On June 20, President Pranab Mukherjee expressed deep concern at the deteriorating standard of education in the country, regretting that not a single university or IIT or NIT found place in the list of top 200 universities of the world.
Addressing the 10th convocation of Tripura University in Agartala, Mukhejee said that for about 1,800 years India had dominated the field of higher education.
India was a prominent seat of learning in ancient times and those universities were visited by famous scholars like Panini, Chanakya and Kautilya, he noted.
Saying “we cannot allow such a deteriorating situation to continue in education”, he told the gathering that there were universities like Nalanda, Taxila and Vikramshila which came into being well before Oxford and Cambridge did, and where students from home and abroad assembled.
Mukherjee said that 84 years ago C V Raman, a scholar from the Calcutta University, won the Nobel Prize and recently another graduate from the same university, Amartya Sen, won the Economics Nobel.
The President expressed dismay at the rise of atrocities against women and appealed to the people to restore values of the country’s ancient civilisation.
We cannot allow this decay. It is time for self introspection. We have to restore our old values. We must have respect for pluralism, moral values and discipline, he said.
Among others, Tripura chief minister Manik Sarkar and Governor Debananda Konwar spoke at the convocation.
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