 Good afternoon everybody and sorry for the 5 minutes delay in assembling everything here in order. As you can see the slide probably being reflected on your TV or on your screen is still evaluation of expressions. Let me assure you that we are not going to discuss databases. Professor Sudarshan for once is sitting quietly and I am addressing you here. As I told you last time we had requested Mr. Ramadurai to come here and address all the 1000 teachers. As you are aware this is the first time we are breaking the barrier of a 3 digit number. We have 1039 of you are participating in this important workshop and we thought it fit that a great industry leader like Ramadurai could address all of you and he has kindly agreed. So, let me formally welcome Dr. Ramadurai. Thank you Ram. Ram why do not you sit here. Most of you would have known about Ramadurai. He took over the range of TCS from Kohli Sahib whom I fondly called the Bhishma Pitama of Indian IT industry. Well since we have a Pitama we now also have a father figure in Ramadurai. As you will know Kohli Sahib got the TCS up from absolute zero base to something like a 4000 people strong organization earning 400 million dollars a year which was a very large sum in those days. But then when Ram took over what he did was nothing short of a miracle. If I am not mistaken when he left TCS had more than 140,000 professionals working and the revenue was more than 6 billion dollars establishing TCS as one of the largest software service provider in the whole world. So, thank you very much Ram. We all look forward to listening to you. But before that as I told you earlier we are able to reach so many of you and you are able to interact with us through a whole lot of development and methodology improvements that have taken place here over the last so many years. The two institutions which have collaborated to bring this model to you are of course IIT Bombay and Amruta University. On all your behalf and on my personal behalf I am glad to welcome Professor Venkat Rangan Vice Chancellor of Amruta University who has given us the AVU and you will very much appreciate that he has reiterated his commitment to open source the entire AVU technology so that not only we can use it but all of you can use it your neighboring colleges and schools can use it. Thank you Venkat for coming here. Thank you so much. Please. Last but not the least our own director Professor Devan Khakar. Thank you Devan for coming. Let me tell you that apart from leading the institute to greater heights in research he has personally supervised introduction of educational technology as an important research area in the institute. We now have a PhD program and a lot of research scholars and much of the work that you see here benefiting all of us comes out of that program. Thank you Devan. Please. I do not know the camera arrangements but I hope you can plan people. I would like to I would like you to show the audience if you can. Yes. So let me go to the audience so that you can also see them. This is Dr. Kamal Bijlani the architect of the AVU software and of course this man I think all of you know the great professor Sudarshan. It might interest you that when we are looking at the common syllabus we found out that 95 percent of the Indian engineering colleges use Sudarshan's book as a textbook in databases. So it is not only internationally well known but it's well known here. Anita is the one who facilitated getting Ramdurai here and of course Professor Kannan Mautgalyu he is the sort of head of our joint project here helps everything done here. I have on this side senior friends from industry they all come here to look at how thousand teachers could be simultaneously listening to a single talk at distributed places. Thank you very much all of you and we have here my colleague and friend Professor Juzer Vasi yes raise your hands and of course you would have seen the glimpse of the entire audience the rest of them have come to listen to Sri Ramdurai I am sure. Oh yes yes yes I could you just focus on Professor Gayathunde. Professor Gayathunde has promised to take a similar workshop on basic mechanical engineering provided the syllabus is more or less thermodynamic syllabus. Anyway we are still negotiating that. So thank you very much without further ado let me request Sri Ramdurai I hope you can all see me what nobler profession are more valuable to the state than those who instruct the rising generation. This famous quote as by Marcus Cero a Roman philosopher captures the mood of India rising the aspirations of our youth and opportunities that abound for those who dream to make a difference. None of this is possible without building excellence amongst the teaching fraternity by empowering you essentially we are empowering India's youth. Good afternoon to all of you and I am extremely happy to participate in the first of its kind online national teacher empowerment program made possible through the partnership between Amrita University and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Our country is in the brink of a golden opportunity of global leadership. India's future depends on the capabilities and expertise of its human capital and it is the academic community that can play a role in this transformation in building this future. However I think all of you understand the scale of this country and the challenges are unprecedented. We have a shortage of 1.2 million teachers as mentioned by our minister Honorable Kapil Sival the right to education act begs the teacher student ratio at 1 is to 30 but India has one of the lowest ratio of teachers and one teacher per 42 students. According to reliable sources more than one third of faculty seats are vacant at premier central universities and other institutions. So, if the 370 universities are expected