Governor and Chancellor of Universities E.S.L. Narasimhan on Monday appealed to JNTU-Hyderabad to produce at least one Narayana Murthy in five years. Speaking at the third convocation of JNTU-Hyderabad, where an honorary doctorate was awarded to Mr Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys, the Governor said: “Don’t get carried away by statistics like the number of colleges we have and the number of engineers they produce every year. Producing thousands of engineers every year is not important; what matters is the quality of engineers being produced.
“I request the VC, registrar and your faculty members to take an oath today that we will produce at least one Narayana Murthy in five years. Even if you produce one Narayana Murthy in five years, it will be a great achievement.” Mr Narasimhan showed his disapproval of the government’s policy of giving engineering seats to students even if they score zero mark in the entrance exam. “There should be some minimum qualifying marks. What do you expect such students, who score zero mark, to do in classrooms? Do you want to develop an inferiority complex among such students?” he asked.
Private colleges, too, came in for criticism. Higher education had become unaffordable for the common man with college managements collecting huge fees, the governor said. He said: “The time has come to fix a maximum ceiling on the fee being collected by colleges. No college should be allowed to collect above the ceiling. The managements should realise that they have come forward to open colleges to provide education. They should not treat education as a business to make profits and mint money.”
Mr Narasimhan also came down heavily on private college managements for threatening to close down colleges whenever the state government failed to pay scholarship and fee reimbursements. “Why have you opened the colleges? Is it only to make money? Is it correct to threaten closure of colleges and throw students out on the streets?” he questioned. Earlier, Mr Narayana Murthy, who delivered the convocation address, said even though India had the highest number of billionaires in Asia, a large number of people were still languishing in deep poverty, illiteracy, ill-health and malnutrition.
Mr Murthy said: “We have created a political system with incentives for most of our politicians to keep our people poor, illiterate. We have consistently been among lowly-ranked nations in the human development index. Not surprisingly, we rank high in corruption.”