Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy advocates ‘train the teacher’ colleges by retired STEM teachers across India

Infosys co-founder N. R. Narayana Murthy

Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy said that our schools must teach independent, critical and analytical thinking to students. In order to accelerate this process, he suggested inviting 10,000 accomplished retired STEM teachers from the developed world and India to run 2,500 ‘Train the Teacher’ colleges across States and Union Territories.

Delivering a lecture on ‘Laying a strong foundation for the prosperity of India’ at the announcement of the Infosys Prize on November 12, Mr. Murthy said that Socratic questioning, and the habit of relating theory to the real world, is the key. “I am glad the National Education Policy has started this journey,” he said.

“Each team of four could train 100 primary and 100 secondary school teachers a year. That is 500,000 teachers every year. Within five years, those we train would become trainers themselves. At about $100,000 per teacher per year, this costs $1 billion a year, or $20 billion over 20 years. For a nation aiming at a $5 trillion economy, that is affordable. As a line, often attributed to Derek Bok of Harvard, puts it, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

However, he said, training alone is not enough and that we must respect our teachers and researchers, pay them better, equip them well, and honour them.

“They are the role models for our young people,” he said.

Mr. Murthy said that there are four stages of economic betterment through invention and innovation in a nation’s journey.

“In the first, a nation neither invents nor innovates. It doesn’t even use others’ ideas to improve its people’s lives. In the second, it uses the inventions and innovations of others, unchanged, to make life better. In the third, it uses higher education and research to improve on those ideas. South Korea did this with storage devices and television. India did it with software services through the Global Delivery Model. In the fourth, a nation invents. The US, Western Europe, China, and Japan have done this, from the printing press to the solar cell,” Mr. Murthy said.

According to the Infosys co-founder, India’s achievements in atomic energy, space, vaccines, the Green Revolution, and generic medicines place us in stage two in most areas, and in stage three in the Global Delivery Model.

Mr. Murthy said that India must aspire to reach stage four in every area that ‘touches the lives of our poorest citizens in our remotest villages’.

“That demands better research and education to generate good ideas, and speed and quality in executing them. It demands high aspiration, open-mindedness, curious minds, global standards of productivity, discipline, and hard work. It also demands the humility to learn from cultures that perform better than ours,” Mr. Murthy said.

He expressed concern over India still being in state one of progress in terms of liveability, on a spectrum of four stages of development.

“In making our cities livable, pollution-free, traffic-congestion-free, and in providing clean, safe water still leaves us in stage one,” Mr. Murthy said.