"Industrial academia interface towards

Sustainable Developme

nt"

Dr. S. XavierHead & Professor in Environmental studiesSt. Xavier’s CollegeKolkata-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.

MILES

TO

GO

PROMISES

TO

KEEP

Thank YouA

Sustainable Dawn shall certainly

come!