G20 meet begins in Amritsar

Amritsar, Mar 15 (PTI) A three-day G20 meet on education began here Wednesday with the participants focussing on building bridges across nations for equitable development.

The event brought together delegates from G20 Education Working Group to discuss the future of work and innovation, according to an official statement.

Several G20 seminars are scheduled to be held in Amritsar over three days as part of the G20 event. Also, an L20 meeting on labour will take place on March 19-20.

India assumed the G20 presidency for one year on December 1 last year. The G20, or Group of 20, is an intergovernmental forum of the world’s major developed and developing economies.

On Wednesday, a seminar on ‘Strengthening Research and Promoting Innovation through Richer Collaboration’ was organised at Khalsa College by IIT Ropar in collaboration with other prominent higher education institutions.

Rajeev Ahuja, Director of IIT Ropar, welcomed the participants and highlighted India’s opportunity to establish itself as a leader in research and innovation globally.

K Sanjay Murthy, Secretary, Higher Education, Government of India, also attended the event.

Govind Rangarajan, Director, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, shared his thoughts on interdependency of domains and interdisciplinary action for solving problems. He highlighted India’s frugal innovations, which have the potential to solve problems of the developed world.

B S Murty, Director, IIT Hyderabad, stressed on the need for synergy between government- academia-industry to find solutions to pressing global problems.

He highlighted that the National Education Policy 2020 has brought in path-breaking reforms in education in India, and various programmes are helping promote cross-institutional collaboration in the country.

The seminar focused on bridging the gap between government-academia-industry linkages for designing solutions for addressing global challenges, said an official statement.

The seminar reached a consensus that research collaboration is the need of the hour and countries/institutions need to break silos to promote translational research for achieving sustainable development goals just as they did during the Covid 19 pandemic.

There’s also a need to establish frameworks for sharing research data and outputs. G20 countries should work towards establishing a common framework for effective use of emerging and disruptive technologies to address global challenges, it said.

Meanwhile, Union Secretary (Higher Education) K Sanjay Murthy, Govindan Rangarajan, Director Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and IIT Ropar Director were among those present at a panel discussion at Khalsa College.

The first panel titled ‘Research in Emerging and Disruptive Technologies, Industry 4.0’ brought together panelists from Australia, France, India and UK who shared pertinent insights on the role of various stakeholders to promote research on the emerging innovations, their impact on education systems and society in general.

The second panel discussion on ‘Research in Sustainable Development Goals’ with panelists representing China, Oman, South Africa , UAE and UNICEF laid importance on enhancing the capacities of universities being the core of research.

One of the panelists, Alison Dell, Assistant Secretary, Australian Government Department of Education, discussed about the national collaborative infrastructure scheme in her country and what her government has been doing in moving towards applied research.

She emphasized on the importance of international collaboration in research and innovation, highlighting the successful partnerships between Australian and Indian institutions in the past.

She expressed her hope that such collaborations would continue to thrive and contribute to the sustainable development of both nations.

The seminar and panel discussion was followed with cultural performances which were much appreciated by the G-20 delegates. A multimedia exhibition has also been organised on the sidelines featuring participation from industry, academia, and start-up initiatives.

Tight security arrangements have been made for the G-20 meet here.