Shillong: The North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU) on Monday signed memoranda of understandings (MoU) with nine Organisations, which included universities, institutes of research and higher learning and start-up industries in the presence of Meghalaya Governor Satya Pal Malik to strengthen the research activities in the first university in the North East.
“In today’s time research is the key to solving a lot of problems and evolving into one of the self-sufficient nations. However, because of lack of collaboration, the growth is not being observed,” the governor noted during his speech even as he gave an example of Patna University which was at one time called the ‘Oxford of East.
Malik rued that the quality of research has gone down in Indian institutes and Universities, which is evident from the fact that only 10 to 12 Nobel Laureates are Indians, half of whom are foreign citizens and a few are Indians but are foreign-born like Mother Teresa who received the Nobel for Peace Prize.
The Governor also stressed on the point that the government should work on investing more in education and that any education bill passed in Parliament without any debate “is a shame” as education builds the next generation and the nation.
Citing the example of Great Britain, Malik stated that the British government never reduced the budget on education and the same should be done in India.
NEHU Vice-Chancellor, Prabha Shankar Shukla in his speech stated that it was indeed an event to be remembered wherein NEHU is getting into collaborations with nine organizations and added that the MoUs would provide ample scope for NEHU as well as the participating institutes and industries to collaborate in cutting edge technologies to bring about change in academia and way of doing research.
“The signing of this MoU and Exchange Agreement in between our two institutions today symbolizes a partnership which we believe will lead to many new joint research initiatives that produce new synergies, and add academic value for both NEHU and all these other prestigious universities, institutes and industries,” he said.
