Amritsar G20: Foreign delegates agree on sharing research data, promoting innovation

Amritsar, March 15

The discussion under the second G20 Presidency Working Group meet on education here reached a consensus that research collaboration was the need of the hour. Countries needed to break down silo mentality and create a unified vision to promote research collaboration for achieving sustainable development goals as was done during the Covid pandemic.

It was also stressed that there was a need to establish frameworks for sharing research data and outputs.

The meet commenced at the historic Khalsa College here with a panel deliberating on innovative teaching methods that could help formulate better practices globally and policies in education. The seminar titled ‘Strengthening Research and Promoting Innovation through Richer Collaboration’, hosted by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Ropar, under the auspices of Ministry of Education, focused on bridging the gap among government-academia-industry linkages for designing solutions for addressing global challenges as there is a need for bringing ‘multi-disciplinarity’ in education. Prof Rajeev Ahuja, Director of IIT Ropar, highlighted India’s opportunity to establish itself as a leader in research and innovation globally.

CM Bhagwant Mann and Secretary, Higher Education, K Sanjay Murthy were present. Prof Govind Rangarajan, Director, IISC, highlighted India’s frugal innovations, which have the potential to solve problems of the developed world and the need to acknowledge and use grassroots innovation.

Prof BS Murty, Director, IIT Hyderabad, apprised that the National Education Policy 2020 has brought in path-breaking reforms in education in India and various programmes are helping promote cross-institutional collaboration in the country.

The first panel discussion titled ‘Research in Emerging and Disruptive Technologies, Industry-4.0’, moderated by Prof Anil Gupta and chaired by Prof Rajeev Ahuja, brought together panelists from Australia, France, India and UK who shared insights on the role of various stakeholders to promote research on the emerging innovations, their impact on education systems and society in general.

The second discussion on ‘Research in Sustainable Development Goals’ chaired by Prof Shalini Bharat with panelists representing China, Oman, South Africa, UAE and UNICEF laid importance on enhancing the capacities of universities as these are the core of research.

One of the panelists, Alison Dell, Assistant Secretary, Australian Government Department of Education, discussed the national collaborative infrastructure scheme in her country and highlighted the successful partnerships between Australian and Indian institutions in the past.

Focus on Bridging the gap

The seminar focused on bridging the gap among government-academia-industry linkages for designing solutions to addressing global challenges in the education sector