 Good morning friends, greetings from IIT Bombay. This is Shyama Iyer coming to you from Mumbai. I am really honored and very happy to be able to address all of this gathering, the principles as well as the management of your host college Sri Krishna. I am the national coordinator for the spoken tutorial project, which is a ministry of HRD, Government of India program, bringing to college students software or IT training skills. So this program is very much relevant or very much in line with the theme of your 3-day program of your 3-day conference, the role of higher education in national development. How is that? What is the reason? When we talk about IT or software training, be it basic IT skills or computer skills, be it lucrative job oriented computer software programs or development software courses. All of these not only do they provide our students with skills, but also make each and everyone either IT literate or IT competent or able to work in software environments. So today we cannot be behind anybody or any other country. If everyone has to come up to speed very, very quickly, not only should there be these courses available in distance learning or distance education or self-learning method, which is what the spoken tutorial training method is all about, but the method should be very, very conducive for scalability and sustainability. That is, many students should come together and learn very quickly. For example, if students enter the college, they enroll in their first year. At the end of their 3 years or 2 years, depending on whether they are in a UG or a PG program, they should be able to acquire the maximum possible software course training. And if this is coming from government of India, prepared by IIT Bombay, the best in the country and also offered free of cost at the very doorstep of the college campus of the student, nothing like it. So it is very much, I think, in line with the theme of the role of higher education in national development. Because national development today, we cannot contemplate without IT, without basic computer or software knowledge. There are two sub-themes which I noticed in your detailed program. One is related to change or may I say innovation in the method of teaching or in the colleges. The spoken tutorial audio-video tool is magical, amazing and is interactive or active learning. So especially suited for Gen Y or today's young learner who may get bored in our classes, but will not get bored and in fact in a very fun and engaging manner be able to master these software programs. So what have we done? We have introduced a change or innovation in the classroom. Second, there is something about entrepreneurship and many of our courses like our computer graphics package, our animation package blender or even just the knowledge of Linux and other open source basic office system software is very useful either to get a job in SMEs, small and medium enterprises or even for the students once they pass out to start their own enterprises. So today when we talk about e-governance, we are talking about certain departmental functions or sectors in departments, in government departments where a lot of skill development or daily day to day transactions are being franchised and our students can open these small franchises which can only be you know very well scalable and at the Taluka level if they are housed and are hosted on open source platforms. This is going to be the future and the government of India policy for e-governance is also veering towards that. So all of you know the principles I am assuming there are so many here today please you know just go and you know just come to us and take this program offer it in your colleges and spread the word. My colleague is going to be detailing more about this particular unique program in the meanwhile I wish you all the very best have a very enlightening and a very soul searching three days again thank you to my hosts as well as you know so happy to one way or the other be part of you and have connected with you. Jai Hind.