And now the moment we have all been waiting for. The distinguished address by our chief guest, a pioneering force behind India's software revolution, Shri N. R. Narayana Murthy, FNAE and founder of Infosys. Professor Sitharam, Professor Patil, Professor Mana, the director and faculty of IIT Delhi, Miss Manisha Sabu, other faculty members, and most importantly the attendees of this impactful program. Before I go any further, let me make an admission. I used ChatGPT 4.0 to create a draft for my speech. However, if there are any mistakes, I own them. One of the important things that happened is on an average I take 25 to 30 hours to prepare a speech. In other words, at 8 hours a day, you are looking at 4 to 5 days. But when I used ChatGPT, when I gave it the requisite details, I just needed only five hours. Imagine the extraordinary power of technology. It improved my productivity by a factor of five to six. Anyway, it is a privilege to speak to this distinguished audience today on a subject that has significant importance for our nation's future. That is the importance of quality in engineering education and research. I thank you for this opportunity. India stands at a pivotal moment in her developmental journey. We are a young nation, rich in talent and in ambition. But to transform our youthful exuberance into real progress for every Indian, the urban and the rural, the educated and the not so well educated, the rich and the poor, and the elite and the not so elite, we must invest in the quality and not just the quantity of our higher education in general and in engineering education and research in particular. China has done it. I will just quote verbatim what Shri Fareed Zakaria, a much respected American current events commentator of Indian origin, said just a few days ago. I quote him. Consider the Nature Index. All of you know what Nature Index is, right? Nature magazine produces this index, perhaps the most comprehensive guide to high-quality research in the sciences. It tracks contribution to the world's leading academic journals. Its newest rankings show what scientists already knew: China is just leaping ahead. Of the top 10 academic institutions in the Nature Index, nine are Chinese. There's only one American, that is Harvard. My parents and teachers taught me in my early years that I should learn even from those that I differ with. After all, verse three in chapter nine of the Bhagavad Gita also alludes to this value. Organized by our premier educational institutions are the five original IITs. This initiative is about learning the best from everybody in the globe to become number one in STEM areas in the world. It is not just a training program. It is a national mission. It is a step towards transforming how engineering is taught, learned, used, improved, and lived, particularly in our tier 2 and tier 3 institutions. I didn't know there was a tier 4 institution too, anyway, that serve as the backbone of India's higher education landscape. Therefore, I congratulate the Indian National Academy of Engineering, the IICT, the IITs, and Infosys for partnering in the creation of the Center for Engineering Education Excellence (CEEE) program. All of us here owe a note of immense gratitude to Professor Indranil Mana, a visionary, for strategizing and starting this initiative, of course with help from Infosys Foundation. As she spoke, engineering forms the foundation for a nation's economic progress in times of both peace and conflict. While science is about unraveling the secrets of nature, engineering is about applying scientific knowledge to make the world around us a better place to live. Engineering is at the heart of improving productivity, building smart cities, better buildings, and better roads. It's about providing better quality of life and facilities to our citizens. It is about producing better equipment for every sector of our nation's economy. It is about achieving climate control. It is about producing sustainable energy systems. It is about conquering space. It is about improving our defense capabilities. And it is about applying digital technologies for our betterment. Engineers invent, innovate, design, and produce the machinery of modern civilization. We must develop and nurture engineers who have curiosity, can think critically, question the status quo, recognize and solve problems we encounter in our daily life. This is the only way India can compete successfully in the global bazaar and improve our prosperity. India's higher education system is one of the largest in the world. Our engineering colleges, located in metropolitan hubs and in rural towns, produce vast numbers of engineering graduates every year. But as we all know, there is huge unemployment among our engineering graduates. This is primarily because our engineering education system just does not produce employable graduates. Not 100% obviously, it is a large percentage, maybe 40 to 60%, that itself is a huge problem. Many of our tier 2 and tier 3 institutions are filled with dedicated, passionate educators. There are a lot of you here. But they often lack access to modern pedagogy, evolving industry standards, and research ecosystems. The standard of English must be improved in the case of many teachers. We all know that most of the engineering knowledge in the world is in English. The rapidly changing and the latest knowledge in the globally valued books and research papers is in English. Many of our institutions still grapple with outdated curricula, ill-prepared teachers, inability to speak and understand