All universities to be connected: Sibal

In the next two years the country’s 600 universities and all colleges will be interconnected so that all students have access to a joint resource pool, said Union HRD Minster Kapil Sibal.

In the next two years the country’s 600 universities and all colleges will be interconnected so that all students have access to a joint resource pool, said Union HRD Minster Kapil Sibal.

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Sibal was speaking at the inauguration of the Victor Menezes Convention Centre at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B).

Confessing that he glad to be in the tranquility of IIT-B and not the tumult of Parliament, Sibal said, “A student in IIT-M should be able hear lectures in IIT-B, and

that is what we are working towards. Optic fibres should connect everyone. Political establishment cannot keep up with the pace of science, technology and trade.” “Legislations have to encourage innovations, which will be solutions for the problems of tomorrow,” Sibal added. The government has declared this decade as the Decade of Innovation and National Innovation Council has been set up prepare a road map.

The government is also preparing a law that allow publicly-funded research and development institutions such as the IITs to license out their intellectual properties.

Already more than 600 leading multinational companies have their research centres in India and employ over two lakh researchers.

“Knowledge is created in universities and it needs to be multidisciplinary with no boundaries,” Sibal said. “The teacher is no longer the only repository of knowledge. The classroom has to change. It is not where the teacher talks and the students learns…the dialogue has to between students and the teacher will learn,” added Sibal.

Stating that healthcare and education will be the challenges of the future, Sibal said that his goal is to increase the gross enrollment ration in colleges from 12.4% to 30% in the next 10 years.