 Let me just very quickly go through this. There is something which is an oxymolon. Everybody knows that. We are just talking about it. I said there are 5000 engineering colleges and somebody corrected me. That is not so. Anybody knows exactly how many engineering colleges exist in the country because every time I asked Dr. Mantra and he gave me some figure and immediately I said that was yesterday evening. So, he is not sure of what is today. So, but you will agree that it is a large scale, Birbal and Kroos in Agra. He is reminding me of the story. How many Kroos are there in Agra? So, Birbal gave some figure and when Akbar said how are you so sure? Suppose I count and they are less. He says then others have gone to visit their relatives elsewhere. Something like that. Engineering colleges do not go around visiting, but scale is clearly the problem. I would only like to say that we are talking only about engineering education, which is not correct. The education is primary education, secondary education, college education. Everything has to be encompassed and we believe that this methodology and this approach can be used to empower teachers across the board at all levels. So, in fact, I am going to make a presentation with the planning commission where I will suggest that similar hubs should be created for school education in every state and for college education across the country. It is likely to be done. Quality enhancement is a big issue because the quality starts building from the time. Suppose I am a teacher, from the time I join a college as a student the quality starts building. My perception about what is good quality and bad quality forms there and my perception about how important it is or how less important it is also formed there. After I pass out, I become a teacher. Traditionally unless I do a Ph.D. I would not be a teacher or at least I do an M.E. or M.Tech, but these days because the scale, I do not know about other disciplines, but in computer science across the country if I take an average about 85 percent of the teachers just hold the first degree B. There are colleges in fact where I had gone to one college I will not name it during my Bharat Yatra where I saw one person with a Ph.D. and one person with an M.E. and all others B. When I went to the college that person with a Ph.D. was not there so I inquired can I meet such and such professor. Then I was told by the head, oh no he has retired two years ago and I said, but his name is still there on the website. He said, sir he is the only person who has a Ph.D. So, we requested him to permit us to put his name as a visiting faculty. Now, that is the status. I do not blame the teachers. There are no opportunities. There are very few places where Ph.D. programs run and so on, but in general the quality of research and the attendant quality of teaching has to be improved. That is when we started his Empower Thousand Teacher program. The last of these Empower Thousand Teacher programs is running upstairs that we just saw. We have engaged about including this workshop about eleven thousand teachers in ten workshops that we have conducted and the experiment has succeeded. More or less the kind of feedback that we have got at the end of the lecture that is available on the respective course model we have publishing the consolidated feedback. We are also trying to get an independent feedback from IST for two purposes. Since the course contents are released in open source, we expect that teachers will use these contents while teaching their course. To what extent they are using and to what extent students find this teaching effective is being independently assessed by IST which will be done over the next two years time. But with the success of this, we wanted to increase it further. I will not go through the background. You are all familiar with the background. The teachers require and so on. By the way, we started the distance education in IIT Bombay in 2000. Around, yeah, 2000 is when we launched our first distance education program from school of IIT. It has now morphed into center for distance engineering education program which is an umbrella organization here. Our educational technology intersting program is also administered through the CDEF infrastructure. The methodology is very clear. We establish remote centers and at the remote center we typically have a remote center coordinator who handles the normal technology infrastructure, lab infrastructure for the workshop and what should I say logistics problems. But there is also a workshop coordinator for each workshop who is an expert in that particular subject and that workshop coordinator is supposed to take the responsibility of designing and conducting all afternoon sessions, interacting with the coordinators here and in general ensuring that the academic quality of that workshop is maintained at the desired level. Additionally, at each remote center, we do request that you should engage on a part-time basis maybe some technical people, some teaching assistants for conducting laboratories. There could be either staff or final year students or ME students or your own colleagues. This is the methodology that we are following. Identification of a remote center ordinarily is a prolonged process. We request for people to submit information about their remote center infrastructure, the nature of faculty and so on. This time we have done that job in a slight hurry and therefore all the new remote centers will be on some kind of a watch list of the ministry and our project team here. In the sense that you will agree that a remote center is actually has to behave