 So next, next is postgraduate diploma in broadcast journalism, business management, computer applications, human resource management and mass communication. I arch upon the candidates for the postgraduate diploma in broadcast journalism in business management, computer applications, human resource management and mass communication to please stand up, to please stand up. Sir, I present to you the candidates who have been examined and found qualified for postgraduate diploma in broadcast journalism, business management, computer applications, human resource management and mass communication to which I pray that they may now be admitted. By virtue of the power vested in the Chancellor of KK Hendricks State Opinion University, I, on behalf of the Chancellor, admit you to the postgraduate diploma and charge you that ever in your life and converses on you so yourself's audio of the sand. Postgraduate diploma in absentia. Sir, on behalf of the other candidates who have been examined and found qualified for the postgraduate diploma but could not attend and have been permitted to receive the degrees in absentia, I pray that they may be admitted to the degrees. By virtue of the power vested in the Chancellor of KK Hendricks State Opinion University, I admit such candidates to the postgraduate diploma in absentia. Next is Bachelor of Arts, Commerce, Business Administration, Computer Applications and Mass Communication. I arch upon the candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts, Commerce, Business Administration, Computer Application and Mass Communication to please stand up. Sir, I present to you the candidates who have been examined and found qualified for the degree of Bachelor of Arts, Commerce, Business Administration, Computer Applications and Mass Communications to which I pray that they may now be admitted. By virtue of the power vested in the Chancellor of KK Hendricks State Opinion University, I on behalf of the Chancellor admit such candidates to the degree of Bachelor of Arts, Commerce, Business Administration, Computer Applications and Mass Communication and I charge you that ever in your life and converses on you so yourself's audio of the sand. Bachelor of Arts, Commerce, Business Administration, Computer Applications and Mass Communication in absentia. Sir, on behalf of the other candidates who have been examined and found qualified for the degree of Bachelor of Arts, Commerce, Business Administration, Computer Applications and Mass Communication but could not attend and have been permitted to receive their degrees in absentia, I pray that they may be admitted to the degree. By virtue of the power vested in the Chancellor of KK Hendricks State Opinion University, I on behalf of the Chancellor admit such candidates to the degree of Bachelor of Arts, Commerce, Business Administration, Computer Applications and Mass Communication in absentia. Now the awardees of the gold medals for the year 2014, 15 and 16 for different programs of the university. The senior most learners for the year 14 to 16 and successful learners from Jorhad jail as announced are requested to proceed to the diaries. I will announce one by one, first of all BA, the candidates who secured the first position and fulfilled all other conditions in BA examinations and qualified for the award of university gold medal are Devendra Nath Sakma, Vasudev Kolita, Ratul Sharma, Bikam, Kithi Borua, Babul Nath, Nipen Hazarika, B.B.A., Uttpal Sharma, Mausum Khakati, B.C.A., Nirupam Ghosh, Nirupal Borua, Biju Bhargahaya. Now the best post-graduate, the candidates who secured the first position in order of merit and fulfilled all other conditions in the post-graduate examinations and qualified for the award of the university gold medal are Makbul Hussain 2014, Sudhi Thakuriya 2015 and Kongon Pujari for 2016. Now the senior most learner passed out Sandro Mohan Roy Minu Phukon. Jail inmates passed out in 2015. The university would like to award a certificate to the successful learners of the university study centers located in jails across the state. The graduate learners from Jorhat Jail are requested to come to the dais, Buddha Boniya and Chandra Sitya. They are from the Jorhat Jail Study Center of the university. The university would like to request Sri Jitumoni Thakuriya who despite his visual impairment successfully completed the graduation program of this university. I request Sri Jitumoni Thakuriya to come to the dais and receive the certificate from the guest. Now I request Honorable Chief Guest, Professor Rabindra Kumar to deliver his convocation address. Honorable Vice Chancellor Dr. Hitesh Dekha, members of the Statutory Authorities of the university, fellow teachers of the university and dear learners, ladies and gentlemen. It is indeed an honor to deliver a convocation address and I thank Dr. Hitesh Dekha for providing me with this wonderful opportunity of talking to the learners and giving this convocation address. Conventionally convocation address is considered a routine delivery of one's ideas and that is why in many cases we have noted that convocation addresses are printed beforehand and convocation addresses are read out in the convocation. It emits such a large gathering of dear learners, it will not be appropriate if I start reading a convocation address and I will not address you heart to heart. After all, I am a teacher and I am addressing a huge gathering of learners who have just now been awarded multiple degrees, diplomas, certificates and also the PhDs. There are nine PhDs here which I think is an honor for a university like Krishna Khan Khande University because such a big number is generally not seen in the university convocations. I congratulate the authorities of the Krishna Khan Khande University and the Vice Chancellor for promoting education in such a big and significant manner. Let us all understand that open university system to which all of us belong, I also belong to the open university system and you have all received your degrees in an open university. Open university system is a very special system. I was noticing that when PhDs were awarded, when graduate degrees were awarded, these students maintained a