From Chandrayaan to IPhone: AICTE chief lauds researchers’ effort at Careers360 Faculty Research Award

NEW DELHI: All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) chairman TG Sitharam lauded the contribution made by engineers and engineering institutes for India’s tremendous growth in the field of science and technology. He was speaking at the Careers360 Faculty Research Award 2023 event.

Careers360 is organising the Faculty Research Award 2023 to celebrate and recognise the contribution of researchers. The chief guest Union minister of state (MoS) for communication Devusinh Chauhan conferred awards to researchers in 27 disciplines.

The AICTE chief said: “I am very happy to be here as a researcher, to witness many distinguished researchers receiving the awards from Careers360.”

Speaking on the occasion, Sitharam said: “The distance between science and engineering has vanished. Take the story of the IITs. I was not a student of an IIT, I was a director of one. The IITs started in the 1950s and 1960s and they remained engineering colleges till about 2005. In the last 20 years, they have become Indian Institutes of Technology. How did they become possible? When I joined IIT Guwahati in 2019, it was never there in any ranking. In two-three years we were able to change that and now it is higher than most IITs. It is possible to change and I have seen it happen.”

Stating that “India is a promising destination for innovation”, he said, “In 2014, we used to import most of the iPhones. Now we manufacture and export. Today, we are in the top five countries in the world for publications and patents, in incubations and start-ups.”

Indian Institute of Science (IISc) had the highest publications and patents, higher than all IITs put together.

“We have the third largest start-up ecosystem in the world focusing on global markets. Then, take Chandrayaan-3. The engineers who work for ISRO, and those working on Chandrayaan-3, are from AICTE-approved institutions and most of them are women. Students of these colleges stay in India and do PhD here and real change happens through these institutions,” he added.

Further, he also talked about National Education Policy and said the “NEP 2020 brings flexibility and a student-centric policy. The three years of NEP have given impetus to education and a boost to the higher education sector.”