like an IIT in a small way at that point. Nothing less will do because in fact you have to amplify the quality if any. Now, first time when a remote center participates there are some typical problems. Our endeavor will be that at least technical problems should not come. So, when you go back please ensure that before start of the main workshop when requests are made for testing, that testing is done diligently and very quickly. We have had in the past some bad experience where people do not login, people are not available. As a result we are not able to assess the quality of reception that you will get and we are not able to give a feedback for that. My team will tomorrow tell you about the technical thing later. But more importantly the preparation for the actual workshop also has to be done. Remote centers also have to responsibility to conduct that workshop meticulously. First meticulous requirement is sense of time. The lectures are given from IIT. The tutorials and labs are held at remote centers. The objective is also to build collaborative teams. Now, the collaborative teams are at two level. One is a collaborative team comprising the remote centers and IIT bombings. Now, here there is a constant interaction with the remote center coordinator and our team. So, that is one collaborative. For a particular subject the workshop coordinators and our coordinators here for that subject become a collaborative team. Now, this would be a sort of high level team. The next level of teams are teams formed during the workshop from amongst the participants. As I said four to five people should form a team and we expect that team not only to work for submission of the common assignment which is given the post workshop, but they should also continue to engage them. We have yet not been able to launch the larger website for this comprehensive program where there will be portals for individual subjects where all these participating teachers will be enrolled automatically. We will be throwing this open to even students later and large collaborative teams should come up for two purposes. One to augment the open source knowledge contents by giving additional examples, solve problems etcetera etcetera. Now, whenever you put something in open source you have the responsibility of ensuring that A the material is of good quality, B it is relevant and C it is not plagiarized that is appropriate credits are given. First we said whatever people submit will put it in open source. We did that for sometime with the first workshop and we were immediately bombarded with questions. This particular problem on your website has been picked up from my tutorial on the web here, here, here without giving any credit. He is not objecting to putting that to the plot, but he is saying you are not mentioning me. That is plagiarism of the worst kind because the authors are written as the team members who said that question as if they have composed it. There is absolutely nothing wrong in selecting a good question that is also a contribution, but acknowledging that this question comes from that. Now, how do you ensure that? So, what we are planning for this collaborative team efforts for material to go on to the final web is that in the jumla which is the framework we are using for building this, we are building a submission of the portal where people will submit those things, but they will not be immediately visible to general public. Now, that submission will have to be hated by a team of reviewers much like the review of journal papers or conference papers, but here the review is to establish these three things a quality correctness, b appropriateness whether it is relevant and c whether due credits have been given. Now, who will do this job? The way open source collaborative communities work is that such group of editors automatically forms. Some people leave that group, some new people join that group. My submission is that the workshop coordinators for individual subjects should be the initial set of editors for such thing. We agree that it will be useful. Now, this is a voluntary effort. There is no funding for this. This is in the lines of the open source community thinking. So, not everybody may be able to give a lot of time, but as long as you are available, then what can be done is that the so called editor in chief who could be in IIT Bombay to begin with, but who could become any one of you would then allocate the work that these submissions have come. Will you please look at these 10? Just like paper review. Now, if you fail, suppose you find some problem, suppose you say the quality is not good, you will be authorized to send a response back to that team. We submitted it saying these are the problems. Please collect it. Or if you say downright plagiarism not to be permitted, but once you have hit it, then we will push that material from the submission area to the main portal so that it becomes visible to all. We agree that this will be a good methodology going forward. Of course, the lectures and audio, video recorded lectures will always be available on the side. So, we open source the contents. One of the mechanisms of reaching out with the open source content is for people to access the website, but the payload for audio, video recorded lectures is very heavy. Sometimes people are not able to download very quickly. The cheapest bandwidth in India as my colleague Professor Shaman Chakrati once observed, the cheapest bandwidth in India is still a Rajdhani Express carrying all CDs from Mumbai to Delhi. You cannot take that much of material that fast to Delhi. So CDs and DVDs will remain the cheapest