Nobel Laureate Abhijeet Banerjee lauds Nehru for creating IITs: IIT Delhi Convocation

2100 Graduating Students Awarded Degrees and Diplomas, thirteen Alumni Honoured with Prestigious Alumni Awards

The 53rd Annual Convocation Ceremony of IIT Delhi was held today during which 2100 graduating students were awarded degrees and diplomas.

Degrees and diplomas were awarded for the first time to the students graduating in the following new programs: Joint PhD (IIT Delhi and NYCU, Taiwan), joint PG Diploma in Visionary Leadership for Manufacturing (jointly with NITIE Mumbai), MS (R) in Sensors, Instrumentation, and Cyber-Physical Systems Engineering, M.Sc. in Cognitive Science, and M.Sc. in Economics.

The Institute awarded the President’s Gold Medal, Director’s Gold Medal, Dr. Shankar Dayal Sharma (Former President of India) Gold Medal, Perfect Ten Gold Medal and Institute Silver Medal to the meritorious students.

Addressing the students, the chief guest, Prof. Abhijeet Banerjee, Nobel Laureate (Economic Sciences, 2019) and Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT, said, "You are some of the select students. You have crossed so many hurdles to get here. The nation needs you. Nehru had great faith in the technology. And he thought that somehow having an elite, such as you are, would transform the nation. And we needed that transformation. I entirely endorse Nehru’s vision that if there is a justification for the IITs, it has to be in terms of what you can do for the nation”.

“We need people like you to provide that extra edge that we need to be the nation that we aspire to be. For that, I have to say that I want you to not stop now. Keep trying to transform”, he said.

“We are in a place where we have great ambitions, we have great problems. And that’s where great talents step in. So be optimistic and think of yourself as a key agent of change”, he added.

“Of course, there are a thousand ways to be useful to the nation. You could do something amazing in science and make the nation proud. You could found a global company and provide employment to hundreds of thousands of people. You could invent a drug and save millions of lives, said Prof. Abhijeet Banerjee.

Dr. R. Chidambaram, Chairperson, Board of Governors, IIT Delhi, said, “The IIT system, as I have often said, has a very high global brand equity; and among the IITs, IIT Delhi is ranked at the top. We have world-class faculty, who continue to get recognitions from within India and abroad. We have leading research workers in IIT Delhi in various advanced research areas in the engineering sciences and others, ranging from high technology fields to pure sciences, and also social sciences, along with the interaction of the latter with science and technology.”

Dr. R. Chidambaram added, “Uniquely, India now is an economically developing country, where parts of the S&T system are highly developed, like Space and Nuclear, some areas of Defence, Knowledge Chemicals, etc., and we have world class academic institutions like the IITs”.

In his message to the graduating students, Prof. Rangan Banerjee, Director, IIT Delhi, said: “We have enjoyed having all of you here on our campus and seeing you flourish and evolve into confident adults ready to go out into the real world. You have been fortunate to have received one of the best educations in our country comparable with the best in the world. We have great hopes from you. You are in the right place at the right time. The future belongs to India - Our Prime Minister has set us the goal of creating an Atmanirbhar Bharat- and set a target for becoming a developed country by 2047. Today, there are innumerable problems facing our society- these are challenges as well as opportunities. We believe that all of you will be leaders providing solutions for our future. I hope you will remember the responsibilities of being an IIT Delhi graduate”.

At the 53rd convocation, IIT Delhi honored its thirteen esteemed alumni with the prestigious Alumni Awards 2022 viz. Distinguished Alumni Award (DAA), Graduates of Last Decade (GOLD) Award and Distinguished Alumni Service Award (DASA).

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