certain silence which is not a welcome sign for an open university. After all, you have done labor, you have worked hard and you have earned an honorable degree. This is no ordinary achievement on the part of learners. Therefore, as learners, the first thing that must come in your mind is to take pride in your achievement and that is why the class should not have stopped from the time the degrees were started being awarded by Dr. Dekal till the time the degree award ceremony would have completed. Open university system is generally seen as B-grade university system and therefore I will take five minutes in explaining to the members present here and to my friends in the media what is open university system and what is the profile of our learners and how open university system is contributing to the benefit of our society. How is it contributing to the growth of a society like Khande? Open university system has several very special features which many of us, even when we are working in the open university system, do not realize. Foremost, the students working in the open university system located at different places read the same study material. Somebody may be in your heart, somebody may be in this school, you may be in Debrugna, you may be in the remotest part of this region but you are provided the same study material which is provided to a learner located in the headquarters or in the vicinity of Guwahati. How many universities have the facility of providing the same kind and same quality of learning material all over the state to all kinds of learners and by this method democratize education. We do not realize open university system is the foremost tool in democratizing education. Therefore, we must all take pride in learning quality study material and quality study material at the remotest locations in our country. Secondly, open university system is perhaps the only university system where the profile of our learners is so diverse. We have seen, there are learners in the age group of 18 to 25, there are learners in the age group of 25 to 50. There was a senior learner just now who passed across the podium and who received her degree at the hand of the Vice Chancellor. There are learners who have done their PhDs. Even among the PhDs, the age profile is from about 25-30 to 60-65. How many universities in the country provide this wonderful opportunity of learners of all ages, all diverse backgrounds and all varieties to take education, to take quality education. The third important feature about which not many open university practitioners are themselves quite clear. The profile of our learners in the open university system has changed dramatically over the last 25-30 years. The learner today is not a recipient. You are not a recipient of knowledge that is transmitted in the form of a classroom lecture in the conventional university system. You are the selector. You choose the kind of information that you require. You choose the kind of information that is relevant to your requirements. You select the kind of information that is needed in your day-to-day life, in your professional career and in the advancement of your career. Unlike many university students sitting in the classroom situation, you are free to select the information that is available to you. The open university system provides you with a basket of courses, developed of course with the assistance of quality teachers and experts available from the entire country, and then gives you the opportunity of making a selection of your own. Nobody forces you, unlike a classroom situation, to read only what is being delivered in the classroom. You are free to select from your books, Lesson 1, Lesson 6, Lesson 10. There is no compulsion on you to read Lesson 1 and then Lesson 2 and then Lesson 3. You cannot unlike a classroom situation, you are not forced to read Lesson 4 only after you have done Lesson 1, 2 and 3. This provides a unique and a very different opportunity to our learners to make selection of learning. And this selection of learning is very necessary in the given environment that is prevailing in our country today and that is available all over the globe today. We are living in the age of digital learning. We are living in the age where the entire learning has been converted into the small digital formats. And these digital formats do not necessarily follow a particular sequence. Therefore, sequential learning that is generally practiced in a classroom situation is completely absent in the open university system. And you have the opportunity at the time of your leisure and according to your preference, select whatever small digital unit you require for your understanding and then bypass that and switch over to any other unit. This is a very unique feature of open university system which not many of us realize. Next, open university learning study material is prepared with the assistance of the expertise that is available all over the country. As vice chancellor of the open university system and as teachers in the open university system, we are given wonderful opportunities of selecting, inviting, bringing people from all the different fields of expertise. We assemble them at one place, request them to write our study material and then print it for the delivery to our learners. This facility is not available to the, I am not comparing conventional university system and open university system, but I am trying to point out to you the significance of open university system and I am trying to instill in you a particular confidence about open university system. If you are a graduate from the open university system, there is no reason for you to look down upon your own degree. There is no reason for you to accept the general criticism that open university degrees are not up to the mark, degrees. Your study material, your learning material has been prepared with the best expertise available in the country. What, how many universities in the country do have this kind of a facility at their disposal? Even if I think of premiered universities, I am not going to name them, but even if I think of premiered universities, the expertise is limited to a group of teachers