Chancellor

I have great pleasure in welcoming the prospective students contemplating to join the Indira Gandhi Technological and Medical Sciences University, Arunachal Pradesh, Ziro, Arunachal Pradesh in one of the vocational and job oriented courses being conducted by the University.

Everybody aware that if human society is to endure not for just another century but for thousands and thousands of years, one needs to learn a way of life that could be sustained by the Mother Earth. Human society must learn to control population size and develop more efficient technologies that produce as little harmful waste as possible. One must learn to rely on resources that are renewable. A society based on these ideas is called a sustainable society. Having a sustainable world is so profoundly different from the way one lives which cannot be imagined without a strenuous exercise of mind. Like human body the Mother Earth has its organs that adjust to changes – in climate, nutrient levels and other aspects of the environment to maintain its stability. Just as the human organism is made of trillions of cells and so is the world organism; each one of us is a cell of Gaia (Greek word for Mother Earth).

Changing our ways will be a colossal task which may involve arduous work but as an optimist we should view the third millennium with a cleaner and greener mind and pledge to work on new educational technologies as the answer to our polluted world by better treating our Mother Earth by not to rival nature but to cooperate with it and live in harmony.

One must guide the human race living in a historic transitional period of burgeoning awareness of the conflict between human activities and environmental constraints, preparing to venture into a new millennium and to finally help save the fragile and endangered planet with the natural resources already overtaxed and for developing a critical path to governance through modern ideas for reducing the toll exacted in supporting daily life and the ever growing problems on the earth exerting profound pressures on the environment.

Education is the largest single activity in the world, involving over 1000 million students and 50 million teachers at all levels, not counting millions of others in educational support activities. But its importance stems not merely from its size but also from its role as institutionalized knowledge – the principal repository, producer, disseminator and transmission belt of all forms of knowledge.

The most significant feature of education for mother earth protection in the 21st century is not so much what the French call li explosion scolaire but the knowledge explosion, which has expanded the catchment areas of learning so fast that it takes only a decade now for the state of the art in any field to become obsolete. Different modes of communicating for advancement of knowledge are fast changing and becoming more sophisticated. In this technological era knowledge can be dispensed technologically and electronically. Teachers and formal school structures are becoming less important, and the conventional age limits on the learning process are becoming blurred.

While implementing the plan for effective teaching, training and research at the Indira Gandhi Technological and Medical Sciences University, Ziro, Arunachal Pradesh, the most important aspect is quality control and systems approach by stressing the need of quality methodology and systems making such tools compulsory for the faculty, support staff and students.

I accordingly look forward to meeting and working with the students joining this University