India must spend $1 billion a year to train school teachers: Narayana Murthy

This training programme should be year-long, he said in his remarks at a press conference here, where the Infosys Science Foundation announced the Infosys Prize 2023 in six categories.

Bengaluru: India needs to invest $1 billion a year over the next 20 years to develop a transformational training programme for its primary and secondary school teachers, Infosys founder N R Narayana Murthy said here on Wednesday.

Under the programme, proposed to accelerate the outcome of the National Education Policy, India can train about five lakh school teachers every year, Murthy said. He was speaking at an event organised by the Infosys Science Foundation to announce winners of the Infosys Prize 2023.

For the year-long programme, Murthy recommended 10,000 retired and highly accomplished teachers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines from the developed world and India, as trainers, to create 2,500 “train the teacher” colleges in India’s 28 states and eight Union Territories.

“Experts tell me that each set of four trainers can train 100 primary school teachers and 100 secondary school teachers a year. We will be able to train 250,000 primary school teachers and 250,000 secondary school teachers every year by this method,” he said. The trained Indian teachers can themselves become trainers over a period of five years.

Murthy said each of these retired teachers could be paid a salary of around $100,000 a year. “This 20-year programme will cost us $1 billion a year and $20 billion for 20 years. Our nation, targeting a GDP of $5 trillion soon, will not find it a big financial burden,” he said.

Fostering research and innovation

Detailing the four stages in a nation’s invention and innovation lifecycle, Murthy underlined the third stage – marked by innovation and research that improves on existing work done by other nations – and the fourth stage, when a nation becomes an inventor of new processes, products, and services.

He noted that with success in areas including atomic energy, space exploration, and vaccine production and distribution, India is in stage 2 (using inventions and innovations of other nations without adding value) in most areas and in stage 3 in a few areas.

India’s success in stages 3 and 4 requires improving the quality of its primary, secondary and higher educational institutions, enabling them to embrace independent, critical thinking. The teacher training programme alone would not bring in the results – teachers and researchers must also be paid better and provided better facilities, Murthy said.