that has come to be the faculty of that particular university. Unlike that, for a university like Krishnikanth, Khandig Open University, the expertise is available from all over the country. They can take expertise from us at the Hindara Gandhi National Open University, at other state open universities, from conventional system, from diverse expertise in the form of professionals. The area from which experts are made available for open university system is fairly big. Now this pool of information creates a study material, that study material is studied by you, and on the basis of your studies you are awarded a degree. There is no reason for anyone of the student, learner present in this auditorium, to feel ashamed of a degree from the open. On the contrary, every learner from the open university system should take pride in having studied the best possible study material, which this is not available to the general students in this country. I would also like to utilize this opportunity to assure and reaffirm our resolve that open universities in this country are not operating in isolation. If Krishnikanth Khandig Open University is working in the state of Assam, that does not mean that the facilities which have been made available to a central university like Hindara Gandhi National Open University are not available to them. I use this platform to publicly declare that every single study material prepared by Hindara Gandhi National Open University will be made available to Krishnikanth Khandig State Open University. We would also like our study material to be translated into languages which are easily accessible to particular regions. In the state of Assam, we would like our study material to be translated into Assamese so that it becomes available to a large category of learners. In addition to this, there are other ecological facilities available with us and I will briefly highlight upon them, particularly because the members of the statutory authorities of this university are present here and they must know what facilities are being developed and they know what facilities are going to be extended to the KK Khandig Open University. Government of India has given us two very unique technological opportunities. One is called Gyanwani and the other is called Gyan Darshan. Not that they are completely new, they were in operation for quite some time, but for some reason they got discontinued within the last two, three years. Luckily both of these have become available to us once again and I would like to extend both of these facilities. Gyanwani is a radio educational broadcast facility made available to us through all India radio stations and through our own FM radio stations which are nearly 40 at present in the country. Our objective is to make this number triple in the next one year's time. So we would like to operate through nearly 300 all India radio and FM radio stations and deliver quality study material through the radio. These will be 24 hour broadcast channels out of which 8 hours will be live broadcasts when your teachers will be talking to you on radio and you will have the facility of interacting with your teachers through a toll-free line which has been provided to us by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and Ministry of Communications. Their combined efforts have made these toll-free lines available to us. We are going to extend these toll-free lines to the state open universities also. So all our learners will have the facility of interacting with their teachers during the live broadcast of this 8 hour FM channel. And the remaining 16 hours will be used for 8 hour slots, 2-8 hour slots of repeat broadcasts so that our learners at their leisure time may be in the night or when they are free from their working situation are again able to understand and receive the study material that is delivered in the form of FM radio broadcast via teachers. The other facility that has been made available to us is Gyandarshan. Gyandarshan is the satellite telecast. That facility is also a 24 hour satellite telecast facility and we have promised to all our brothers and sisters in the state open universities that we will share Gyandarshan with all of them. Gyandarshan will be equally available to state open universities which means Gyandarshan will be television telecast in the same manner as FM radio broadcast will be done and our teachers will be made available to our learners over 8 hours of live telecast sessions and then 2 slots of 8 hours as repeat telecast sessions. The advantage is that our learners will no more have to bear with distance. Generally state open universities are criticized for teaching our learners at a distance. That situation has changed in the year 2017. We are no more open and distance learning system. We are open and digital learning system. And this digital learning system I take pride in saying and I share this pride with my fellow vice chancellor Dr. Hitesh Dekar that this digital learning system is a unique technological opportunity that has been made available to our open university system is not available to the conventional system in the country. We would like to utilize to its maximum. Having said this, there are some other responsibilities that this talk on you as learners. Please remember the education system of this country is a colonial legacy and most of us are a victim of this colonial legacy. What is this colonial legacy? The colonial legacy is in telling us repeatedly right from the days we enter our schools till the time we complete our university education that conventional traditional cultural methods of imparting education in this country are archived. They are not useful and therefore they need to be discarded. They need to be discarded in favor of homogenous universalized modern system of education. I will dilate upon this and will take five minutes in telling you why is this proposition so defective and so faulty. The conventional and cultural educational system that this country has practiced and which gave under a severe stress and onslaught as a result of colonial intervention about 150 years back had two very distinct advantages. One advantage was it