President Mukherjee opens Osmania celebrations
Pays tribute to last Nizam as a visionary with a dream of making OU an institution based on humanism
President Pranab Mukherjee has emphasised the need to make universities and institutions of higher learning in the country, a place for free thinking.
Inaugurating the three-day centenary celebrations of Osmania University in Hyderabad, the president paid a rich tribute to its founder and last Nizam of Hyderabad Mir Osman Ali Khan as a “visionary”.
With the buildings of Arts College as the backdrop, the president remembered the 100year history of the university.
Addressing a gathering of more than 15,000 people including the guests, faculty members and students, the president said “hundred years ago on this day a visionary Mir Osman Ali Khan, the last Nizam, had a dream of establishing a university in Hyderabad which will be of world standards”.
“Osmania University was established with a dream that it would be an institution of excellence where free minds will meet freely, exchange ideas and views, interact and dream in peaceful coexistence”, the President said.
“These hundred years from 1917 to 2017 have so many momentous changes including in your own state,” Mukherjee said recalling the two World Wars in the first half of the last century. “It also saw the birth of a nation on the intervening night of 14 and 15 August. When half of the world was asleep, India arose from slumber of 190 years of foreign rule and India began its destiny.”
On the objectives of the Indian education system and institutions of higher learning, Mukherjee said that in 1956 when University Grants Commission was set up, the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru envisioned what a university should be. “It will be a place where minds both in form of teachers and students interact with each other without any bondage any external imposition”, he quoted Pandit Nehru.
The president said India played a leading role on the international map of higher learning for 1,500 to 1,600 years with universities such as Takshashila which, is in Pakistan now, and Nalanda. “All of them are in ruins now but for 1,300 years they attracted talent from all over the world in form of teachers and students who made exchange of views advanced the learning on the basic principle of humanism, on which Osmania University was established.”
He urged the students and the faculty to look into the fact that universities in the country were lagging far behind in basic research and excellence.
But he admitted that academic institutions alone cannot be blamed for the situation. “Uninterrupted flow of funds either from the government or industry was not possible . ... There must be interface between the industry and the academia and the industry should have vested interest in education research advance of science and development.
“Then only we will be able to achieve our rightful place on the international map of education system and economically advance,” he said.