Nagaland Chief minister exhorts youth Expressing the opinion that education is the most important investment for development and progress of society, Nagaland chief minister Neiphiu Rio said the state government has established private colleges in almost every district. Addressing the All-Nagaland College Students Union’s 16th biennial confer-ence at Phek district on October 3, Rio said the state has a literacy rate of 79.55 percent, higher than the national average of 74.04 percent. However, the chief minister expressed regret that despite 50 years of statehood, Nagaland still lacks technical and medical colleges. “Fifty years of state-hood and still the state government is pursuing the issue of establishing technical and medical colleges with the Union government,” he said. The chief minister further added that despite a high literacy rate, “Naga society is yet to be civilized” and exhorted youth to take the lead in bringing change to Nagaland. Jammu & Kashmir Kashmir U special convocation Describing universities as a repository of knowledge and information, Jammu & Kashmir governor N.N. Vohra called upon Kashmir University’s faculty to impart practical and values-based education and training to students and scholars to equip them for future challenges. Addressing students and faculty of Kashmir University in Srinagar on the 132nd birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi (October 2), Vohra said univ-ersities are expected to be repositories of knowledge and unless they are able to transfer knowledge and information to society, they are “somehow failing” in their duties and responsibility. “Therefore, universities need to be proactive and make sure that the education dispensed to students and scholars provides them a global view on various aspects and problems of life,” he said, at a special convocation of Kashmir University. The special convocation was convened to confer a Ph D upon Prof. Goverdhan Mehta, national research professor, School of Chemistry, at the University of Hyderabad. “I have had the opportunity to work with some students of Kashmir University whom I supervised for M Phil and Ph D degrees. They are brilliant and second to none in the world,” said Mehta, speaking on the occasion. Karnataka Premji calls for greater effort Industry captain and philanthropist Azim Premji has called upon govern-ment and other stakeholders to invest greater resources to improve the state of education in the country. Addressing the first convocation of the Azim Premji University (APU, estb. 2010) — which offers Masters progra-mmes in education and development with multiple specialisations — on October 2, Premji especially called upon state governments to become proactive. “They need to invest more in school education, in teacher education and other school-related issues, including higher education. They also need to reform governance of all related syst-ems,” he said, while lamenting the lack of education institutions offering study programmes in the field of education. The founder-chairman of IT major Wipro Technologies, who has endowed APU with an irreversible corpus of Rs.65 crore, Premji added: “Equally, I have no doubt that other stakeholders need to do more. This means that more people and civil society organisations must engage in…
