India, as a democracy, has tended to focus on quantity and not quality, Governor of Bihar Devanand Konwar has said.
Addressing the students of GITAM University here on Friday, he underscored the need to focus on standards in all aspects of governance, including welfare schemes.
Referring to establishment of a university in every district, he asked whether it was need-based or greed-based. “Out of 640 universities in India, not one university has either produced a Nobel laureate or has a laureate on its rolls as faculty,” he said, and pointed out that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S. has 42 Nobel laureates as faculty.
“There is a problem in the manner we are functioning. We must have the capacity to learn from our mistakes and make midcourse corrections,” he said. “We need to understand where we are going wrong, how we are going wrong, and make a course correction,” he emphasised.
Soviet Union experience
“If China has been able to become a superpower, it is only because it was able to make a course correction. The former Soviet Union, which did not wish to learn from its mistakes, has fallen by the wayside of history,” he pointed out.
“The form of government is not important. What is important is to deliver services to people. People have to be happy or the government does not matter.”
Earlier, Judge of the AP High Court Justice Nooti Rama Mohana Rao said that our policymakers must be ready to learn from mistakes and change. He underscored the need for promoting enterprises that bridged the rural-urban divide.
Referring to the recent public turnout in protest against acts of barbarism, he said, “Today, people are unwilling to tolerate injustice.”
President of GITAM University M.V.V.S. Murthy, Vice-Chancellor of the university G. Subrahmanyam, and Dean of GITAM School of Management Sivaramakrishna spoke.
