Dr.Banarsi Lal
kvkreasi@gmail.com
A central concept in considering the long-term perspective of human survival and progress is sustainable development.The term education and education for sustainable development according to UNESCO ,means a “A dynamic concept that includes a new vision of education that aims to empower people of all ages to take responsibility for creating a sustainable future”.The role of education is not only to transfer the knowledge but also the encouragement to activate changes in behaviour in order to return to nature. A Quality education empowers people to develop a better life and society as it promotes equality,critical thinking skills and lifelong learning. Quality education is the backbone of any nation in the world and is said to be key instrument for the development of any society.An intelligent society always invests in the quality education for its new generation.From the last one decade the system of education has been changed and private institutions have come up for quality education as compared to the government institutions.These private institutions are meant for the financially sound candidates and government institutions are left for the poor or middle class people.Huge amount of money is being spent in the government educational institutions to uplift their educational standard. There is dire need to provide the quality and equitable education for all with a common curriculum.Professionally qualified and trained teachers are needed to impart the quality education to the children.We just think for the enrolment and not for the children’s learning.Government schools comprises 69 per cent of the total,enrolling 50 per cent of students and employing 50 per cent of teachers while private schools accounts for 22.5 per cent enrolling 32.6 per cent of students and employing 38 per cent of teachers. In order to get the better dividends,the Indian government have prioritized skill development for the youths.
Education and training for sustainable development should be considered a part of livelong learning,as it needs to be integrated into all educational institutions,from pre-school to tertiary education as well as informal education and learning settings.We all know about the campus selections in the Engineering, MBA or other colleges. Top IT companies visit Arts and Science Colleges to select the graduates in Computer Science, Physics, Statistics, and Mathematics etc. for different IT based jobs. The recruiting team says that these graduates are trained for a short period and then the jobs are offered to them. It is really a change. Now the education systems is globally changing and in this global interaction thousands of youngsters are going abroad for higher education and many of the youths are coming to the Indian universities from across the globe. The education system in India has become more global than thousands years ago when the Chinese monks came to Nalanda to learn more about Buddhism in India. Now with the winds of change blowing across the different continents, the youths too have to embrace the whole world in one sweep, for knowledge boundaries and narrow confines. Now every Indian can be said as the world citizen and the whole world is now the job market for him. The Indian youth should hone his skill in such a way that he can not only become a job-seeker but a job-giver. The entrepreneurs like Mr.Alan Musk,Sh.Mukesh Ambani,Sh. Anil Ambani etc. are not made in a day. It requires quality education, perseverance and positive attitude.In present era they are said to be the stars in the business world. They have spread their empires far and wide across the globe. Isn’t it a miracle that these men of a nation enslaved for over two centuries have come up on their own just after some decades after India’s freedom? In an interaction with school children, a child asked to Hon’ble Indian Ex-Presiden,Dr.A.P.J.Abdul Kalam that whether there would be enough jobs in India for all of them when they would be grown up. He answered in a very simple way that there would be no dearth of jobs if many of you grow up to become job- providers, instead of becoming job-seekers.
Quality education develops sensitivity in us to the outside problems. Our well-educated officers must think that even the slightest dereliction of duty on their part would cause irreparable damage to the country and its people. Quality education creates conditions for the development of a wholesome personality of an individual so that he can contribute his best to the family, society and the nation. He can be capable of nurturing the right values within the setting of family and become a role model for the children. We should think that the children watch our activities. In case we fail to practice the values we teach, our children would taunt us about our lapse, much to our embarrassment.There has been mushrooming growth of engineering colleges in India. It has been observed that there are about 8876 engineering colleges in India,out of which 6611 colleges are private and 2265 colleges are government. It is to be ensured that students do not feel risk while getting admission in such colleges that lack both faculty and facility. The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) needs to monitor the quality education in most of these private colleges.
After evaluating out India’s top engineering colleges, experts recommended in putting them alongside IITs, saying it may even seem detrimental to the stature of the existing IITs. These findings came from two sources-an expert committee which gave its report to the Human Resource Development Ministry and a standing committee of the council of IITs .The expert committee was headed by Mr.S.K.Joshi, a, a former Director-General of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).The committee short listed seven institutions in order of merit, taking into account all the relevant parameters. The committee said that even these institutions fall below the level of existing IITs in the criteria used for short listing. The committee felt that it is not correct to position these institutions alongside the IITs. The committee suggested that these seven institutions may be said as the institutions possessing the best potential among the engineering colleges in the country for up gradation to the level of IITs. Our main competitor country China and many other countries like Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan are spending a lot of money on the higher education. They are having research- based world class universities.India is having the third largest higher education sector in the world after China and the United States of America .India has made significant progress in education. India edges over China in a way that it uses English as a primary language for higher education and research. Our country is having a long academic tradition. In India there are small numbers of high quality institutions, departments and centres that can form the basis of quality higher education.
In India only about 10 per cent of people can go for higher education, it is about 15 per cent in China and more than 50 per cent in the industrialized countries. IITs, IIMSs, AIIMS and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research enroll well under one per cent of the population. We should contemplate a lot for our quality in higher education so that we can compete with the world. Our neighboring country China is investing heavily in improving the quality of higher education in its universities with the objective of making a large number of them world class in the coming years. China is striving to make internationally competitive research- based universities. India too needs quality education universities which can produce the brilliant graduates and also promising research scholars, which are required to provide knowledge to knowledge poor society. We should think that only quality education can provide right job to an individual. Quality education not only helps to get the right job but also creates opportunities of self-employment. We should face he truth boldly. If everybody will hunt for job then there are not enough job opportunities in our country. In government sector jobs are few and it cannot accommodate the vast army of job-seekers. A few among the daring individuals should take risk of becoming the job-givers. Many of today’s youths want the comfortable government jobs. Now the time has changed and if they find a job in a good company or in multinational company would be more satisfying as compared to the government sector. If we look to the heroes of rags-to-riches stories, we find that most of them were having brain and brawn but they were lacking the money to launch their projects born out of their idea. They were having indomitable will power to achieve the seemingly impossible targets.
The writer is: Dr.Banarsi Lal,Chief Scientist & Head, KVK Reasi (Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology-Jammu)(SKUAST-J).
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