Former President A P J Abdul Kalam, who was in the city on Saturday, urged engineering students to look beyond their specialisation and understand the concepts of convergence between various technologies.
Interacting with engineering and management students at BNM Educational Institutions, Kalam said that the curricula of professional courses must be developed after removing inter-disciplinary barriers.
“IT and biotechnology together gave rise to bio-informatics. Similarly, with nanotechnology and IT, we have the field of intelligent biosciences. Students must explore these new fields,” he said.
Students at BNM College must adopt 22 villages around the city to start their own Providing Urban Amenities to Rural Areas (PURA) project for sustainable development, he added. Kimmane Rathnakar, Minister for Primary and Secondary Education, said the department will recruit 12,000 teachers to fill up vacancies in government schools across the state. He said, “We have 22,000 posts still lying vacant and schools in each district require around 1,500 teachers. We will begin recruitment in the first week of August,” he said.
Kalam said incidents like the deaths of 22 children in Bihar after they consumed mid-day meals could have been avoided if professionals were employed in the field. “They must periodically monitor the quality of food and ensure that nothing goes wrong,” he added.