 So, let me welcome you to IIT Bombay. Many of you would have visited us earlier. How many of you were coordinators in the first workshop that Prasiddharshan conducted sometime ago? Is there anybody from that group here? One, two, three, four, very few. How many of you have attended the first course on databases Prasiddharshan conducted that was again two years ago. One good thing is most of you are new to this game. So, which means you have left to be learned. Let me first introduce the context. As all of you are aware, you are here as coordinators for a workshop which will be conducting for ten thousand teachers. You would have read much about this program very briefly. We conducted thousand teacher training programs for several years. Our model being that these thousand teachers assemble at specified remote centers which are 30, 40, 50, engineering colleges such as yours. In the main workshop, the lectures are given from IIT Bombay in an interactive mode using a view and the local laboratories and tutorials etcetera are conducted for those 30, 40 teachers assembled at a remote center and this conduct is supervised by workshop coordinators. Now, the workshop coordinators are like teaching associates to the main teacher. This is a practice which IITs follow for almost 40 years, 50 years that I have been here. So, for example, when I taught my first course in computer programming as a young teacher, almost all my colleagues including my own head were my teaching assistant. That is the privilege that we have and we found that that thing works well. The point is that teaching associates also require some inputs as to how to conduct the labs, how to conduct the tutorials etcetera etcetera. Now, earlier when we used to have 30 or 40 remote centers, it was relatively easy, but last year as you are aware, we scaled up our efforts to try and train ten thousand teachers at a time. Ten thousand is a figurative number, could be six thousand, it could be twelve thousand, but basically a scale of order of magnitude larger scale. That is what is being attempted. We conducted the first course in this modified structure in December in thermodynamics, which Professor Uday Gaitondhani's colleagues conducted. What you will be helping to conduct will be the second such course in the series. We are required to conduct fifteen such workshops over the next three years, training one lakh fifty thousand teachers. The responsibility that all of you have is enormous. Approximately ten thousand teacher colleagues of ours from across the country will be interacting with all of us, primarily with you in your respective colleges and it is extremely important to try and motivate them to do a much better job of quality education provision for our students. That is the objective. The exact methodology that is adopted is well documented. Professor Sudarshan will explain the process a little bit more, but in this first session I thought I will share with you some of my ideas in general about the way the education is moving forward and in particular I would like to state a few things about the importance of data management. Not just the database management system per se, which is the technical component that you will be all perfecting within yourself and also helping others to perfect, but the impact of the database management system in the larger plan of things in the world. Let me begin with the basic problem that all of you are aware of. How many of you have studied Indian demography, the age distribution, all of you are familiar with that? How are the Indians? How old are the Indians on an average? How long will they live? How many are young Indians still studying? No idea. So, I begin with a suggestion that while all of us, each one of us in fact, is a teacher in a specific area, specific field and working for a specific institution. Because we belong to an institution called teachers, it is important for us. It is expected of us by the society that we are in general aware of all problems inflicting education in the country. And the beginning of that understanding will come when we are aware of the huge scale and the challenge that that scale poses. At least all of you are familiar with the population of the country, no confusion there. So, about 1200 million, give or take a few million. The median age of the nation, what is the median age? Close to 25 years. We are all older than 25 years, barring may be one or two, I do not know. That means half the country, more than half the country is younger than us. The number of people in the age group of 0 to 19 is more than 370 million, 370 million Indians. This is larger than the population of most countries. These 370 million young Indian brothers and sisters of ours seek good quality education and they are not getting it today. A majority of them give up after the high school education. Those who attend college of any kind beyond high school is a small percentage of the total people who qualify in high school. That percentage is called gross enrollment ratio. Have you heard this term? Gross enrollment ratio is the percentage of qualified people who are qualified to attend college but who actually attend college. The gross enrollment ratio for college education in most advanced society is upward of 60 percent. In India the current gross enrollment ratio is 18 percent, about 6 years ago it was only 11 percent. That means only 18 percent of people eligible to go to college actually go to college and I am talking about college in general. You are familiar with the state of education in all colleges. Since the education quality is not very good, people flock around to professional courses hoping that they will be able to make a better living etc. by getting a professional degree. Most of you are teachers in Indian colleges. You know the kind of mara mara that happens for Indian college admission, specifically in good colleges etc. The percentage of those 18 percent who go to the college of that 18 percent, how many come to Indian colleges you can calculate, very small percent. The nation proposes to increase this gross enrollment ratio to 30 percent by 2020. That is almost twice the number that we have today, twice. That means the number of colleges, number of universities have to be doubled in next 7 years, doubled. Can you imagine that? In next 7 years. It is a near impossible task. So this is the context. Good primary school education, good secondary school education and good college education and good professional education is an urgent requirement