source. We will be writing to some major agencies such as Moser Boyer, who have brought down the cost of film CDs significantly if you want to know. So, we will be writing to them saying that we want to release this open source thing. There is no money to be paid because this is a contribution, but can you ensure that you just cost the media and the distribution cost and make these available. So, we will be perhaps doing that. That will be an additional source, but in each of your remote centers we would like to have a server, which we call a replication server, where we would like to replicate all the contents of all workshops at each place. Why? Because these students locally should be able to connect on local intranet and access the area. And we would like to do the same thing for all the participating teachers institutions also. So, till such time that every college is connected on a 1GPPS bandwidth, let us have at least some additional things like servers. This is just one of our early workshops where we had this. So, this is how the interaction happens. I have chosen this to show you that you will see this wide spot here and wide spot here. There is lot of light there. However, there is sufficient light coming from this end and therefore, people are visible, but you will notice that people in this corner are more visible than people in this corner. Now, this is something which you will not appreciate in your own remote center. Believe me, you can see all of them with great clarity, but the others who are seeing it. Now, is some training on photography, some training on visual, this thing, etcetera is required, which we are not competent enough, but Sajjan will be able to tell you tomorrow as to what exactly are the precautions that you need to take. Look at this workshop. This is another center. People are more clearly visible. Why you require a handy cam and not a webcam? There is another reason for it. Suppose, this person stands up and asks a question. He is further away. If you have a webcam, you cannot zoom. If you have a handy cam, you can zoom. So, the parties, if you could see that in Surat, they were able to zoom on to the person so that the person is visible clearly. I will skip the intermission and I will have the question answers at the end before we break for lunch. But this is one idea that I think I had partially mentioned perhaps to the previous team. This methodology that we have successfully established over the last two years. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason why these kind of workshops should be conducted only from IIT. Any one of your institution can conduct. The technology is well known. Not only our workshops are open source, we expect people to continue building workshops in open source. Our methodology is also open source. There is nothing hidden about it. In fact, we are preparing a compendium of all the documentation of how the whole system runs. So, what is to be established at remote center, etcetera. But if I have to scale it up to 10,000 teachers, can we always do the workshops in the traditional fashion, where the workshop coordinators come to IIT Bombay for a one week interaction on how to conduct this workshop later. Today, we have 171 remote centers. My ambition is that there should be about 500 remote centers out of which at any one time up to 200 may be participating because not every remote center will have an expert workshop coordinator for every subject. Even 200 remote center coordinators, can they always come to IIT from all over the country and can we have a meaningful interaction. So, I am now trying to create a next level of hierarchy model where I will set up nodal centers. And suppose I take, say 10 nodal centers I set up, out of the any 5 nodal centers will participate for helping us to coordinate for a particular. What will happen at these 5 nodal centers? At each place 50 workshop coordinators like you will assemble and we will conduct the coordinators workshop at each of these nodal centers. So, nobody will come here. This reduces the cost of travel from a person who is coming from the far place. So, if I have these 10 nodal centers spread across the country. These nodal centers of course, have to be capable of running each and every subject. So, these have to be institutions which not only have large faculty, but large faculty spread across all disciplines, high end researchers there. Naturally again going by pay degree the first choice will be national institutes which perhaps have some kind of a collection of such people there. What is the method of selecting these? I cannot do a tender process or something like that. This will have to be done. It is not only the numerical strength at the institution. There are two or three key ingredients in somebody becoming an older center and assuming higher response. The leadership and the leadership is two levels. First of all the director of the institute must be conducive and convinced of this effort. Otherwise the activities will not flow because the things flow from the direction. Secondly, the nodal center coordinator must be able and willing to spare time to handle nodal center activity and that nodal center coordinator should generally be different from the remote center coordinator and the workshop coordinator for different subject. We will soon be, I will be writing very soon. My original idea was to actually set up these nodal centers and conduct this workshop in that fashion. That would have happened if we had to conduct this workshop in December. But because ministry forced me to do it earlier, we are having this here. I also expect these nodal