Narayana Murthy addressing the Infosys Prize: India will need to invest $1 billion a year for 20 years to educate teachers

Narayana Murthy addressing the Infosys Prize: India will need to invest $1 billion a year for 20 years to educate teachers

One of the six recipients of the Infosys Prize 2023, presented by the Infosys Science Foundation, is a professor from IIT Kanpur who has studied air pollution.

Indian educators and researchers need to be respected and compensated more, according to Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy.

According to NR Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys, India must spend at least $1 billion a year for the next 20 years to educate primary and secondary school teachers in order to improve student outcomes.

He was giving a speech at the Infosys Awards, which the Infosys Science Foundation was hosting. Each year, six categories of scientists, researchers, academicians, and economists from India and throughout the globe are recognized with these prizes.

Speaking of the Modi government's New Education Policy (NEP), Murthy said that action should be made to hasten its outcomes.

"Creating 2,500 "train the teachers" institutions in our 28 states, 8 developed-world states, and India to hire 10,000 highly qualified retirees in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) is one strategy to potentially expedite the results of NEP. Teachers from the Union Territory must be invited. It should be a year-long training program, according to Murthy.

He said that in a year, each group of four trainers could train 100 teachers in elementary schools and 100 instructors in high schools.

With this approach, we will be able to train 250,000 teachers in elementary schools and 250,000 instructors in secondary schools annually. Over a five-year period, these trained Indian instructors may become trainers themselves."

He said, "We ought to be paying roughly $100,000 annually."

According to him, India would have to pay $1 billion year and $20 billion throughout the course of the twenty-year program.

"This will not be a major financial burden for our country, which is soon aspiring to achieve a GDP of $5 trillion," Murthy said.

Being a teacher's son himself, Murthy said that India need to value and compensate its educators and researchers more.

He went on to say that India need to aim for Stage 4 innovation and invention, where it develops new procedures, goods, and services, imitating the prosperity of nations like the US, the majority of EU nations, Japan, and Australia.

Murthy identified four phases in a country's innovation and invention lifecycle and noted that, in general, a country does not innovate or create in stage one. In the second stage, it starts manufacturing goods and services using foreign technologies and innovations.

The third phase aims to increase productivity, quality, affordability, and comfort by using research and higher education to develop and enhance for people in other nations. A country enters stage four when it starts to innovate new procedures, goods, and services.

In several crucial areas, including creating livable cities, managing traffic, pollution, and supplying clean, safe water, we are still in Phase 1. In all areas where our poorest citizens are impacted, India should aim to reach Phase 04 status. has an impact on persons' life. It's "the most remote part of the country," Murthy said on November 15 at the Infosys Awards 2023 in Bengaluru.

"High aspirations, inquisitive and curious minds, the desire to achieve the best global standards of work profitability, the most rigorous discipline and hard work, and a culture of mentality of a nation in accordance with high-performing cultures as well as is willing to learn from them," he said, are the sources of excellence in idea generation and speed in putting those ideas into action.

In order to embrace autonomous, critical, and analytical thinking, he argued, it would be necessary to raise the standard of education in elementary, secondary, and tertiary schools.

The winners of the Infosys Prize 2023 in the following six categories were revealed by the Infosys Science Foundation (ISF): engineering and computer sciences, humanities, biological sciences, mathematical sciences, physical sciences, and social sciences. Each category's Infosys Award comes with a gold medal, a citation, and a US$100,000 (or Indian Rupee equivalent) reward. The Infosys Science Foundation headquarters in Bengaluru served as the venue for the event.

A group of international jurors chose the Infosys Awards 2023 winners from a pool of 224 nominees.

The Infosys Science Foundation Trustees, Chris Gopalakrishnan (Chairman, Board of Trustees), Narayana Murthy, Srinath Battani, K. Dinesh, and SD Shibulal, have revealed the winners of the Infosys Prize 2023.

The winners of the Infosys Awards in six categories for 2023 are:

Sachchida Nand Tripathi, the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT-Kanpur) Professor of Sustainable Energy Engineering, received the Infosys Prize 2023 in the "Engineering and Computer Science" category.

The founder and director of Science Gallery Bengaluru, Jhanvi Phalki, received the prize for "Humanities".

Arun Kumar Shukla, an IIT-Kanpur professor of biological sciences and bioengineering, received the "Life Sciences" prize.

The Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University's Fernholz Joint Professor of Mathematics, Bhargav Bhatt, received the prize in the "Mathematical Sciences" category.

Mukund Thattai, an associate professor of biochemistry, biophysics, as well as bioinformatics at the National Center for Biological Sciences, received the medal in the "Physical Sciences" category.

The winner in the 'Social Sciences' category was Columbia University political science professor Karuna Mantena.