Itanagar: Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Nabam Tuki today reiterated his government’s commitment to expand the scope of higher and technical education in the state and provide access to a greater number of aspirants.
“We have decided to take higher education almost to the doorstep of the aspirants. While various programme, have been launched to streamline the primary and secondary education, higher education too has received our priority in the last three years,” Tuki said while addressing a conference of higher and technical education here.
Congratulating the awardees who have been honoured on the occasion the chief minister exhorted the stakeholders at various levels of the department for their commitment so that the vision and the mission of the state government translated into reality in the sphere of higher education in coming years.
“Being a late starter has been in fact an advantage for us. We can learn from the mistakes of others and guard against those pitfalls so that our future growth becomes smooth and foolproof. We need to plan well before we go ahead,” he said.
Besides one Central University at Doimukh, this year the government decided to setup a new State University at Pasighat, the chief minister informed.
“We have also allowed three private universities to operate in the state to cater to the growing and varied needs. For strengthening technical education, we have NERIST, a regional level institute and the Centre has started one NIT, the foundation stone of which has been recently laid by Union HRD Minister, M M Pallam Raju,” Tuki added.
The chief minister said the state government was planning to set up ten Model Degree Colleges of which three have already started functioning from this current session – one each at Doimukh, Daporijo and Nyapin.
“To support the youths we are planning to set up ten new Polytechnics, five of which are to start functioning from the next academic session at Namsai, Pasighat Roing, Dirang and Laying,” he disclosed.
“Our higher education sector is mostly supported by the Centre. We need to thoroughly examine the policies and programmes of the HRD ministry, UGC , AICTE ), NCTE and other national bodies and find ways and means to implement those programmes to obtain maximum benefit from these schemes,” he said.
“The newly launched programmes such as RUSA (Reference and User Services Association), accreditation programmes of NAAC (National Assessment and Accreditation Council) should be implemented in right earnest in the higher educational institutions in the state,” Tuki stressed. (PTI)