim for stage 4 innovation and invention, when it becomes an innovator of new services, goods, and processes, replicating the success of nations like the US, most of the EU, Japan, and Australia.
A nation typically does not innovate or invent in stage one, according to Murthy, who outlined the four stages in a nation’s invention and innovation lifecycle. In the second stage, it starts utilizing foreign inventions and innovations to produce goods and services.
In stage three, it uses higher education and research to innovate and improve on those of other countries, with the goal of improving productivity, quality, cost, and comfort. The fourth stage is when a country becomes an innovator of new processes, products, and services.
“In some critical areas, such as the design of livable cities, pollution management, traffic management, and providing clean and safe water, we are still in stage 1. “India must aspire to move to stage 04 in every area that affects the lives of our poorest citizens in the farthest reaches of the country,” Murthy said on November 15 at the Infosys Prize 2023 awards ceremony in Bengaluru.
“Excellence in speed in idea generation and in the execution of those ideas comes from a culture of high aspiration, curious and inquiring minds, a desire to achieve the best global standard of work productivity, the most stringent discipline and hard work, and the mindset of a nation that respects better-performing cultures and is ready to learn from them,” he said.
He said this would require improving the quality of primary, secondary, and higher educational institutions to embrace independent, critical, and analytical thinking.
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Source: TOI
