 My name is Deepak Phatak, I teach here, been teaching here for, I would say not close to but almost 40 years, long time. Like all of you, I have been a open source enthusiast, but as some of you would have heard me, I understand that the real world often works differently and in order to do useful things, you need to maintain a balance. So you have to tell the open source jihadis that occasionally they roll back and you have to tell the proprietary vendors that occasionally they should roll back. But as I maintain, both these extremes are important for the society because I think they are the ones who carry the society the larger extreme. I hope by now you have understood the way these activities will be conducted at your place. I had a demonstration of AVU software also, you have actually been using it. At your place, which one of you represents a remote center, which has not been a remote center in any earlier program, is there any one, two. So I would think that you would have assimilated enough information on how to run the remote center and so on. You are from Chennai and… IIT, Kolhapur. IIT, Kolhapur. We have a remote center in Ichal Karanjee which has run our program. So you are familiar with that. I need not add how important this activity is. First of all, the importance of trying to empower thousand teachers through this mechanism, something this country had never attempted earlier and thanks to visionaries in MHRD who agreed to provide funding support to this exciting idea, we have now been successfully conducting these programs. As I said, primarily this national mission project that we are doing is to address the deficiency of expertise in teaching core courses in engineering. But we deviated a bit when Professor Prabhu Ramchandran, Professor Madhu Belour suggested that this is an important activity and since half the students in the country study programming sometime or the other, sorry, do programming in the rest of their life and the remaining half study programming sometime or the other, it is important that teachers be empowered in this also. So I had taken some risk when I decided that this be considered a core course and when they agreed that we could run it on successive weekends, this was a novel idea. It did create a lot of problems by the way from the point of view of organization and from the point of view of funding support. You realize that we have a limited fund for conducting a workshop and when we conduct that workshop at one place for ten continuous days, we only spend money for people to come and stay and eat, but they travel both the hassle for the participant as well as cost are significantly reduced. Since this was not a classified core course anyway and since this was running on a different model, originally we had decided that we will not be able to fund this as much as we do fund other courses. That is the reason why you would have seen two of my colleague managers who run the project for me, Dr. Mukta Atre, your mentor and Jaya who is our finance minister. She basically controls the finances. They both were instructed to work out a schedule by which we could run this program at a limited funding way, but they have been telling me again and again and again that most of the coordinators they talked to, they pointed out that there may not be an extraordinary enthusiasm on part of the participants if they are told that they have to spend from their own pocket for coming, they have to spend from their own pocket for eating when they are there and so on. So we took a very strong decision I would say, strong in the sense that I do not think technically I have the authority to take that decision, but like many of you I am one who has never bothered to seek permissions. I have found that whenever you are trying to do something good seeking apologies later is much easier and people will accept if you are I say then I have never I have done that always in my life. So I had a long discussion with Professor Kannan, you would have heard a bit of my mind yesterday when I spoke saying that we are trying to elevate this to a regular course. We have now decided that this will be considered a regular course running with a different model. The model is that people will be coming to you and going back. So what we decided is we cannot extensively enhance the travel allowance that is to be paid to every participant. Since participants will have to come to you five times instead of once, technically they should be spending five times the money. As it is we have always stipulated that people should be coming from nearby places and we have kept an upper limit on the amount of money that could be paid for travel for people who come for participation. My coordinators have convinced me that that money alone will not be sufficient if people have to come five times. I however did not agree to increase it to five times because that will become too much amount. So we have decided that we will increase it to somewhere between two and half times to three times. What it means is that participants will break even if most of them are localite then their expenses actually will be local travel expenses. Somebody who is within 50 kilometers could catch a early morning bus or a train or something and come there and I think about two and half times of the current travel grant should sort of be reasonable. Do you agree with that? Everybody we have said that for five weekends