Nadtional Education Day:Need to free faculty from administrative responsibilities’

50 per cent of the technology in India is foreign and used without alteration, says former V-C
Gold medals given to students who passed out of JNTUCEK

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Kakinada: The weakness of Indian higher education system is the paltry number (about 16 per cent) of the faculty who are engaged in research whereas it is almost cent per cent in most foreign countries. This small number of faculty are burdened with a part of the administrative responsibilities in the affiliating system. It is beyond dispute that a system of higher education where the entire faculty members are involved in research in addition to teaching, has to be established to be competitive in research, said V.C. Kulandai Swamy, Chairman of Tamil Virtual University and former vice-chancellor of Anna and Madhurai Kamaraj Universities and Indira Gandhi National Open University.
Unplanned growth Addressing the faculty and alumni of JNTU College of Engineering College, Kakinada (JNTUCEK), on the occasion of National Education Day organised to mark the birth anniversary of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad on Wednesday, Prof. Swamy said the Indian higher education system had no relation whatsoever with the recommendations of a plethora of committees and commissions including the National Education Policy of 1986.
The result was that Indian system was so different and so deficient in comparison with that of the rest of the world. An unplanned evolutionary growth had continued unchecked in the field of higher education, he observed.
Quoting from the information given by a former secretary of the Department of Science and Technology in the year 2000, Prof. Swamy said, 50 per cent of the technology in India was foreign technology used without alteration, 45 per cent was foreign technology modified and adapted to our needs and the remaining 5 per cent was indigenous technology.
This has been the sorry state of affairs on the technology front. India could not expect to become a world power by depending so heavily on foreign technology. The capacity to innovate and generate new technologies had to be improved to add to the progress that had since been achieved.
The JNTU-K Vice-Chancellor said Abul Kalam Azad was credited with the establishment of Indian Institutes of Technology which flagged India’s pride among the comity of nations, and University Grants Commission.
He was responsible for various other landmark developments in the field of higher education. Later, Prof. Kulandai Swamy and Prof. Appa Rao gave away gold medals to former students who passed out of JNTUCEK after 1946.