of the nation. The fact that the nation has so many young people is considered a demographic advantage. No other nation has it. Even the Chinese demography is slightly skewed towards older people. Western civilizations are all old civilizations, old nations. But this great demographic advantage can become a disadvantage if we are unable to educate our young. There will be chaos in the society subsequent. So what you and we together deal with is a tip of the iceberg, the engineering college students. And even there if we are unable to give quality education, if we are unable to teach professionals a better way of doing things, then this better way of doing things will not percolate down in the society. Engineers do not represent only an educational dimension which is professional in nature. They also represent a professional education which will permit them to generate societal wealth in a non-linear fashion. You are familiar with the fact that the smarter people and the professional people generally contribute to larger share of wealth generation for themselves, for their families and for the society. And that is why it is important for you people to ensure that your students learn not just one subject wealth, but learn the entire engineering education, science education, holistically understand the context of wealth generation for which this knowledge has to be deployed. And therefore, imbibe the best professional practices while they are studying. So this is the larger context. I would only like to mention that if you examine the education that goes on in our colleges, including IIT system, you will find that every step there is a possibility of improvement, there is a possibility of improvement. In the IIT system because we are completely autonomous, we take upon ourselves to upgrade the syllabus, to upgrade the teaching methods, to enhance the work that we give to the students, to engage the students by giving them more and more challenging problems. We would like all of you to tell our teacher colleagues later that that is what they have to invite. Very often I am told that people have to teach as per the syllabus and the exam system is all standardized in the university. I entirely agree with you. But let me ask you one question. Does it prevent me as a teacher? I imagine I am a teacher in a small town called Jharsakuda. There is a rule book which says this is the university exam. Does this system, does my college prevent me from doing the following? Does it prevent me on my own in studying some research papers? I might independently want to do it because I am pursuing PH. Does it prevent me from calling students in the evening and on Saturdays, Sunday to my college saying forget the system. Those of you are interested in solving challenging problems, I will spend two hours on every Sunday. There are teachers among us who do that regularly by the way. And those teachers who do that, their students benefit non-linear. There are two things that we will have to do friends. One, we will have to change the present system of affiliation, somebody teaching, somebody else setting paper and somebody else examining. That does not work. We will have to change that. But till such time that the system changes, we will have to use the very system and use whatever we can do additionally to buttress that system, to make that system better and more fruitful for students. Most of us are sensitive teachers. We will generally take care of people who are not doing well in a class. That is standard. The poor students will come to us, will engage extra classes, something, something. We will of course teach the bulk of students as per the university syllabus. There is one point that I would like to make which you might want to consider. What do we do for the smarter children in our class? Forget all other majors. The common major of quizzes, tests, examinations, CPI, percentage of marks. Okay, good, bad or ugly. That is a mechanism which sort of filters out the relatively smarter people, the relatively more committed people, the relatively more diligent people up in the class. There will be at least 10 or 15 such students in every class that you teach. Do you agree? Now, here is a question that I would like to ask you. What spatial thing do you do every semester for those 15? The point is we generally don't because it is presumed that those 15 are smart enough. They will take care of themselves. The point is we want them to take care of the society tomorrow and we want them to take care of themselves much better. And therefore, I submit to you that they deserve to be paid a special attention. They deserve to be challenged with something which is not in the syllabus. They deserve to be exposed in a much greater fashion because they are more capable. They can perhaps put in their mind to solve more complex problems. I was just wondering what is it that IITs do differently and I found this, that whenever in our classes we have some people who look to be different, we generally will engage them and challenge them with harder problems. This happens intrinsically so it is not documented anyway. But I have realized that this does not happen in other colleges at all. Barring a few, one or two teachers in every college somewhere on one's own whims and fancies, one does it. But it is not a part of the system. I am recommending to all of you that we should imbibe this practice of challenging the smarter students in the class with harder problem and outside the conventional examination system if necessary. Because that will help the entire ethos of the class to go up because these students do not work in isolation. They have friends. They will talk to others. They will say I am being given this hard problem. We are struggling with this problem etc. I think that is an ethos. Why I mention this to you? Through you, I want the 10,000 teachers who will come just to learn and teach database management system to imbibe this philosophy. That A, they have to spend far more time on their students than what they either to have been doing and B, they have to specially take care of the smarter people and the people who are at the bottom. The average of the class will take care of it. I would very quickly like to mention the changes in the entire education pattern that is happening. So far our teaching learning and all of us have gone through the same process revolves around the following activities. In the beginning of a semester, I am allocated a course during the summer months or whatever I prepare