when they come they may have to stay at your place at least for two nights. They may come on Friday night and go on Sunday night or they may come on Saturday morning go on Monday morning. So we have decided to include under variable cost a full ten days of stay and food as per our norms. So we will be including that. So I am thankful to my managers who made these valuable suggestions. Yes. You see I will also tell you the real reason why I agree. At the end of the day it is not about money. At the end of the day it is about trying to influence people. And if you believe that because of the funding restriction the number of people we could influence would drastically become less then you will agree that it is not in the interest of the nation. After all this is one area where we desperately need to increase the numbers. So in fact my only request to you would be go all out and try to really get not thousand but thousand five hundred people in this exciting. Tell them it is troublesome. Also tell them without missing words that the certification in the special program will not be based on attendance as it often happens. In other courses we insist that our faculty members should conduct quizzes and tests. Although so far an occasional failure in a test we have ignored while certifying their participation. But in this particular case tell people that they will not only have to give the test but they will also have to pass the test. Of course we will not steep so low to say so low to say that you will not be remember expenses unless you pass in the exam that will be unfair. We will only say that this certification will depend upon your successful completion of so many test of quizzes as happens in any class you know. I might fail in one quiz but I should pass in other quiz overall the idea is people should master the techniques that are being taught here and that is exactly. So this is the good news I wanted to give you I also wanted to share with you a larger program that we are planning it will not be for five weeks it will probably for two weekends or three weekends or it may run as a single one week program. This is a program on research methodology I will be soon writing and it will be put up that note will be put up there when Dr. Karmarkar of IIT Madras had given a course about couple of years ago here. Many of our research scholars benefited Professor Sachin Patwar then head of our chemical engineering department is now bringing that kind of structure for orientation of all our research scholars year on year. I suddenly felt that a large number of teachers across the country independent of the discipline they work in could benefit from this because most of them would be attempting to do PhD master something of that and therefore my plan is to conduct a program for ten thousand teachers in next summer or in some weekends immediately following ten thousand teachers cannot be assembled at thirty centers they can be assembled at two hundred centers. And then we can really localize it we can say that get all teachers from all colleges around you no outsider not required of that program I cannot run with this kind of funding if I spend almost a crore rupees on one particular program a thousand teachers I have to spend ten crore rupees in just one program which is not feasible till such time that the government believes that such programs and such scales are important and they give me two hundred crores instead of twenty crores I will not be able to run the program by that fund there is also another aspect of it sooner or later we and our colleague teachers have to understand that in order to make myself better I should be ready to spend money from my pocket that the world is not a charity that if I have to advance I have to shell out something both my sweat my work my hard work my abilities and my money. Now this temperament God knows how long it will take for larger number of our colleagues to come across the country today it is not so as you sadly notice that many people will come only if the costs are made well that is also meaningful because after all they also have families they have problems and so on I will not go into those details but it is for this reason I had stipulated that that ten thousand teachers program will run with no cost to the project people who really want to learn something about research would come spent from their own pocket it would be like a fee spent to a remote center for their stay and other arrangements and we will be conducting the orientation program for coordinators for remote centers through AVU and the existing thirty forty remote centers will actually be helping us to conduct the coordinators program for those two hundred percent you agree so this is the next level of I hope you you appreciate what I am trying to say because we need to scale that way up we need to address ten thousand teachers and effective and that effectiveness will come only from you ultimately the great teachers who teach from here just as you would have noticed you do a fantastic job of teaching but ultimately the reception by the students depends upon how well you are teaching assistants or lab in charges or technical people help them in conducting proper labs proper tutorials and they understanding that is where the details flow in exactly the same way these great teachers would not be as effective unless you as great teachers help them to do that by taking the