to go up to 800 universities in the next 10 years there would be a huge demand for good faculty how will we address the issue of demand and high variation in the quality of faculty training. No other nation in the world faces challenges of this magnitude we cannot look elsewhere for solutions we have to develop them ourselves. The good news is that we have ample talent to do that today is a demonstration of that in action. It is in this backdrop that we must consider the significance of a view and its implementation through the national mission on education through ICT. This unique empowerment program is a solution which is scaled up for much wider usage spanning all dimensions of Indian education including schools can address the training issues as well as create a more inclusive community and that is one of the clear objectives of this. It is not possible to even begin solving problems of such scale unless there is collaboration on all fronts. Technology enabled collaboration and collaboration of resources and collaboration of expertise. So, when professor Venkat Rangan and professor Kamal Vigilani approached me several months ago with a view proposal which before sending it to the government I was more than pleased to give them my support by way of recommendation to the government. With its adoption by the national mission on education through ICT this platform can create a multiplier effect that is badly needed in addressing the shortage and quality of faculty. The features of interactivity in a view means it is not a one way top down approach, but a democratic process of learning and learning by sharing. My congratulations to professor D.B. Patak and IIT Bombay for arranging this workshop for the engineering colleges in the country. This should mark the beginning of more such programs that will proliferate over time. I also appreciate the second initiatives of ask a question by which eminent professors of IIT Bombay answer questions of students from all over India in the field of engineering and science. I believe that the academic community has a pressing your responsibility in today's context speaking for the IIT industry. There is a general consensus that the next phase of growth in the Indian IIT industry will be driven through innovation in technologies, processes and business models. Indian IIT industry aims to position itself as a thought leader engaged in technology advancement. Therefore, developing an ecosystem that fosters innovativeness, technological advancement and the creation of IP is absolutely the need of the hour. The role of academia in this ecosystem is vital by developing a breed of graduates that think differently or open to new learnings and new way of doing things. Such developments in industry require a shift of gear in all aspects of teaching. These changes must occur quickly to have a real impact. Real time connectivity as enabled through a view can quickly disseminate such developments across the country. I would also like to emphasize the need to propagate the pursuit of teaching and research. International collaboration for education and research is required to foster a global outlook in research. Therefore, there is a need for networking amongst technical institutes at different levels, share the resources and undertake of course, joint projects. We must explore how a platform like this can expand to take on multiple roles. So, once again I would like to wish this endeavor the very best. I hope that all of you will draw the greatest benefits from the workshop and provide your feedback on a continual basis to the team so that the effort to improve and expand this platform will be maintained at all times. Thank you so much and I wish everyone the very best. Thanks a lot. There is a request from National Institute of Technology, Varangal where the director professor V. Ramarao is personally present today. Incidentally, Professor Ramarao is an alumnus of IIT Bombay. So, very glad to welcome Professor Ramarao and the National Institute of Technology, Varangal. Over to you Varangal. Hello Professor, we are students under the same professor H.P. K. Kriya. Yes, yes, yes. And two days back I was at T.C.S. Head of Institution's meeting. Right. Where Ramadurai invested on the almost similar issue of scaling problem of number of students, colleges and less number of teachers. Definitely, this experiment will solve the problems locally within the state and across the country also. This, of course, the quality and the bandwidth of the problems would be there. I did not attend any lecture, but today I came to interact with you. Do you remember that? Of course. Although you are here, I have great slightly. Thank you very much, Dr. Ramarao. It is really a pleasure to see you in person after such a long time. Thank you. Can we try a center in the north? Is DOE-ACC Srinagar connected? Can you go over to Srinagar? Thank you, Dr. Ramarao. Thank you everybody at Varangal. We are switching over to DOE-ACC at Srinagar. Let me for the benefit of dignitaries here tell you that when we are running a pilot, the situation in Srinagar city was not very quiet and calm. In spite of that, all the participants attended the entire workshop and I am told some of them walked 5, 6 kilometers to avoid trouble to come to that place. So, welcome DOE-ACC Srinagar. Over to you. I would like to congratulate you and your team for the kind of teaching-learning experience that has been brought to us through this ICT workshop. Let me tell you sir, this has been a real democratization of learning making use of ICT and real integration of the proverbial Kashmir to Kaniyya Kumari has been achieved. We have in all these places kind of evaluated whether it is scorching heat or it is sub-zero temperature as we are experiencing now, but not withstanding these things. Let