Opening an IIT at every corner is not a solution
By siliconindia   |   Saturday, 30 August 2008, 17:26 IST
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Mumbai: Instead of opening an IIT at every corner, the smarter solution to bridge the educational gap in the country would be to go digital, said Vijay Govindarajan , Professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. While speaking at a convention organized by the Association of Indian Management Schools, Govindarajan, who was named one of the most important business thinkers of 2007, further elaborated that the educational gap has to be filled fast. "India is a country with a large number of very talented people. We are good at Information Technology and we must use it to take education and healthcare to people," he said. Govindarajan also supported the idea of establishing an e-IIT where thousands of aspiring engineers could access quality education through distance learning. Likewise, tele-medicine and mobile 'Nano clinics' could change the face of rural healthcare. Govindarajan said that management education needed to go beyond the teaching of Best Practices to teaching Next Practices. He further exhorted to eschew management orthodoxies and challenge the status quo to create transformation and confront the rules to create a revolution. Earlier, ICICI Bank chief K V Kamath had talked about a much needed renaissance in education, from KG to high school to vocational education. "We need to become a hotbed of innovation", said Kamath, emphasizing that more could be done. He later promised that as president of the Confederation of Indian Industries, he would push for a more active industry-academia interaction.

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