centers A to increase in numbers across the country as we go and encompass other aspects of education such as college education, school education, etcetera. I also expect the nodal centers to be the first ones to start offering courses on their own. So, the nodal centers should eventually become hubs and the other remote centers should become nodal centers and slowly they should become hubs. That is how otherwise you cannot cater to quality education in just 6000 engineering colleges. Forget the other. That is the idea. So, set up hubs like IIT Bombay is the ultimate ambition. There is another lesson that I would like to leave behind which we have learned just as that person said, we are very happy to have somebody from IIT Bombay. As I said Balchan, Pulani and Atul Sharma could have been anywhere else. But notice that for this workshop it is not a faculty member from IIT Bombay who is the lead faculty. The lead faculty is President Karmal Karkar from IIT Madras. Now, he could have been anywhere again, need not have been in IIT Madras. Eventually, the nodal centers and the hubs that will emerge like IIT Bombay must incorporate into their participation as teachers experts from all institutions across the country. Consequently, one more thing we have to do is just like the father proactively told me that he is interested in teaching. I would like you to go back to your own colleges. You have an idea of who are recognized as best teachers and best expert in your college. There is no ranking or anything published anywhere, but you know students know for example, who is the best teacher. I would like you to start preparing quietly a list of great teachers in your own institute who can contribute to either this subject or that subject or that subject. I would simultaneously like to build very quietly such a list on sidelines across the country, starting with this 171 remote. But you will agree that amongst the 5000 colleges also there may be great. The idea would be that in the coming years we would increasingly involve such teachers by requesting them to participate as teachers. There is nothing else given lecture and you will notice that if audio visual at your place is good and bandwidth is good, that teacher need not come to IIT Bombay to give a lecture. That person can give a talk from wherever he or she is provided you have these arrangements. Now at our end we have a studio, we have slightly better arrangement. Consequently at nodal centers at least, we would like to make some good infrastructure, not a full place studio may be, but a good infrastructure. We are also designing what I like to call teacher's chaos. That means sitting in my office or I can just go to some place, a small room, well lit room, a good camera, a laptop connected on good network bandwidth and a device, the software like AVU and a device on which I can write some. That is all is required for me to give a talk from any. So if we can set this up at various places. Now for nodal centers I am going to request the ministry and also mention it to planning commission that some substantial grant should be given to each of the nodal centers to establish themselves first as nodal center in IIT Bombay's effort and subsequently to come up as a hub. I hope some of you would be interested in it. The second point which, so how we can help is by requesting ministry and the planning commission and others to provide for some funding. But the thinking in the ministry is they are happy with the success of this model, but they are unhappy with the cost which we are incurring. We incur a cost of almost 60 to 70 lakhs in conducting one workshop of 1000 teachers. If 10000 teachers actually participate we will be spending something close to 7.5 crore rupees. Now in a single workshop to be fully funded like this and that too on a large scale the government has to rethink. So one request which they have made is they have asked us to judge to what extent the participant participating teachers will be willing to contribute to that cost, either participating teachers or their institution. Now in India we have a major problem that everybody expects a free door. If there is something free and is something very interesting then I may attain. But otherwise if you ask me to spend money from my pocket I usually hesitate. How do we solve this problem? Will this problem remain perpetually or do you think we could build enthusiasm among teachers to participate? They will participate if they believe that they will get something from it. People would have joined it. And the thing is if a participant can attend such workshop for the first time he is likely to pay a substantial fee the next time. So this is my point of view. That point of view is also buttressed by the feedback. In the last few workshops in the feedback form we are asking these questions specifically. It is a very well formed question. We give three options. One option is that I would be able to attend this workshop only if it is fully funded as of now. Second option is I would be able to pay for my travels, stay and food and attend the workshop. And the third option is I will be able to pay for all these expenses plus be willing to pay a fees to attend the workshop. Very curiously the division in all the last three workshops that we collected the feedback was one-third, one-third, one-third. So one-third people said jyaptak payasale rega, mine is rega, fair enough. But almost 33 percent people said that they will be willing to pay for their own expenses that is food, stay, travel, etcetera. 