 Let me welcome great doctor Sam Petrola. I have been a witness to the revolution that he had brought to this nation. He is an innovator, power excellence and a scientist at heart who is committed to see India reaching greater heights, exploiting her own talented people to do world class work. There was a time when people considered making telephones an extremely hazardous task. He came into the country, established institutions like CDOT, nurtured them, worked against all common sense parameters which said that we may have to continue importing technology from elsewhere, insisted that we can build technology here, actually demonstrated that the best technology can be built which is rugged and affordable and caused a revolution. Even today he continues to be a hard throb and a motivator to a very large number of people. I am delighted that he agreed kindly to spare some time. Please understand that it is 11 o'clock night is time Chicago, but he agreed to share with you some of his thoughts for 15 minutes. Dr. Sam Petrola, over to you sir. Thank you Dr. Fatah. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. It is indeed a special privilege to have this opportunity to talk to you all the way from Chicago. First time I would like to thank Professor Fatah for giving me this opportunity. I have known him for many years and he is indeed one of my heroes. He has been in the forefront of indigenous development for many years and I believe this effort to bring 8600 teachers to talk about research methodology using NKN is indeed a unique, remarkable experiment in India. I want to take this opportunity to talk about two or three things. First the need for indigenous research, Indian model of development and Indian talent. As we all know that today research is all about multi-disciplinary research. Requires great deal of collaboration and is happening faster than ever before. And as a result it is very important for Indian scientists, Indian academicians, Indian Indian teachers to improve collaboration using tools like NKN and new technology. We have great deal of work ahead of us to build local research infrastructure that we can begin to monetize and deliver in terms of products and services. People in India are innovating at all level but lot of these innovations don't really benefit people at the bottom of the pyramid. The real challenge in India is to really improve the lives of 400 million below poverty line. I have been saying for last 15 years that best brains in the world are solving problems of the rich and as a result problems of the poor don't get the right talent. To really address research related to problems of the poor we need to focus on affordability, scalability and sustainability. I am delighted that government of India has given us this new tool called NKN. National Knowledge Network came out of deliberations at the National Knowledge Commission. The idea was to connect 1000 nodes to 40 gigabit bandwidth to connect all our universities, all our R&D institutions to really enhance collaboration and share resources. I am delighted that this network is being used today. It is operational and we hope over a period of time we learn more as to how to take advantage of this. We need innovations in the utility of the National Knowledge Network. As you know along with this government is also committed to building optical fiber network connecting 250,000 panchayats. Along with these there will be platforms for UID, National GIS, applications, payment, procurement, cyber security and hopefully all of these investments in infrastructure of tomorrow will give us ability to democratize information. Democratization of information is very critical in our society but we believe through this we will bring about openness, accessibility, connectivity, decentralization, networking and hopefully over a period of time the right of talent into the mainstream. I have been involved in some of these programs and I must say we have huge amount of talent to really get many of these programs on the ground now. Government has dedicated fair deal of resources. If I add all of the programs my guesstimate is that we will be spending probably close to 10,000 crores in getting right kind of information infrastructure to democratize information in India. Now it is up to all of us to really use this asset to transform our research, our education, our institutions and bring about generational change. Let me give you one example. When I look at our education system I realize that our systems have not kept pace with the technology of today. When we think of education today we still think of black school, chalk, teacher, textbook, exam, grades, certificates. Children today do not learn the way I learned 60 years ago. Learning models have changed completely. Internet and web has changed everything around us. It is having far implications on governments, education, health, agriculture, science and technology, finance, business, delivery of public services and as a result we must learn to take advantage of this. Today we really do not feature in a sense to create content and deliver content. Content is already created by best of the best in the world and it is available in terms of open courseware material. Delivery could be in multiple forms and KN is a good example with right kind of devices. Rich content can be delivered anytime in multiple forms. I am on the board of the open courseware material at MIT in Boston and at MIT they have 2200 courses on open source material. Now there is a program with Harvard University. Similarly IITs in India and many other good universities have fair amount of good content. So when you have this kind of rich content, the road is going to change substantially to that of a mentor. So teachers will have to focus more on research and mentoring. So how do we create mentors out of existing teachers? I have been giving great thought to this for last 4-5 years. I have several of my colleagues helping me and hopefully in next few months we will be able to design better programs for teachers training using new technology to really move away from delivering content and creating content to more mentoring. There are many areas we are looking at together with some of our colleagues. One is how do you really make teachers aware of the self? How do you build self in our teacher strong self with little bit of