Narayana Murthy bats for creating 2,500 'Train the Teacher' colleges across India

Bengaluru: Software icon N R Narayana Murthy on Wednesday advocated accelerating the National Education Policy's outcome by inviting 10,000 retired, highly accomplished teachers from the developed world and from India in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) areas to create 2,500 "Train the Teacher" colleges in the country's 28 states and eight union territories.

This course alone is not sufficient, Murthy said.

"We must show much respect and pay better salaries to our teachers and researchers. We must also provide better facilities to our researchers. We must honour them. They are role models for our youngsters. That is why we instituted the Infosys Prize in 2009. It is our small contribution to further the cause of research in India," he added.

The "Train the Teacher" programme should be year-long, he said at a press conference here, where the Infosys Science Foundation announced the Infosys Prize 2023 in six categories.

"Experts tell me that each set of four trainers can train 100 primary school teachers and 100 secondary school teachers a year. We will be able to train 250,000 primary school teachers and 250,000 secondary school teachers every year by this method," the founder of Infosys said.

These trained Indian teachers can themselves become trainers over a period of five years.

"We should pay about USD 100,000 a year for each of these retired teachers. This twenty-year programme will cost us USD one billion a year and USD 20 billion for twenty years. Our nation, targeting a GDP of USD five trillion soon, will not find it a big financial burden," Murthy said.

If you think this is expensive, you may recall the words of Derek Bok, a former President of Harvard University, who said, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance," he noted.