to give lectures. My primary task is to give lectures, 30, 40, 50 lectures in a semester. My associated task is to conduct labs and assignments and conduct tests and examinations. And finally there is an examination which as I said somebody else sets up the paper and conduct it. It creates an ethos where the interaction between me and my students is very limited. During the class teaching if I ask some questions or some soon ask some question that is the interact. Why is this done? It is done because it is a show that it is important for a student to listen to a lecture or series of lectures by a teacher to understand some. Consider today's technological age. The lectures from the best teachers in every subject are available now in a pre-video recorded format. You are aware of NPTEL courses, process solution's own course, the previous thing when he had given all the video recorded lectures are there. We are going to record these lectures here again. Now, suppose I again put myself back into that Jharsugula college. I am a teacher there. I use process solution book to teach. Now, I say that look process solution himself is teaching. Those lectures are available. So, why should I force myself on my student? I may be a good teacher, but I am certainly not as good as professor Sudarshan. So, if his lectures are available, why can't I tell my students? Let us watch professor Sudarshan's lecture on normal life. We are actually in the process of recommending to the government that up to 25 percent of the lectures can be actually delivered by the expert lectures which are pre-recorded. This should be permitted for that. The problem with the government is the government says if that happens, then a teacher like you in Jharsugula will simply sit like this and say what? So, does it absolve me from my duty? In my opinion, it actually increases my job. What is my job? Now, I will say you listen to professor Sudarshan's lecture, but then we will engage in problem solving. We will engage in discussion. This is called flipping of the lecture or flipping of the classroom where people attend lectures at their homes and come to the classroom for tutorial and lab discussion. You will notice that in this particular workshop, professor Sudarshan has arranged the timetable such that there are very few lectures, but most of them are lab sessions and discussions. We expect in the coming years this is how professional education will evolve. So, in conclusion, I would say that the role of the teachers is going to be actually more important in coming years, but that role is going to be more and more engaging with students, discussing with students, solving their problems and helping them understand and imbibe a particular course or subject very well in their minds. All of this is easily understood. There is only one problem, solving their problems. Now, again I put myself into the shoes of a teacher in Jharsugula and if I have to solve people's problems, I will not be able to solve those problems unless I have solved at least 100 of them myself. When I taught the first course in programming for teachers, I inquired how many lines of code teachers have written themselves. Very few lines of code. In a practical course of this nature of any engineering course, in fact, unless a teacher has darted his or her hands, I do not think a teacher is fully prepared to solve all the problems that arise in students. Even after teaching for 40 years when I taught CS 101, I wrote at least 200 programs in the summer before that and not 10 line or 100 line programs. Several of them were 2000 line, 2500 line programs. It is only then I get a level of comfort and confidence in my own mind that yes, any problem raised by any student I would be able to solve. So, friends, this is very hard work. I am sure since you are all coordinators of the workshops, many of you would have at least done this, but those of you who have not done that, I would sincerely advise that please imbibe this philosophy of darting your hands. So, for example, if I have to ask a question on or forget me, if a student has to ask me a question, sir, I do not get the left outer join correctly. Now, I will not, if I do not know, of course, I will say absolutely, I do not remember this, I will read and come back, but ideally I should have written at least two or three square scrapes which do an outer join and which do an outer join for solving a specific application problem. It is this a thought that I would like you to imbibe first in the next seven days and you would like, I would like you to help all of us to these 10,000 teachers to imbibe. Information processing is vital in the society. It has always been vital. It is becoming increasingly more critical. And when people like us teach students data management, which is a larger problem than just database management system, as I said, we are actually trying to make them understand how efficiently, effectively and affordably handle a lot of information. Meaningful information handling by groups of people is a requirement. On the other hand, Indian ethos is such that in general return articulation and in particular awareness of the other people's need or how the information should be presented, lack very much in our society. You would all be familiar with student submissions. You say, you say, assignment five, please upload on the model. How many fives do you get which have a name, assignment five? I get at least 50 in a class of 500, 10 percent. Now, if I get assignment five, assignment five, assignment five, assignment five, how do I know whose assignment it is? I ask my staff to scan some documents and they, every day some documents are to be scanned. Every day I get fives. Scan one, scan two, scan three, scan four. I have 500 scan ones, 700 scan tools. I can't make any sense of all of you would have faced this problem. Now, how many of you have announced in a class, not only in your class, but in general for all Indian college students, that whenever you submit any file online, any digital file online, this should be the convention for naming that file. Without that, if you submit a file, it will be rejected. We never do that. I am giving this as a simplest example, which all of you can appreciate. But I want you to appreciate the real reason behind this problem. The real reason behind this problem is when I submit a file to my teacher, I am completely unaware of that teacher's requirement of having to handle 100 students. I am looking at it only from my perspective. And this is the