Dr. Baldev Raj, Director, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, has called for a paradigm shift in thinking and a multidisciplinary approach with a global perspective for India to earn its rightful place in the comity of nations.
Increasing competition
Inaugurating a two-day workshop on “Non-Destructive Testing (NDT)” for engineering students organised by the QIS Institute of Technology here, Dr Raj, former director of the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research in Kalpakkam, said increased competition in the era of globalisation had to be met with “competence, innovations and ethics.”
Clean and competitive energy, water, health care, ageing assets and increasing social work stresses were among the challenges before the nation, he said and exhorted the budding engineers to go for a career in the area of Non-Destructive Testing (NDT), a wide group of analysis techniques used in science and industry to evaluate the properties of a material, component or system without causing damage to them, for “fun, fame, money and building India.”
He won a big round of applause when he quoted Buddha and said “believe in nothing.... No matter where you read it, who said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense...”