Lord Paul, who is also the Chancellor of University of Wolverhampton and University of Westminster, said Indian universities must try to benefit from ‘internationalising education' for education to be truly global.
“For education to be global, we must enter into transformational arrangements, with academic minds from all nations learning from each other, Lord Paul said.
“In order for India to fully benefit from these strategies, we must all strive to make Indian universities world class. If India wants to have a strong voice in the world, it needs to have a strong, world-class universities,” he said.
With global recovery from economic downturn slowly under way, Lord Paul said it is a perfect time to concentrate on ensuring sustainability and development for years to come “and the fundamental component of long-term economic health is the availability of a skilled workforce ready to meet the challenges ahead”.
Lord Paul said India requires 500 million people to be trained by 2020 to produce a competitive labour force and ensure that there is a skilled work base to provide the necessary infrastructure for a growing population.
He said the Indian government's target of having 30 per cent of 18-24 year-olds in higher education by 2020 was an enormous one, which “is more than ten times the total number of students studying in the UK”.
Updated on: April 15, 2014 22:36 IST
