Nagpur: “Quality of education defines democracy and development. It fast-tracks our journey towards achieving the goal of making India a fully developed nation by 2047. There was a time when people used to call India a sleeping giant. India is no longer a sleeping giant. It is on the rise, the rise is unstoppable. The rise is continuous. The economic upsurge is exponential,” said Jagdeep Dhankhar, Vice President of India.
Dhankhar was speaking at the inauguration of the Digital Tower of Ramdeobaba University (RBU) in Nagpur on Sunday. Dr Sudesh Dhankhar; C P Radhakrishnan, Governor of Maharashtra; Banwarilal Purohit, former Governor of Punjab and former Administrator of Chandigarh, and Founder and Chairman Emeritus of Shri Ramdeobaba Sarvajanik Samiti (SRSS) that runs RBU; Devendra Fadnavis, Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra; Satyanarayan Nuwal, Chairman of SRSS; Rajendra Purohit, General Secretary of SRSS; Dr S S Mantha, Chancellor of RBU; Dr Rajesh Pande, Vice-Chancellor of RBU, shared the dais on this occasion.
At the outset, the Vice President of India and Sudesh Dhankhar inaugurated the Digital Tower of RBU, and unveiled a plaque to mark the occasion. Satyanarayan Nuwal made the introductory remarks. Banwarilal Purohit presented an idol of Lord Ganesh to Dhankhar.
The Vice-President pointed out that India’s economic rise had been exponential. According to global institutions, he informed the audience, India is a favourite destination for investment and opportunities. However, he rued, this was not the case previously. Though the youth of the country constituted important stakeholders in democracy and taking India forward towards the status of a developed nation by 2047, they were previously held back by three things. These three things, according to him, were that some people thought they were above law as they had privileged pedigree, extra advantages; no job, no contract, and no opportunity was available without corruption as power corridors were infested with corruption; and the country was not considered as generating hope and possibility.
“All this has changed now. Equality before law is a ground reality now. Middlemen have been removed permanently and power corridors have been neutralised and sanitised of corrupt elements. Besides, the world has come to recognise India as a land of hope and possibilities,” he said with enthusiasm. The world is acknowledging the resonance of India’s dominance on land, sky, and space. There is an ecosystem in place for every boy and girl to realise and exploit potential, talent, achieve ambitions, and fulfill aspirations, he said.
Asserting that education was service and not commerce, Dhankhar appreciated the contribution of Banwarilal Purohit in the pious field of education.“Purohitji has dedicated his life to nurturing education. He has done it with a firm belief. His legacy is in every brick of this campus. I have no doubt that those taking the baton from him will also carry forward his deep sense of morality, propriety, and commitment that education is service, not commerce,” he said.
The Vice-President called it his ‘great good fortune’ that he had attended a function of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan-Delhi in which a nine-volume English Sanskrit dictionary was released. “There I got an idea of the personality of Banwarilal Purohit. The lifelong journey of Banwarilal Purohit is a beacon of hope, inspiration, and motivation that our civilisational ethos requires to give back to the society, and there can be no greater gift than giving education to the people,” he observed.
On the newly inaugurated Digital Tower at RBU, Nagpur, he said that it would go a long way in changing the mindset of people, putting them in a different group, and making people fully alive to the technological advancements.