English by the students and teachers. You know, I have come across approximately, probably about at least maybe 150,000 people who joined Infosys over the years. So I have enough data. I'm not speaking just out of my hat. I have enough data documented. Everything is there. Anyway, too often we see a gap between what is taught and what the real world demands. The inequality in exposure and resources between institutions creates a gap, a gap that affects not just institutions but students, industries, and India's global competitiveness. This disconnect, my friends, must be addressed. Quantity without quality leads to unemployment, underemployment, low productivity, and wasted potential. As you all know, research is the soul of any academic ecosystem. Without cutting-edge research, education becomes static. Without application, most research work, leave aside a small blue sky research, but most research work becomes irrelevant. India needs a strong research ecosystem where engineering research is not limited to academic journals but translated into solutions to real-world problems like clean water technologies, clean air technologies, renewable energy, good vaccines. All of you know that we have still not found a vaccine for chicken gona and dingo. Anyway, AI-powered healthcare, agricultural productivity, climate control, resilient infrastructure, and more. Countries that lead in innovation lead the global economy. Let us be very, very clear about it. There's enough data. Your charter therefore is to put India amongst them. We are in the era of the fourth industrial revolution. A time of rapid change driven by AI, by IoT, by quantum computing, and biotechnology or genomics. Our engineers must be future-ready, equipped not just with technical knowledge but also with adaptability and lifelong learning habits. Engineering education must evolve to include emerging technologies, sustainability, and social impact. This responsibility does not lie with just governments alone. Governments will fund and prioritize STEM education. However, I humbly request our bureaucrats and politicians to desist from interfering in running higher educational institutions. The industry must support R&D. Institutions must modernize pedagogy. This is a good example. This program is a good example of that. And of course, these wonderful IITs must help the tier 2 and tier 3 institutions through mentorship. Students must approach their education not just as a tool to get a job but as a mission to solve problems and serve society. Money will always come. My mother always said, 'Go after Saraswati. Lakshmi will follow you.' It is said that a mediocre teacher gives a monologue, a good teacher explains, a superior teacher demonstrates, and a great teacher inspires. Unquote. Today, India does not need just good engineers. It needs inspired engineers who are creative, entrepreneurial, ethical, and socially conscious. To produce such engineers, we need inspiring teachers who are not just knowledgeable but skilled in teaching, able to communicate well in English, exposed to globally acclaimed books, comfortable with research, and connected to real-world applications. You can indeed become transformational agents if you become such inspiring teachers, which is the objective of this program. Through this initiative, IITs will provide their expertise to uplift institutions across the country by building bridges of knowledge, mentorship, and collaboration. You, the participants, are the carriers of that upliftment that should ripple through classrooms, laboratories, and eventually our society. This program is not just about learning techniques. It is about elevating mindsets. In addition to this impactful program, some of the other useful initiatives that you, the attendees of this program, can pursue to improve the quality of engineering education in India are: one, engineering is about converting scientific ideas into physical reality and to create new and improved physical inventions and innovations like buildings, rockets, electrical vehicles, computers, renewable energy equipment, just to name a few entities. Every one of these, my friends, is a project with thousands of tasks, with some tasks in the critical path. Your reputation as an engineer depends on how good a team member or a team leader you are in completing every project that you take up on time, within budget, and with better than expected quality. Just the other day, Air Chief Marshal said not one project that was given to the Indian industry by our defense forces was completed on time. Not one. That's what he said. Anyway, therefore, project management is an indispensable skill for your students. Please include project management as a mandatory subject for the students of every branch of engineering in their final year. Please ensure that your students assist the project manager of a project in your own locality and learn this important skill thoroughly. I am a great admirer of and I am very respectful of Kannada, Hindi, English, and every one of the 22 languages recognized by our constitution as of 2025. However, the reality is that most STEM research work, knowledge, and reporting of the STEM progress in the world, they're all in English. To be successful engineers, your students must interact with engineers from all over the world. Engineers of even the most developed nations from Europe have adopted English as a link language. I spent several years in Paris more than 50 years ago. And let me tell you, English was a language we all spoke in the office, not