message to the participants who will assemble at your place. See they will talk to them and interact with them in the morning half but in the afternoon suppose I am a coordinator the thirty five forty people are assembled at my place are going to be directly my responsibility at that time they cannot ask a question to Ashokan or Madhu or anybody you will I will have to answer that question and I better be that confident that capable and that experience and that is the responsibility all of you share I hope you will be able to do justice to this big dream don't forget that each one of us benefits when we try to do something at this massive scale and I will tell you those thirty five forty teachers who come to your place will remember you for life time we have seen that in the past workshop that we have conducted I have got very passionate emails from several participants who said how this coordinator made a difference to our lives by quoting how even after the lab was over that fellow was available for discussion etcetera etcetera etcetera till late night now that means putting some trouble to your own family time but remember the kilos that you will get the appreciation that you will get will be a normal and you will be making a difference to that person's life hopefully that person will go back and make the same difference to this course this is the chain which we wanted to enunciate everybody is aware of lack of quality teachers in this country everybody is aware of how stemmed our syllabus is how stemmed our exam systems are and it is in that context also this course is very important this course has no written syllabus whatever they teach plus whatever as they don't teach is syllabus there is no set pattern for exam therefore whatever questions they ask is examined including whatever questions they don't ask but your participants will ask and finally additional question that you will ask is the exam I think for the first time in this entire national mission project the entire group of participants and teachers have got such a free hand it was never available early because we were required to address a set syllabus ultimately teachers have to go back and teach that syllabus here we want to open their minds and therefore don't feel constrained and therefore give your participants harder problems to solve the style that we follow in IIT is if I am teaching I am for example I am teaching the first year programming course so I would write hundreds of programs in summer and I would revise those programs from two angles one how best to teach that program so that the student understands because the same program can be written in 20 different ways and two how to offer hard problems to them so that their minds are kindled this is something which you don't see in the conventional examination system they have hard problems occasionally let me tell you an instance in my life worth repeating I have repeated it 10 times I think I mentioned it yesterday I mentioned about professor K. C. Mukherjee's I think that is that is worth noting we had a professor late professor K. C. Mukherjee a very renowned professor in electrical engineering I had just become a young teacher then and one of the students when I was a student he was with me on the institute testing so very close one of the students came to me after a mid semester exam waving professor Mukherjee's mid semester paper and he gave me that paper he says Deepak how do you solve this question 3 so I looked at that paper it was a paper on electrical fields I could not understand how to solve that problem frankly but I hotly told him look I am a computer science professor he says no your basic degree is electrical engineering so you should be able to solve it I struggled for another 10 minutes we could not get it he says nobody in the class got it since I was a teacher then I said alright let us go and meet professor Mukherjee we both went and when professor Mukherjee in his cabin saw us waving that paper he started smiling as we approached he says so question 3 huh father so I said yes sir he would not say anything so this fellow asked him sir what is the answer he says I do not know and he was completely aghast then Mukherjee turns to me and says father this is part of a problem the hard research problem which has been unsolved for last 10 years but you know this batch is so smart I thought somebody will solve it I gave the problem the story didn't end here because the college where I come from I I did my undergraduate in in lower JSITS in in lower if this kind of question paper we have come in a question paper there would have been an instant strike by students syllabus ka bar ka sabhal pucha phaila wo master ko suspend karo when you talk and something similar would happen everywhere because students will not take it kindly question is as outside the syllabus that evening many of these students who came from a particular hostel hostel 4 they were having a milkshake party in the hostel a milkshake party in those days would be given to celebrate something extraordinary that has happened to the hostel like the hostel has won an inter-hostel hockey tournament or somebody has won a debating trophy or something like that so since this group of 10 or 15 students were having a milkshake party the general secretary who happened to pass by he said what has happened I am the general secretary I don't know something greater than that and someone