Huge spend on defence deplored

TRICHY: The huge spending on defence at the cost of education is deplorable, said M Victor Louis Anthuvan, professor of finance at Loyola Institute of Business Administration (LIBA). While giving an overview of India to the student community while delivering the graduation day address at Bishop Heber College on Saturday, Anthuvan said students and country could have benefited if there was more outlay for education.
Giving a pep talk to around 820 new graduates, Anthuvan egged them on to play a role in changing India for the better. Anthuvan said India was the first region in the world to start university education. Takshashila university, which was established 700 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, was the IIT and MIT of the world. More than 10,000 students came there to specialize in 56 different disciplines from Vedas to grammar, and from archery to ayurveda. Nalanda University was started in today's Patna 400 years before Jesus was born. By the first century AD, India had a vibrant academic body, but repeated attacks destroyed our universities and our glory, he said while tracing the lost glory of India.
The country, which that was at the forefront of science and technology 2,000 years back, became a backward, poor country in the last 300 years, he added.
Anthuvan urged students to make use of multiple opportunities they have. Nearly, three crore young boys and girls are in our colleges. Today, India, which has 720 universities and 37,000 colleges, has the second largest system higher education next only to China. "Now you have wonderful opportunities and of course challenges, and if you can accept these challenges, you can set things right for the country," he remarked.
"Once again there is a great demand for Indians globally.
Now, the world is convinced that Indians are intelligent, responsible, dependable, and honest. That means the future belongs to you, and India has prove to the world that it could grow at 9 to 10% every year. If you grow at 8% every year, in the next 10 years, India's national income would be larger than that of France, Britain and Germany," said the expert in global finance.
Referring to the deteriorating relation between Pakistan and India during the last 67 years, he said the two countries have become enemies leading to war clouds perennially looming over the Indo-Pak border. "This is because education is commercialized, commerce is vulgarized, religion is politicized, politics is criminalized, criminals are glorified, women are modified, children are 'laborized', and the society is tantalized," Dr Anthuvan said in his alliterative flourish.
"You have a duty and responsibility to take the world from the war path to global peace," he advised the students.