French. Outside we spoke French. Anyway, it is accepted all over the world that a good command over English is a necessary skill for a successful engineer. Therefore, transform those of your students who are poor communicators in English to those that can hold grammatically correct, heavy-accent-free, and unambiguous discussions with the best engineers in the world on global platforms in a universal language like English. To do so, you may want to have at least one course in English in each of the eight semesters of the undergraduate degree and in each of the four semesters of the master's degree in engineering. This will help your students to learn to express their ideas orally and in writing correctly, clearly, concisely, and unambiguously in English. Move your focus from syllabus completion to conceptual understanding. Move away from rote teaching. Relate theory to understanding and solving problems by your students in the towns and cities where your college is located. Adopt open-book examinations as much as possible, but at least in the core subjects of engineering. This will enhance independent thinking and problem-solving capabilities of your students. The reason is very simple. In life, when your students take up a job, every day they have to use open-book examinations. All the information is there and they have to find a solution. What a wonderful thing it will be if you started your students right from first year undergraduate degree with open-book examinations. Work with IITs to provide your promising students an opportunity to take at least one course every semester offered in those institutions through a virtual medium like Zoom. Teach your students teamwork by creating opportunities to move from individual classrooms to collaborative networks of students and teachers across the country, and where feasible, across the world. Move from just monologue by you in the classroom to enthusiastic class participation by students. This will help your students to improve their curiosity, their critical and independent thinking, Socratic questioning, and problem-solving. You may want to watch the 12 episodes of Professor Michael Sandel teaching philosophy to second-year undergraduate students at Harvard University on YouTube. This will help you appreciate the value of your interaction with your students. At least once a year, create a mechanism to enhance interaction between your students and their cohorts from the top 50 ranked engineering educational institutions in the developed world. The heads of the tier 2 and tier 3 engineering colleges must make it mandatory for every teacher in the college to earn some consulting fees every year from the local industry. This will improve the problem-solving mindset of their teachers. If your college can afford, send one teacher every semester from each department to credit a course as a student in a relevant subject at an IIT or at a top 50 globally ranked engineering educational institution. The cost could be reduced by using a virtual medium like Zoom. These teachers must take all the examinations of the course like a real student and must be evaluated by the teacher teaching that course in the host institution that provides the opportunity to your teacher. This will help your teachers understand learning from the perspective of a contemporary student. Make it compulsory for every teacher to obtain a year-long internship once in five years, as it happens in the developed world, in a local company of their specialization. This will help your teachers understand a major problem the company is grappling with, contribute to that solution, return to the college, and enhance the problem-solving capabilities of their students. Allocate a semester of the fourth-year undergraduate students to identify and solve or improve some function of your own institution. For example, the computer science students may develop some of the information systems needed by your college. The civil engineering students can be given a project to strengthen a weak building or a dilapidated road on the campus. The passing of the students in this course should depend on the acceptance by you of the defense of the idea and the project plan to implement that idea by the student. Finally, remember that no student will become a successful professional unless he or she has competence and, more importantly, values. That's why when I founded Infosys, we adopted the byline: 'Powered by intellect, driven by values.' Anyway, values form the cultural foundation without which durable and fast economic growth of our country will not happen. One of the important attributes of a good value system is humility and not boasting about our own minor achievements. Professionals from other countries should praise you, not you yourself. Please demonstrate by your own example the importance of high aspiration, humility, civility, honesty, integrity, decency, courtesy, hard work, transparency, fairness, accountability, sacrifice, excellence, and discipline in your everyday interaction with your students. Friends, this program is more than just a faculty development initiative. It is a nation-building exercise. IITs have set the stage. But the true change will only come when each of you return to your institutions not only with new skills but with a renewed purpose. Let's remember that education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. May this program ignite that fire in every one of you and through you in every student, in every classroom, and in every campus in our country. Thank you, Jai Hind.