me tell you sir, all the participants who have come across different universities and colleges of India state have thoroughly enjoyed and gained invariably from this workshop. Thank you so much and once again thanks a lot for your special enthusiasm. I greet all the participants. Let me tell you that you shall remain the cornerstone of our endeavors and we will always come back to you again and again in coming years. As I will later on tell you, we have decided to expand the scope of these activities multi-fold so we may be able to go to even other colleges and schools in future. Let me just try one more centre if you permit. Can you pick up some centre maybe at least one in Maharashtra otherwise people will feel bad that IIT Bombay is located in Maharashtra. We are connecting to KG Somya Vidya Vihar. We can see on the screen, so if the coordinator is there, I would request you to make a brief comment over to you Vidya Vihar. In 1975 I was very proud that when IIT was taking leave in this communication and the new program of teaching, number of teachers all around India. I am very proud of IIT Bombay. Now I would like to say something to Ramulaisa. See we have been always talking about number of teachers educated, number of teachers taught, but can we now start talking about the quality of the teachers and the quality of the programs which are being telecast by IIT Bombay because we have organized two such programs in our college, which I felt were quite on the elementary level. Can we arrange now the advanced level programs for all the teachers in and around India? Well, this is an excellent suggestion. Let me tell you that all the three dignitaries here including Mr. Ramdurai as well as Dr. Devan Khakkar and Professor Venkat Rangan have already decided that we should extend the use of this technology to arrange for some kind of not just advanced level courses, but even the gatherings of research groups across the country with small collaborative things. I may be I request Ram to make a quick mention. I think as Professor Patak said and you commented, one is not just the numbers, but the quality and the quantity coverage through those quality programs. And how do you take the advanced programs beyond the basics, which is the next level, so that you are at par with any of the institutions or any teachers in any part of the country or ultimately around the world? This gives an excellent medium to communicate because when we see you on the video or the audio, even though it was slight glitches, but the overall quality of the audio when we are able to hear you was excellent. So I think it's just a question of time before the technology is fully deployed and we are able to give you the comments which you made in terms of addressing higher level programs and a continuous enhancement of the programs. And that's what this whole collaboration is all about. Thank you Ram. Maybe we can try just one more institute. Is there a Tanjavur? Tanjavur may be back. We'll once again try to go to Tanjavur and then close the show. Thank you very much once again. You know, I feel very proud that the institute and industry is coming very closer. In fact, Sri Ramakarai is being guarded by IITs and Amirata University. It's a major field in this country. And I hope you brought many more industries also to watch as the capability of academia is what they can do. I'm really complimenting the efforts taken by IITP and the leadership of Sri Ramakarai. And also, you know, the way we created by Amirata and friend, Dr. Vikat Ramak and Amirata Amirata University. Maybe here the second thing is very much happy. You know, as Srinagar said, now Kanyakumari, then Srinagar is connected through IITP. This is where we are expecting the institute, industry, leakage should also go to cover into cash mill and similarly Assam to ArabICC. I think you are in ArabICC and you will have to bring much more things. As the immediate boss of IITP, I've been proud to have such a kind of a leakage and we are bringing the nation together. I think the Kanyakumari National Mission on Education through IITP is going to make a major breakthrough in terms of bringing lot of nexus between industry and institution. Now it is there everywhere. We will have to connect with each. If we connect it, ultimately India is going to be a very, very super power in the very short span of time. I thank you once again for having given a good opportunity for PMU, for having lived with the IITP. Thank you sir. Thank you very much for joining us and I am very happy that the small technological glitch was solved because we don't like technological glitches persisting. But on the mention that you made and the observation that our friend from Srinagar had said, we are indeed very proud as I mentioned some time ago, we will be going over to the northeast in big force in a very short while. I request my director Prasadevan Khakkar to make a brief comment on this. Good afternoon to all participants and other dignitaries listening to this broadcast. IIT Bombay is really very proud to be part and parcel of this very important initiative. We have already seen through this demonstration that you know ICT can essentially bring all kinds of information to essentially the desk of every student and every teacher. And these are very powerful tools and it is important that we incorporate them to a greater extent. Thank you. And it is important that we incorporate them to a greater extent in our educational processes. There is a great deal of knowledge now in our country in all the institutions of higher learning and as was just mentioned, it is important to connect them and connect them also with the learners. And I am sure that this national mission on education using ICT will have a major impact in doing this connectivity and transmitting the knowledge to the students. But finally, you know even after we get all the knowledge to the students, I feel the teacher has a central place. And so I am particularly happy that there is such a wide participation in this workshop where teachers are now interacting and essentially being empowered to deliver the advanced material to their students. So, again I would like to congratulate both the teams who have done this wonderful effort of bringing both knowledge and technology together to deliver these workshops across the length and breadth of our country. And I wish you all the best. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Khakar. Before closing, I would like to make some observations and comments on what we heard from Sobhya College head. Very, yes, very pertinent observations and about the conglomeration of research topics. But before I make my closing remarks, I would request Professor Venkat Rangan to briefly address the conglomeration of 1000 teachers. Thank you very much, Professor Fatak. Actually, you know, when we started as a university several years ago, our Chancellor, she is well known. You know, she gave us a challenge. She said, you know, when Amma travels all around India, thousands of, maybe tens of thousands of students come and cry in her lab saying they don't have good teachers in paying high tuition for their education. At the same time, very imminent academicians, professors, professionals come and offer their services how they can help. So, the challenge was how do we connect the two together. And it also has immense benefits. For example, you know, by way of this network based teaching, we are able to save so much on travel, so much of pollution, so much of oil, so many wonderful side effects are there. So, as a result is also necessity is the mother of invention. This is not a necessity for IIT Bombay, but it is a necessity for Amrita and other institutions. So, this partnership has brought to, so to speak, the haves and the have-nots in the education sector together. It is truly a democratization and we hope that, you know, this is the, particularly the coming in of the national knowledge network which brings in very high speed connectivity all over India will open up the platform, the partnership to bring the benefits of higher education learning to all of India. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Professor Venkat Rangan. So, let me respond to the observations made from Somya College. Yes, madam, we entirely agree with you that these courses are indeed what we call the core courses, but please appreciate that this is the main objective of this phase of the project because, take for example, the course on databases. It is learned by more than 3 lakh students across the country and it is taught by over 15,000 teachers and unlike in institutes like ours or good colleges such as yours, there aren't very many well-prepared teachers to teach databases or even programming. So, that was the need that we have started addressing in this phase. However, you are absolutely right that we cannot separate out the basic education from research. As a matter of fact, I would like to take this opportunity to announce that we will be working not only for giving advanced courses to teachers, the numbers may be smaller, but we will go to larger number of places, but we would also like to invite experts from industry to give sessions. One particular thought that occurs to me since all the teachers who are gathered here are essentially teachers of databases, there is an issue of performance in databases. While there are some of us, some of us academics who are great performance experts, there are greater experts in the industry who live with the performance measurement and tuning all their life. One of them, in fact, happens to be Dr. Rajesh Mansharamani, another of our IIT Bombay alumnus and I believe he used to be the head of the performance group at this place. Dr. Rajesh Mansharamani has given several talks here to the research gathering and there is no reason why him and such like across the Indian industry should not be able to come and address thousands of teachers maybe on specific topics. So, what I am proposing and this you might because your thousand teachers there because we will seek your feedback on this. Next time we will extend this workshop duration by two more days and we will do two important things in the last two days. One day we will interact with like this with all teachers across the country because we had done that in the pilot and that was very useful because every participating teacher sees every other participating teacher and briefly talks and we will preserve one day to invite experts from industry to talk to you on specific important advanced topics in that area including research. So, I would expect Ram to not only help directly from TCS but to help us gardener support from the larger industry in India to do that. It's a great suggestion Professor Patek and I can assure you not only from TCS, CMC, Tata Alexi, Tata Technologies but also from the industry will make sure people are willing to come here and spend the time or at any location wherever you want to be connected. Thank you very much. Last but not the least, there is one person who is missing amongst us for all our dreams would not have come true except for that person. I had actually a bouquet for him so I would like to offer it in absentia. The name is Mr. Enke Sinha, the additional secretary in MHRD who has been almost like a father figure for this project. Friends, I would request you to clap in his honour because it is his tireless work which has permitted us to do that. So, thank you Sinha sir and someday in some other workshop we hope to see you in person addressing thousand teachers. Thank you. Thank you Ram. Thank you Enke.