promoted diversity, it promoted dialogue, it promoted discussion and it promoted dissent. It allowed our cultural system translated into educational system to practice dissent as a significant form of imparting education. The homogenized and universalized modern education system has no place for dissent. When you read a textbook, do you have a space for dissenting with what has been given in the textbook? There is no place available to you for dissenting with that. And the moment you dissent, you score less marks, you go out of the system, you fail and you are declared a renegade. How many of us do seriously realize that dissent which is which our newspapers every other day preach as a essential value of our modern society was so inherently and so beautifully available in our own cultural system. As a result of colonial intervention that space for dissent and diversity has been completely taken away. There is a great need for all of us to realize that restoration of that system, particularly dissent and diversity is very important. And this dissent and diversity was available in all main cultural forms, in sub-cultural forms and even in the underground or undercurrents that permeated all the cultural traditions available in our country. There is a very dire need for restoring that. We are trying to make a small beginning and we want all of you and all this fraternity that is present here to be a partner with us in promoting this kind of diversity. As a result of Ministry of Human Resource Development's initiative to provide education in the remotest parts of our country and to everybody who is eligible for education or who wants to have education, that person should not be deprived of educational opportunities. As a result of this resolve of MHRD, 32 dedicated educational satellite channels have been set up. Out of these 32, five have been awarded to the Open University System. Another Gandhi National Open University being the previous Central University is the custodian of these five channels. Out of these five channels, one is a channel that we have dedicated to a collaborative effort with the State Open Universities. And one channel has been dedicated to a focused study of India's culture. I invite everyone present in this auditorium to be a partner with us in promoting that cultural diversity, a space for descent and a space for dialogue that was so essential and such an inherent element of our traditional cultural system. And as a result of this colonial intervention that has been completely sidelined. I also call upon the fellow teachers working in the Open University System to partner with us in promoting this kind of an educational system in our country. Finally, as learners, when you go out of this system, some of you have received graduation degrees, some have got postgraduate diplomas, and there is a group of nine very eminent learners who have been awarded PhDs. What is it that you want to give back to this system? After all, Guru Dakshina is expected of you. And as a teacher, should we not expect a Guru Dakshina from our learners who have drawn these wonderful downs and who present to us such a wonderful opportunity or such a promising group of learners? What is the Guru Dakshina that in your mind you have to give back to us? There are many things that you can give to us. Teachers do not aspire for material gains. What do we basically expect our learners to practice when they go out of this system, when they become graduates, when they become doctors, when they become postgraduate diploma holders? Foremost is humility. Unfortunately, western model of education, colonial model of education, instills in our learners a sense of conceit, not a sense of humility. Therefore, we must expect our learners from this land, once they have received their degrees, etc., to go out with a sense of humility. Learning does not load you with conceit, it loads you with humility. You must have realized that a tree laden with fruits generally bends down. It does not stand erect. Only that tree stands erect which does not bear any fruits. So if you have borne the fruit of learning, you must go down. What do we mean by going down? What do we mean by humility? Your learning should not be a cause of conceit, false pride in you. Your learning should be a cause of instilling in you a sense of service to humanity, a sense of service to society. So every single learner who goes out of this auditorium after having received the qualification degree, should take a vow that they will not allow any kind of pride to get into their head. On the contrary, they will be available for general service to our society and humanity. And the second brutal action that we expect of you is that every one of you, every single graduate and post graduate and doctor who goes out of this auditorium, will take a vow to bring at least 100 illiterate, uneducated countrymen into the folds of education. There cannot be a better Guru Dakshina that this fraternity of academicians and statutory authorities that are seated here and who have been a witness to the award of convocation degrees to you can expect. Thank you so much. With the permission of the vice-sensor, I would like to inform the August House that Dr. Himantabhiswara Sharma, Minister Education Assam and the guest of honor in today's convocation could not attend the program because of a last minute emergency to visit Manipur. Now I request the vice-sensor to declare the convocation closed. I declare the convocation closed. With this, we have come to the successful closure of the second convocation of Krishnakanta Handik State Open University. May I now request everyone to rise for the rendition of national anthem and remain standing till the academic procession leaves the convocation hall. Thank you. Now all the graduates are kindly requested to leave the procession in the same sequence in pairs in the direction through which they had entered the convocation hall. To the roving room in order to return the ropes and to collect the certificates from the respective counselors. I request them to maintain discipline to collect the certificates so that there is an easy and quick processing takes place. Thank you.