Andhra Pradesh soon to have a Teacher Education centre

State Andhra Pradesh may very soon have its own Teacher Education centre in state. The UGC Commission has decided to set up an Inter University Teacher Training Centre in Andhra Pradesh.

The main purpose of this centre is to conduct training classes to teachers in order to improve the quality of teaching in higher education.

Speaking on 'Quality concerns in higher education' at the Osmania University, UGC vice chairman H.Devaraj said that only teachers could improve the quality of education.

Showing his deep concern over the lamenting over-lack of quality in the research done by PhD holders in India, H.Devaraj said they could not find even a single candidate for appointment to the faculty of a university, though 160 doctorates attended the interviews. He said, none of them had basic knowledge of the subject.

He further shared another instance of lack of quality in research where, he found one university which had, a faculty strength of 60 and awarded around 360 PhD's in a short span of time.

Explaining that the responsibility of guiding research scholars and roping in best candidates for teaching lay with professors and leaders of university administration, he said merely awarding PhD's on the basis of cut and paste thesis grabbed from old data available on the internet would serve no purpose.

In response to criticism of lack of infrastructure to pursue research in India, the senior bio-chemistry professor at Madras University said, "Discovering something needs brains". He also said that research in India is going horizontally as a huge number of candidates concentrated on a single concept at a time.

He in-fact supported the trans-disciplinary research as in western universities, which saw good results.