Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy on Wednesday said India must invest $1 billion annually for 20 years to train teachers to accelerate the National Education Policy (NEP). Murthy was delivering a lecture at the Infosys Prize 2023 ceremony hosted by Infosys Science Foundation.
Explaining that it will not financially burden the country, he said, “Our nation, targeting a GDP of $5 trillion soon, will not find it a big financial burden.” Quoting Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard University, Murthy said, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
Batting for better salaries to researchers and teachers, he also said that “we must also provide better facilities to our researchers. We must honour them”.
Murthy added: “One possible way to accelerate NEP’s outcome is to invite 10,000 retired highly accomplished teachers from the developed world and from India in STEM areas (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) to create 2,500 “Train the Teacher” colleges in our 28 states and 8 union territories.”
He said each set of four trainers can train 100 primary school teachers and 100 secondary school teachers a year. “We will be able to train 250,000 primary school teachers and 250,000 secondary teachers every year by this method. These trained teachers can themselves become trainers over a period of 5 years. We should pay about $100,000 a year for each of these retired teachers,” Murthy said.
He said there are four stages of innovation. In stage 1, a nation generally doesn’t invent and innovate. In stage 2, a nation generally starts producing products and services using the inventions and innovations of other nations without any improvement and makes the lives of its citizens better.
In stage 3, a nation leverages higher education and research to innovate and improve on those from other nations for better productivity, quality, cost and comfort. In stage 4, he explained, a nation becomes an inventor of new processes, products and services. He further said, “India must aspire to move to stage 4, in every area that affects the lives of our poorest citizens in the remotest part of the country.”
Infosys Science Foundation announced the winners of the Infosys Prize 2023 in six categories – Engineering and Computer Science, Humanities, Life Sciences, Mathematical Sciences, Physical Sciences and Social Sciences.
The prize for each category comprises a gold medal, a citation and a prize purse of $100,000 (or its equivalent in rupees). One of the winners was from IIT Kanpur whose findings hold key to mitigating air pollution in India.