Asserting that Jammu is fast emerging as North India’s education hub, Union minister Jitendra Singh on Sunday said with the constitutional changes in Jammu and Kashmir last year, they hoped to be able to overcome the impediment of attracting the best of faculty for recently established educational institutions.
The Union minister of state in the Prime Minister’s Office was speaking after laying the foundation stone of a new education complex named after Pandit Madam Mohan Malviya at the Central University, Jammu.
“With the constitutional changes that took place after August 5, 2019, it is hoped that the biggest impediment in attracting the best of faculty from across the country for these educational institutions will be overcome,” the minister said.
He said the standard of any institution can be maintained only when there is total professionalism and no compromise in the selection of scholars, and when the institution is ready to facilitate and incentivise the best of the faculty to take up teaching assignments.
Singh also noted that through the Department of Space, of which he is in-charge, north India’s first Space and Research Study Centre has been started at Central University Jammu and K Radhakrishnan, a renowned space scientist who is also known as the father of Mars Mission, has been appointed as the advisor.
The Union minister said the DoPT (Department of Personnel and Training), which is also under his charge, is working out the feasibility of setting up the first of its kind Study Centre of Governance at Central University, Jammu.
“For any educational institution to receive a wider recognition and identity, there are essentially two prerequisites. Either there should be an extraordinary faculty which can produce research publications of international level or there should be exclusive departments of study which are not easily available,” he said.
This is one of the first central universities in the country to have such an educational complex named after Malviya, who along with Syama Prasad Mookerjee, was among the leading academicians of the first half of 20th century but, he said, their contribution somehow did not receive the amount of recognition that it deserved.
Singh added that this was a befitting tribute to him.
