Gujarat University’s 64th convocation – Talk of dharma and you’ll be termed communal: Governor

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Drawing a parallel between the imbalance that has been created by the dominance of science and technology over humanities and social sciences and lack of dharma shiksha in education, he said, “The debate is going on in the nation whether this dharma palan, which is value education, should be an integral part of formal education or not. Even if we consider that it is not a part of formal education, it should at least be a part of education. Without this, education is incomplete,” he said.

Commenting on the large percentage of dropouts, he said, “Even today, we have a large proportion of population that fails to enter the gates of a university. How to make those waiting outside to enter universities is a question for the government, educationists and policy makers.”

While talking about employment opportunities, Kohli said, “It is natural for a graduate or a postgraduate to aspire for a government job, but the government lack these jobs and merely aspiring for a government job would not employ somebody. Thus, it is important to change the nature of education so that it makes us capable of self- employment. Towards this direction, there are several slogans fluttering in the air today, like make in India, skill India, vocational education and innovation. Apart from education, several attempts have been made to encourage vocation and skill education. The vocational streams were started in schools, but hardly 2 -2.25 per cent students took these courses because of lack of social respect for manual work. How to bring vocational education at college and university level and to make it a part of it, how to attain social respectability is a question for educationists.”

State’s best-known humorist Vinod Bhatt, who was the chief guest at the convocation, stressed on the urgent need to address the increasing rate of depression among students. Vice-Chancellor M N Patel announced that the university was set to offer an integrated LLM course from the coming academic session. Also on the agenda was installation of CCTV cameras and making the entire campus Wi-Fi enabled, he added.

As many as 55,720 students received their degrees at the occasion. Among these, the maximum came from commerce stream (23,267), followed by humanities (15,090), education (9,295), science (5,460), law (1,201), medical (707), dental (539) and pharmacy (3).