33 percent people said that they will spend all that money plus they will be willing to pay the fees. The only feedback that we got is that if you can convert these costs into some kind of a charge to be officially paid then it will be easier for them to claim some support from their institute. So if it is suppose there is a fees that we charge and if that fees is paid to the remote center that is collected by the remote center for let us say expenses incurred by the remote center. Will that model work? Sir our institute has already decided that one faculty can go for any STTP they will reimburse the TA and DA facility. So we can do that type of model at all centers. Second thing TA we can remove it because now we are making so many remote centers. So distance is not so far for any faculty hardly 40, 45 kilometers. So we can save money in that part basically. And noddle center is the very good idea so we can say because just I have seen so many came from flights. So bill may be round about 10,000 per candidate. So if it is nearer to that college is that can be cut out. My finance minister indeed objected to this lavish expenditure that I am incurring on travel because ordinarily when you have 2, 3, 4 months to plan people can book tickets in AC train and so on but given this short time it was not possible. You are very right. Sir one other suggestion. With this scale of participants we could also have combinations of workshops with 4 or 5 parameters. Say for example with without course fee, shorter duration, longer duration. So if the frequency of workshops is a high maybe they will pitch up on one workshop or the other and we will have people coming in. Ok so let me tell you what I told the secretary higher education in the ministry. I told her that the idea is excellent and eventually all the teachers will be willing to pay even the fees. I told her about the feedback. However I said that we have just kick started this activity. So kindly provide for some funding and tapper it off slowly. If you say that in the next class no funding will be provided the whole project may just die without this. So they have agreed for this. Now let us see I have asked for I think 85 or 95 crore rupees to conduct 10 such mega workshop for 10,000 rupees each. The problem is if a project is succeeding I think the nation has money. Now how do we tapper it down is something that we can discuss in work. But do you believe that this kind of plan will succeed? No no I mean ok we are getting into the financial aspects. So let me tell you something. My sense is that the government will not garage the expenditure if it is well spent. The problem that we have found out are very typical and sometimes very unfortunate because we have 111,000 teachers and amongst 11,000 teachers you get all kinds of people. There have been reports from the remote centers that there are some participants whose only interest in life is to collect money from you as reimbursement ok. And most of the workshop time they are going shopping or something like that they are not. Now this is this is bad. But what do you do? When you have thousand to see you can define the behavior of the people in slots by percentages. A majority of people will be genuinely sincere people about may be up to 70 percent. 10 percent will be extra enthusiastic they would like to take that back. But 10 percent could be down right rogues. They are black sheep amongst us. They are there everywhere including my numbers are small. Now you will have to contend with them. In fact that is something that I would like to leave behind that there will be occasions when you will find these 50 participants some of them behaving so irritatingly that you may lose your temper. But you have to behave like mature people. What my most favorite axiomy is that every teacher who comes to my remote center even if the youngest person or a brash person must be treated with the same dignity that I would expect to be treated when I go somewhere else. That is that is your responsibility as workshop coordinator and therefore you have to keep your cool solve all problems. Treat every problem as genuine problem till it is proven otherwise. And that is the only approach that will work. Now this is a mindset issue and this will evolve at some point. I will tell you that so far from the 78 remote centers that we had barring one or two exceptions we had absolutely excellent cooperation and work. There are few points of which you are talking about finances. There are remote centers which do not settle their accounts months after and after several reminders. Now you look at our problem a particular workshop account has to be closed. It cannot be closed if one out of the 50 remote centers does not send back the real center. And all that we are asking is an audited statement saying that you have company we do not ask for bills we do not I do not know what is the current status. But whatever is the supportive document and if you have made some over expenditure we pay back. If you have made some less expenditure you are supposed to give a check. Now this is something which your remote center coordinator and the workshop coordinator for that workshop must jointly settle. So there are some of the issues I think you have discussed these with or you are discussing them yesterday you discussed. Can we involve the resource person since in this workshop we are utilizing resource persons from IIT Bombay. So can we utilize resource persons from outside the India means MIT like or Cambridge professors can they get involved into this thing. So that they can take the lectures and that can be delivered. We have no problem we believe in good experts from anywhere in the world to be acceptable to