told him oh you don't know the great professor Mukherjee believes that we can solve unsolved research problems so we are celebrating now that is the ethos IIT is no different from other institutions it has infrastructure it has people like you it has students like you have students all human beings all capable ambitious human beings the difference is in these ethos that people here believe that attempting to solve hard problems even though you don't get an answer actually adds to your knowledge while solving 10 simple problems from a standard syllabus and exam pattern will give a lot of you know comfortable feeling but you will not add to your knowledge ordinarily you can't experiment with these things when you teach other subjects as per the syllabus this is one subject where there are no constraints I would like for example you as a group and subsequently these thousand people as a forum to come up with a discussion session or a forum on the web will be releasing our portal very shortly which says hard problems to crack and in which people contribute partial solutions and those solutions and those problems are seen by everybody are attempted by everybody can you imagine the amount of knowledge that will get generated the amount of thinking that will happen that is what I would like to do so please use this opportunity that this is a very special course there are no precedences we are setting up precedences you are all creating history if you are creating history create an history of which you will be proud the nation will be proud and people will benefit that's all I wanted to share with you there is a lot more that I can talk I can keep on talking I am basically a story teller by mistake they appointed me as a professor here but so once again thank you very much and I hope you appreciate that the decision that we have taken in so far as the funding support is concerned we spent almost last three days discussing with this but primarily I would compliment my managers who pointed out the difficulty and then when I translated that difficulty into the larger context I discussed it professor Kandan Mughalya who is actually the overall coordinator for all national mission projects at IIT and both of us said let's do it and if there are any consequences we will take responsibility we genuinely believe that when you are attempting to do good things and useful things will be at the constant only two things since we are going out of our way please try to genuinely limit the actual expenses to whatever extent you can because that will help if somebody is going to ask us questions would be able to at least tell them that look this is what we did because we believed it was right but our coordinators have attempted to save every penny and ensure that the money is utilized for a good cause so as long as you do that that would be nice and do tell the participants I think our specification should say that certainly normally says certification will depend upon your performance in the test scenario so that's all I wanted to share with you thank you so much I can now start the formal proceeding let me start the formal process and in order to do the honors I would request Professor Kannan Mavgalya to join me here Kannan Professor Kannan Mavgalya is a colleague for long years many decades although he is in the chemical engineering department his specialization is in what I may say digital control which happens to be my area erstwhile my area and like me is very passionate about trying to do something for the whole nation in fact I must tell you that while we did a lot of work in this distance education mode earlier and we did make our initial proposal to the government but once the proposal was made spearheading of all activities around it has been conducted by him that is how we are comfortably busy running the program rather than spending time in this so thank you Professor Kannan I would like to begin the brief validation program valid program by first offering bookcase to the people who made all of this possible the learning and and teaching so Professor Madhu Belut professor Ashok and I call him a professor because he has been professing yes oh I see a third man is not a formal teacher but he has been I think you will agree that he has been participating in this activity that is what you have seen but without you are seeing he has been doing a lot of things at the background and that is why we would like to honor him as a teacher super tonight now let me request the participants to come here to collect their participation certificates there are two certificates that we are giving one is given by our continuing education program under whose ages we conduct all these quadratus workshops the other is given by the project assigned by the quadratus and and me so let me call people here Mr. Bholanathri MNIT Bhopal Professor Hashmi Akbar from Hyderabad Benedict Jayaprakash Nicholas thank you oh PSG only the other day somebody was here Professor Meghla Armugam it's Mekhla right yes thank you for coming Professor Sunil KS all the way from Kottayam thank you he used Javeria Udaipur city of Lex good miss Suchitra Patil she is our neighbor and Somaya has been a very active remote center for us thank you so much for coming Rajesh Dharmik from Yashantra Chavan Thank you please Professor Deepu job so there are two centers in Kottayam or one center two people two centers so you will have two and a