Panagariya Credits Nehru With Building Key Institutions

03 November, New Delhi

Rejecting criticism that first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru laid overemphasis on higher education at the cost of the elementary, National Institute of Transforming India (NITI) Aayog vice chairperson Arvind Panagariya Tuesday said it was due to the expansion of engineering colleges that the IT revolution became possible.

”Our country started building higher education institutes even before independence. First Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru built excellent institutions such as Indian Institute of Management (IIM) and others. However, there is a lot of criticism that we overemphasise on higher education and ignore elementary one and it was a big mistake. Personally, I don’t really subscribe to that view,” Panagariya said while addressing Higher Education Summit 2015 here at Federation of Indian Chamber Commerce and Industries.

”India achieved 8.3 per cent growth rate from 2003 to 2012. This high growth for nine years was realized due to the IT revolution that was made possible due to expansion of engineering colleges,” he said.

The vice chairperson said there was an immense scope of growth in education domain both in private and public sector, adding that both school education and higher education should grow together to help India face various challenges.

He described issues related to the quality of higher education, lack of teaching and research facilities as the biggest challenges in front of education sector.

Pitching for rapid expansion of premier educational institutions such as IITs and IIMs, Panagariya said it was a misconceived notion that the quality of such colleges would decrease, if more colleges come into picture.

He added, ”nowadays, students are very smart. They will still distinguish among colleges and will try to get into best of them.”