typical Indian problem. We look at any piece of information only from our individual perspective. We don't look at it from the general perspective. So, when you teach database management systems, please also emphasize data management and please also emphasize some mundane simple common sense rules of terms which must be followed. And these common sense rules of terms, they are not in the syllabus, you see. There is no question in any examination. He says, please, this is the description of the contents of a file. Please suggest file name. We don't ask such question, because that is not in the syllabus. That is not in the examination part. I am elaborating this simple example just to tell you that there will be hundreds of such examples that you can construct. But if you start thinking like this, you are all experts in databases. How are the attributes names by named by students in their database design? How are the abbreviations formed? Are the attribute names meaningful? Can people make sense out of those attribute names? X, Y, P4, 1, 2, 3 is not a meaningful attribute name. When you automatically generate database schema from such tools, such funny names may come. But when people design attributes, name is an attribute. In one table, the name may make sense. But if there are five tables, each one has name with different connotation. Somewhere it is a person's name, somewhere it is a subject name. The name is name. How many of us have come across this? And yet, how many of us have not taken pains to ensure that in our lectures, the first lecture will actually emphasize this point. Listed 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This is not to be done in this course. That is what my friends is teaching. Teaching is not just giving knowledge. Young students are at least as smart as we are if they are not smarter. They can all learn on their own. The best lectures as I said are available. Our role, therefore, is increasingly more complex. Our role is to tell people, invite them to think about such attendant practical and theoretical problems, which will make the knowledge richer and more beneficial. Now, if we have to reach the students, finally, we have to reach the teacher. And I'll conclude by saying that these 250 people who are assembled here have an extraordinarily important role to play. Please remember one thing. The 10,000 teachers are not coming to IIT. They are coming to your colleges. They are not going to see Professor Sudarshan face to face or any other teachers who teach them face to face. They are seeing them face to face on video, but they will not be able to interact as freely as they would interact with you in the afternoon. And please remember one thing that happens in IIT. When I teach a course here and I have, let's say, 20 course associates, then for my 500 students, those 20 course associates are my direct representative. They see in each one of them me. They expect in each one of them the same capability, same dedication, same answering that they expect from you. Therefore, are the direct incarnations of Professor Sudarshan in your courses. That's a very heavy responsibility. If I were to be one of you, I would be scared. I know the kind of tough job he does and expects. But the point is, it is also a great honor to be in that position. It's also a great honor for all of us to be in that position where we are the teaching associates for a course conducted by none other than Professor Sudarshan. And therefore, if I were you, I would remember the following. I am a workshop coordinator. My job, therefore, is not merely to conduct the workshop well. My job is to represent Professor Sudarshan in my college. My job is to interact with those 30 teachers who assemble in my college exactly the way Professor Sudarshan would have interacted with them, working with them in the labs, being available, discussing in the evening, during tea breaks, in the nights. That is my job. It is a tough job, but I will tell you it's a very enjoyable job. And I will also tell you that those 30, 40 teachers who assemble in your colleges, if they see you doing this, they will not only benefit, but they will be grateful eternally, because they will be carrying back something far more than just the knowledge. Please understand that knowledge is already encapsulated in the book and that book is almost followed by most of the institution. So, it is not per se the knowledge that we are looking at. It is the ability to grasp that knowledge, dissect that knowledge, understand it in various contexts, correlate it to solve different problems. That is the objective. And you are the people who are our representatives. Well, there is a lot that I can speak on, but the nation is making a retrived attempt to put back the education, the proper level of quality and the proper level of skill. It will take next 7 to 10 years. Precisely during these 7 to 10 years, things are going to change drastically in the educational framework, as I told you. More and more students are going to directly listen to the lectures. And therefore, the role of teachers is going to be in engaging the students in solving problems, discussions, motivating them, etcetera. And that is what I would like you to emphasize to these 10,000 teachers. Please remember one thing, the 10,000 teachers, they will come to your centers. They may ostensibly be teaching only the database management system course. But like you, they are also a teacher in their college. So, for example, if I am a teacher attending that workshop and when I go back, I not only learn about databases, but I learn about different ways of life that the teacher has to spend. And I will talk to my colleagues in other disciplines. I will share with them the benefits that I get while teaching a course to my students. So, this is how the ethos will spread. There is a subject. There is a syllabus. There is a learning and examination system. And there is an ethos. There is an environment of learning that subject. It is that environment which I submit is slightly different in IIT system because it has evolved differently. And we would like you to imbibe that ethos when you are here for the next seven days and spread it both among your colleagues in your colleges as well as in the 10,000 teachers who come to us. Of course, our prime responsibility is those 10,000 teachers. Make a difference to those 10,000 teachers and I tell you, you would make a definite difference to the quality of education in this country. Thank you very much. God bless you.