Gandhian input and values? So the teacher begin to examine themselves to make sure that they are in tune with the mentoring needs of tomorrow. How do we sensitize teachers to think more about learner? Who is the learner? What is the family background, education background of these learners? Because all learners in the class are not same. Some may need more mentoring, some may need less mentoring, some may need completely different kind of mentoring. So self, learner, content, methodology, research, assessment, technology, leadership, management, organization, traditional knowledge, these are the new areas that we need to really focus on for teachers training. So teachers training ought to be moving away from creating better content to really creating better teachers for mentoring. And innovation is going to be the key. As you know government of India has already declared decade of 2010, 2020 as the decade of innovation. We have an innovation council set up. We are working with the state level innovation councils, sectorial councils. We are creating a billionaire fund, venture fund to fund innovations for the bottom of the pyramid. We are looking at innovations at clusters, innovations in many universities, providing scholarships to encourage students to innovate, trying to encourage young students in schools to innovate, create innovation centers at our science centers. All of these efforts that we are trying to push at the government level require public-private partnership, require a deal of collaboration with universities and teachers become the most important change agents in this process. So when I learned that Dr. Patak is addressing 10,000 teachers through NKN, I requested him to give me about 15 minutes. And I'm thankful to him for giving me this opportunity. I know I can go on and on, but I wanted to make sure that I have this unique opportunity to talk to you and experience for myself the real use of NKN. I don't think we quite understand the power of NKN yet. To be NKN is going to be the mother of all Indian networks, not only for education, ultimately for delivering government services, e-governance, health services, agricultural services. But in all of these education research are going to be key drivers. And as a result, when 10,000 teachers come together on NKN, it becomes a very important event. And I'm so happy that Dr. Patak and others have taken the lead to really bring doctors in India together to create new dialogue. And I thought I want to use this opportunity to really focus on these two, three things. One, once again, I want to emphasize the fact that government is investing huge amount of capital to build information infrastructure of tomorrow that all of our teachers and scientists can use because at the end of the day, India really has three fundamental challenges today. One disparity, disparity between rich and poor, urban, rural, educated, uneducated. Collectively, it is a job to really reduce that disparity. Two, demography. We have 550 million young below age of 25. It is their prosperity, their future, their training, their skill set that we need to keep in focus. We need to really prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow. And to me, this is the workforce for the world. And three, expedite the process of modernization and development and keep momentum going. India has to grow at 8 to 10 percent a year for next 20 years to come to really address the poverty challenges. And it can only come from new tools, new technology and bring in new talent into the mainstream. And that's where teachers become very critical. So I thought I'd talk a little bit about NKN and government's effort in democratizing information. To talk a little bit about the impact web would have on the new models, new learning models and the role of the teacher that I believe will change substantially from that of delivering content and creating content to that. I hope you all have time to think about these issues. Maybe we just over a period of time and use this group of 10,000, 8,000 teachers that we have as the change agents throughout the country and to sensitize our teachers that we must use new tools. We must learn not about IT but about the power of IT in education and research. It is not about what IT is, it's about what we can do with IT. What does search in this new world mean? How do we use existing databases? How do we explore new frontiers with vast amount of information available on the internet? So it is not about how computers work but it is about how we use computers to transform education and research. With this, once again I want to thank Dr. Phatak for giving me this opportunity. I know my time is up, I've used up little bit more than 15 minutes. But I hope we have more time to interact in the future and if Dr. Phatak allows I'll be available for next few more minutes. With this, thank you everybody. Thank you very much. Ram, it was a pleasure having you here. Let me assure you on behalf of all those 8,500 teachers that at the end of this workshop they will pledge two things. They will pledge to do the best of the research themselves and through their students. And they will pledge to become mentors. I would suggest to them that they will do one more thing. That they will spread this enthusiasm amongst all their colleagues because as you know there are more than 150,000 teachers in Indian colleges alone. You will be glad to know that recently when I made a presentation to Planning Commission they have asked me to prepare a model for both enlarging the scope of this activity and extending it to train school teachers and other college teachers. So thank you very much for endorsing these views and we promise you that we will not let you down. India will progress and the pioneers will be first 8,500 teachers who are attending this mega workshop. So thank you so much sir. Thank you for being with us. We will be troubling you often on whenever in future we have such workshops. Ideally we would like you to be in India one of those days so that you can use a view. You can perhaps visit couple of centers yourself to see how enthusiastically people are attending this workshop from 168 remote centers. By the time we start our workshops in December I hope to have at least 300 remote centers actively collected. Thank you very much sir over and out. Thank you for your leadership. Thank you.