PUDUCHERRY: Deputy Chairman of the Rajya Sabha P J Kurian on Thursday expressed the need for allocating a larger share of GDP towards meeting the challenges of higher education.
Delivering the Graduation Day address after distributing scrolls to the graduates and postgraduates of Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS) on Thursday, Kurian said,” India has a good number of worldclass institutions. Yet, it still faces challenges such as low and inequitable access to higher education, shortage of faculty, deficient infrastructure, urban-rural and male-female inequality and disparity, as well as insufficient and poor-quality research.”
“A policy has to be formulated for medical teachers so that they are trained, oriented and updated regularly so that the education of the future doctor would be on a strong, scientific and social foundation,” said Kurian.
Besides, better remuneration packages (and better working conditions) for them have to be ensured so that their level of ‘job satisfaction’ was reasonably high and they also imparted value-based quality and ethical education to students who would be the future of India, he added.
Deploring the sad performance in the score-card of higher education in Science, Technology and Research in the country, he said the policy-makers and the academia have an important task in supplementing the collective efforts to improve this vital area of higher education.
“It was rather uninspiring when compared with other countries like the US, Europe, Japan and China. India’s share of global research and development investment is as low as 2.1 per cent which is much lower than the 12.5 per cent of China and 33.6 per cent of USA,” he said.