The University Grants Commission (UGC) Chairman, Prof M Jagadesh Kumar, highlighted the importance of resilience and adaptability in delivering high-quality education to young people in India.
He spoke as the chief guest at a two-day conference titled ‘Empowering the Education Ecosystem’ with the theme ‘Resilience and Adaptability: Navigating Challenges in Education’. The event, organized by FICCI in collaboration with the government of Telangana and TGCHE, took place on Friday.
Prof Kumar emphasized the need for a sustainable, secure, peaceful, and healthy future. He acknowledged the challenges such as a growing population, demands for clean energy, clean water, food, health facilities, and quality education, as well as issues like multi-dimensional poverty, unstable economic systems, and climate change.
He stated that addressing these challenges requires training young people to be problem solvers and solution providers. This would help in finding appropriate solutions and achieving a sustainable future.
Prof Kumar also mentioned that reforms in the education system are essential. He referred to the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 as a vision document that provides a roadmap for achieving these goals. The NEP-2020 aims to offer learning outcome-based education, personalized education, and mass-scale education.
He acknowledged that while these three objectives might seem contradictory, there are ways to achieve them. Providing high-quality education on a large scale can improve societal competency levels, which in turn boosts productivity and strengthens the economic system. This would allow for more investment in education, benefiting a larger number of people.
