Dharmendra Pradhan calls for nurturing students as future entrepreneurs

NEW DELHI: Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan calls upon higher education institutions to adopt an exponential approach towards building a future-ready workforce. In his concluding remarks at the two-day conference of vice-chancellors of central universities and directors of institutions of national importance at the Rashtrapati Bhawan on Wednesday, the minister said that the age of incremental change is gone.

Speaking about the challenges and opportunities in the new world propelled by technology, the minister said that India has shown its technological prowess in various initiatives like UPI, direct benefit transfers, Aadhar and that “we must build upon this strength and make a future-ready workforce ready to embrace the changes arising out of Industrial Revolution 4.0.”

Pradhan also mentioned the rising number of unicorns in the country as an indicator of a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem and called for preparing the students to be job givers and not only job seekers. He also spoke about various initiatives taken by the government in the realm of digital education and called for leveraging technology to further democratize education.

Participants of the conference deliberated on various topics such as international rankings of Higher Education Institutions, collaboration between academia-industry and policymakers, integrating school, higher and vocational education and education and research in emerging and disruptive technologies.

On the second day of the conference, Nunzio Quacquarelli, founder and CEO, QS Ranking gave a presentation on international rankings which included suggestions on how Indian institutions can improve their performance and attain better world rankings.

Presentations were also made by Virendra Kumar Tewari, director IIT-Kharagpur, Yogesh Singh, VC, Delhi University and V Kamakothi, director, IIT-Madras

President of India Ram Nath Kovind inaugurated the conference on Tuesday. Apart from the heads of the universities, minister of state for education Subhas Sarkar; Amit Khare, advisor to the Prime Minister,

Sanjay Murthy

, secretary, higher education, M Jagadesh Kumar, chairperson of UGC, among others were also present on the occasion.

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