Send 10k PhD students each year to US: Narayana Murthy
BENGALURU: Infosys co-founder N R Narayana Murthy has said India and the US should work on an agreement to send 10,000 Indian students to the US to do their PhDs in important areas in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education, every year over the next 50 years. This, he said, would cost the government approximately $5 billion a year – a small sum considering the benefits it would have in terms of creating lots of innovative solutions that can solve problems across sectors in India.
The agreement, he said, should make it clear that the students would not be given employment in the US once they finish their PhDs and they would have to come back to India and serve here for at least 10 years.
“The US will also benefit from this arrangement. There will be a large number of Indian students working on problems that will add value to US academicians,” he said. He also suggested that India issue 10-year multiple-entry visas every year to hundreds of thousands of graduate students from the US. Speaking at the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce Conclave 2020 on Friday in Bengaluru, he said one of the offshoots of this strategy is greater collaboration between the Indian and US academia in developing solutions in emerging areas like the internet of things (IoT), where devices would be talking to each other and talking to your phone.
“India has to become a partner in adding value to the US companies by developing advanced software in IoT not just for US companies, but the customers of US companies. This requires us to train our youngsters in adaptive control and handling analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog framework and digital devices. They have to be taught how to write and optimize code since the response time is critical in these applications,” he said. Murthy also said one of the areas neglected is opening India to foreign universities.
“Even though former PM Manmohan Singh wanted to open India to foreign universities, for some reason, we have not made progress. But it’s important that we immediately take steps towards this if we want our grand-children and their children to be in an India which is economically strong,” he said.