us. But do they add any extra value or are you going by the pedigree. Just as I said Balchan Pulani could have been in your institution and I do not care whether he has an MIT tag or IIT tag or surat tag. And I am particularly abhorrent of getting people from outside India just because they are from outside India. If Finman wants to come and give a lecture most welcome. But if some XYZ from Timbuktu or even from MIT wants to come and give lectures just because he is from MIT I will say thank you very much nice meeting. Believe me in this country today you saw some glimpses here. You would have seen such good teaching in your own colleges. There is absolutely no dearth of expertise and great teaching ability in this country. So particularly to me to be very careful when you mention Phirang. I have very strong opinions on this. Yes great expertise and great teaching abilities are welcome and I will be the first one to say get that person. But MIT just because it is MIT I am not impressed. So and this is what you have to create in the minds of the teachers who participate. They should not come to attend just because IIT faculty is teaching. They should come to attend because some good faculty member is teaching some good things. Where that person belongs to is irrelevant actually. And this technology permits us to make that irrelevant provided more and more expert teachers from other places actually start participating in this. And that is why I very much like this suggestion made by that father over the next one year will be increasingly inviting people to come and give talk. But this invitation has to be judged has to be arrived at very careful. I will take you two minutes. Say somebody wants to offer a course here. You know how that person is selected. You think he is a IIT professor. So we immediately say okay. Absolutely not. We first go back to the head of the department to find out what is the feedback of students in his teaching. Is he a good teacher? Is he an accomplished worker in his own field? We get this endorsement discreetly from people. Then I personally interact with them to find out what is their mindset, what is their approach, what is their attitude. Are they convinced that this will work? And then only we select them. Now this is not a written procedure or something. Remember I requested you to make a list quietly of the best teachers that you have. When I get such a list, I will be personally meeting them either on a view or some of my colleagues will be traveling to your place. It will be a quiet one-on-one interaction for ten minutes. It's just a judgmental call. And then we'll say yes, good, good, good, good. Then we'll declare a short list. It does not mean that others are bad. It is just that in my opinion, which is subjective, I feel that this person could do a good job. That is exactly how you do faculty selection in IIT also. Is the selection committee subjective judgment at the end of this? But this has to be done discreetly. We will do that. Over the next year it will be my ambition to get hundreds of teachers emerging out of first, out of these remote centers and then out of other college. That is the way that I foresee this. I think we'll stop now. If you have any, I'll take just the last two questions, yes. Over my interaction with you for the last two days and my observation, I have realized that you are on a nation building exercise and you have the contact with the ministry with the right type of people. So there's one thing that I want you to convey across. You have just said that how can we help and reduce the expenditure. I want to ask you, okay, why don't you suggest how can we help and increase the expenditure? Frankly, my opinion is this is the first time in my life, right from the beginning of my childhood education till now, that the government is spending something on me directly. I felt my tax that I have paid last year or whatever has come back to me directly right now. So why doesn't the government spend more on the faculty? And you can make a difference. I feel that you can make a difference because you have the right contact. It's really appreciable that we want to cut down the price and cost and everything agreed and we will support you. But at the same time, please keep it at the back of your head that the expenditure on education and on faculty should go up. Then only our nation will build properly. You're provoking me to say something, although I, I, no, no, no, okay. So let me, let me, let me, let me share with you. You see, what is a teacher's job? Tell truth to public, tell truth to power. What I shared with you was my telling truth to you. What I share with the government is by sharing truth with power. And to power I have always said throughout my discussions that the amount of money that the government of India spends on education is very little. It needs to be increased. That's the reason why I argued with the Secretary H.E. that do not curtail the funding for this program. And what I'm going to tell Planning Commission is to extend a similar kind of funding to empower school teachers, college teachers, everyone. So that's the job I do. They may listen to me or they may not listen. They may not listen. There is a, there is a subtle thing here. I would like this funding to be made by the government so that teachers feel happy. Yes, government is doing something. But I would also like teachers to be willing to participate even if the government does not. And both things can coexist. The, the comfort level with the government is that, look, if they need be, the teachers will be willing to spend money from their own pocket.