half participants each or how would you arrange I suppose you will collect a lot of people from Kerala oh I see wait Professor Ravindra Vaidya are you coordinating every workshop practically or only a few yes yes yes that's why you keep the he's from Pune Narayan Rappal Rathore you have that list here oh you are from Indore thank you thank you don't you have a list of places where they come from tell him next time that list should be there Rajshekhar Natarajan so you have to tell me where you are from oh well or good place thank you I see good good but but remain like that even when you become old that is how we all learn Amit Garb you are from which place Amit ah Jaipur wonderful so Jaipur Udaipur boy covering Rajasthan somebody joins us from Jaisalmer I think there is somebody from Kukkas he is from Kukkas Dr. Radhika and oh Amrata Coimbatore thank you so much thank you Digambar Padulkar he comes from Bharamati a small place but a great college thank you so much Manjusha Deshmukh oh till I college near us thank you so much thank you for coming this is Sameer Patel all the way from Ahmedabad thank you for coming this is N. Sairam Tanjahu thank you for coming I will always curse myself for not visiting both NIT and this university although I passed by Tricy and Tanjahu next time this is Samson Ebenezer you are from which place sir this is Siddharth Roy ah Gauhati which college in Gauhati Don Bosco engineering great so greet him he comes from the farthest distance away unless somebody is there from Jammu or Kashmir Kastrinagar there yes yes yes Professor Umair Khan God bless you you are doing a great job I must tell you the story it was a very moving story when we conducted the first workshop the OECC said that joined us at that point in time there was huge turmoil in Kashmir and it was not possible for people to easily move around Srinagar and any vehicle which moved would be stolen that the enthusiasm of the participants and the remote center coordinators was so high that the entire attendance was hundred percent on all the days and some people walked 10 kilometers 15 kilometers every day to attend that course and I believe a couple of people stayed back I I ladies stayed back I I I narrated this to honorable minister Kapil simple and I said that look this is something which we had never imagined as a possible impact but this program is bringing people across the country together as one to do something phenomenal and fantastic in academy so thank you so much please convey my regards to you Professor Subash Chandra Khakinada good thank you thank you for coming Professor Dinesh Patil you are from which place Dinesh? Jalgao okay okay please thank you Professor Tanaji Patil which place you come from? Kolhapur KIT Kolhapur please Professor Gaurishankar Reddy which place you come from? Thirupati S.V. Universe is it good good good thank you so thank you very much but I would only like to point out a sad feeling I get in my heart when I see that all my remote centers start somewhere in Rajasthan cover Gujarat cover part of Maharashtra cover Karnataka Andhra Pradesh Tamil Nadu and rest of the country Jannaganamana that is not good I I would request you to find out if you have friends somewhere in other colleges do write to them saying if you believe that we are all benefiting saying that look you could benefit why don't you come forward I have personally written two letters to all NIT directors some NITs are part of parcel of our activities some are not and my ambition would be to create 200 to 500 such remote centers across the country which would receive courses not from one hub like IIT Bombay but from at least 20 hubs across the country in different subjects because that is how the knowledge and capability built at some place would flow around and the AVU technology thankfully developed well by our people in friends in Amruta partners in Amruta is such that it does not require a captive satellite channel since it works on internet it should be possible for us to have teaching participation not limited to IITs alone after all each one of you would be master in some aspect of some subject and there is absolutely no reason why in some courses in future some of you cannot participate or some other great teachers in your college participate teaching may be a course teaching may be a two hours teaching some section collaborative learning nobody knows better than you how great it is because the open source is all about collaboration but since you are all teachers also I would like you to try and build this kind of collaborative network thank you so much things about the type of files to be uploaded on model over the next few tests unlike multiple choice questions which used to be held till now I would also like to take this opportunity to all the people who helped make this program a success we want we would like to thank Sushant Mr. Sajjan Mr. Krishna who is recording also the other people who helped us record the whole program I know names of Ranjit Jaya madam Mukta madam another madam who helped take care of all the administrative processes before while you are here and also after we should have a round of applause for everybody the course content itself was developed by various of our project Fossi project employees Shrikanth Patnaik here Puneet Chaganti, Madhusudan, Parth, Bhuch, Primal, Jovina and Prashandhavi so I would like to give a round of applause for them also thank you