At the summit on higher education organised by the confederation of Indian industry (CII)

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in Chennai on Thursday, experts agreed that educationists need more resources at their disposal, particularly to attract the right kind of talent for imparting quality education.

Dr P V Indiresan, former director of the Indian Institute of Technology – Madras, questioned whether Indian industry was committed enough to take up that mission. “MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) gets $350 million as contributions every year,” he said, quoting instances from the heavily donor-funded American higher education system. Indian industry needs to contribute at least Rs 350 million per year, he said.

Rooting strongly for autonomous institutions, he said, “Select students at the pre-final year level. But, decide what skills you need from them and get teachers to provide those skills.” VIT university chancellor G Viswanathan put the onus of becoming employable on the students saying they should acquire the relevant skill-set in order to meet industry expectations.

“However, industry has to work closely with institutions to improve the quality of education,” he said.

Parliamentary standing committee on HRD chairman Oscar Fernandes also encouraged industry participation in education.

“Student enrolment in technical education in India is around 10 per cent which is very low compared with other Asian countries. We need to aim for 50 per cent, and the government is planning to build 50,000 technical schools across the country and also upgrade the village schools as vocational training centres,” he said.