"Industrial
academia
interface
towards
Sustainable
Development"
Dr. S. Xavier
Head & Professor in Environmental studies
St. Xavier’s College
Kolkata-700016
In an Ideal Situation:
Industry and
Academy are
complementary
products
like pen and ink,
car and petrol.
Industry provides
resources for the
sustenance of
academic
institutions.
Academic
Institutions
provide the brains
and the brawn to
run industries.
(It also provides the
entrepreneurs who
set up industries.)
The common goal is
Sustainable
Development –
future proofing
today’s needs.
By “Socially
Responsible”
Corporate
Citizens and
“enlightened
engineers of
change”
But the
ground
realities are
different:
An inconvenient truth…..
On the
Industrial
front :
• Sustainability is not ingrained, leave alone being
at the core
• It is, like “equal opportunity employer”, another
mere term
• A term used to fill corporate brochures & for
lectures in summits like these
• Which corporate interacts with the academia to
have such issues in the curriculum?
• Which corporate releases in house “experts” to
interact / train students?
• How much is the actual spend? How much is
spent on advertising it?
On the
Academic
Front :
• What weight age is given to Sustainability in our
course curriculum
• In a performance driven world are our students
being equipped with “values”?
• Are we aware of the skill sets that are actually
required on the floor?
• Have we interacted with the industry to
understand their needs?
• What have we done to ensure that we leave
behind a world that is cleaner, greener and more
prosperous than what we had inherited?
• What is the lesson that we are imparting to the
“enlightened engineers of change?”
The way
forward:
• Heal thyself (“Be the change you want to see in the
world.”- Mahatma Gandhi)
• Create platform for industry – academia interaction
• Acknowledge “Sustainable Development” as an area
of grave concern
• Finds ways and means of integrating Sustainability into
key operations
• Create Sustainability projects that can be funded by
industry as its CSR efforts
• Invite Industrial Experts to the campuses to share their
knowledge & experience
• Increase student exposure to actual industrial work
• Embrace a “value based” teaching system
• “Earth provides enough
to satisfy every man's
need, but not every
man's greed” –
Mahatma Gandhi –
industry MUST be
more responsible –
EARN PROFITS, don’t
PROFITEER
Get up, and set your shoulder to the wheel
-how long is this life for?
As you have come into this world,
leave some mark behind.
Otherwise where is the difference between
you and the trees and stones? –
they too come into existence, decay and die
Compost-Manure
To Conclude:
• “In the End, we will
remember not the words of
our enemies, but the silence
of our friends” – Martin
Luther King (Jr.)
• We have sinned in our effort
to play God. We have
unleashed on ourselves the
twin menace of Global
Warming and Climate Change.
• We have to find ways of
reversing the trends and
diffuse the bomb
• Sustainable Development
• is the way forward. Together
we have to.
P
R
O
M
I
S
E
S
T
O
K
E
E
P
M
I
L
E
S
T
O
G
O
Thank You
A
Sustainable
Dawn shall
certainly
come!