The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Outsource jobs to rural areas, says M.S. Swaminathan

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Aug 13, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Outsource jobs to rural areas, says M.S. Swaminathan

Staff Reporter

Charge cess on IT exports to fund higher education: Vice-Chancellor

M.S. Swaminathan

TAMBARAM : Outsourcing jobs from urban areas was the only hope for developing rural areas, M.S. Swaminathan, the eminent scientist, said on Friday.

It would increase rural youths' confidence levels and their competence and help them to secure jobs, he stressed.

Delivering the presidential address during a University Grants Commission-sponsored national conference on human resources development at S.D.N.B. Vaishnav College for Women, Chromepet, on Friday, he said that despite a number of Indians figuring in the list of billionaires in the world, about half the women in the country were still illiterate and infant mortality continued to be high.

Dr. Swaminathan said an important objective of the government was to provide jobs to the unemployed and unskilled people in rural areas. In order to bring about a paradigm shift to equip these people with the right skills, there was a need to create a new method of "life-long learning," he said, which included "re-training and re-deployment."

Touching upon the various components of human resource development and its relation to human beings, the chairman of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation said students had to spend more time in interactive learning rather than classrooms. He called for application of the right kind of pedagogical methods, be it teaching children in school or youth in colleges.

Today, information from all around the world reached people's doorsteps, which called for a combination of modern technologies and conventional methods of teaching, Dr. Swaminathan said. At present, there was a mismatch between admission policy and pedagogical methods.

S.P. Thyagarajan, Vice-Chancellor, University of Madras, said the State government could levy a cess on exports from the Information Technology Sector. "The State government could generate an income of Rs. 200 crore to Rs. 300 crore if it levied 0.5 to 1 per cent cess on IT exports.

The collection realised could be used for improving the quality of higher education," he said.

Quality

Calling for taking higher education to the vast number of youth who could not afford it due to the high cost and the limited opportunities in government institutions, he said that at the same time, quality should not be compromised.

Of the 16,885 colleges all over India, only one-third of them satisfied the norms stipulated by the Government.

"The social enterprise of higher education has become a business enterprise," Dr. Thyagarajan remarked. S.N. Bhatt, college chairman, T. Sumithra, principal, spoke.

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