New Delhi, Dec 15 (PTI) The bureaucracy, military, industry and academia came together here on Saturday to speak in unison on the need to improve higher technical education in India.

Ajay Kumar, Secretary, Defence Production, in his valedictory address at the conference on 'Upgrading Technical Education: The Essence of Make in India', emphasised on the need for the domestic education system to focus on design and intellectual property (IP) creation, the organisers said in a statement.

The conference was organised by Global Dialogue Review (GDR), a think-tank and an internationally reputed foreign affairs journal.

Lt General P J S Pannu, deputy chief, Integrated Defence Staff, and the head of technology institutions in the armed forces, in his keynote speech at the conference, called for more forums to discuss the upgrading of higher technical education to meet the country's needs for the next decade.

Deepak Talwar, Global Vice President Procurement for Engineering of Thales, asserted that Indian skill creation will gain in ambition if decision-makers provide more encouragement for industries' participation in improving the academic infrastructure of the country.

The possible involvement of higher technology importation institutions as part of offset requirement was raised at the conference by Air Marshal M Matheswaran (retd), former Deputy Chief of Integrated Defence Staff.

The conference sought to focus attention on the critical need to enhance the country's higher technical education through collaborations with globally reputed institutions of excellence in order to meet the challenges of domestic self-reliance, especially in strategic areas of defence.

It took place as India embarks on the journey towards greater reliance on domestic industry to produce state-of-the-art equipment and systems, while being hampered in this endeavour by the "lack of world-class" teaching institutions.

Speakers at the conference stressed on the fact that Indian educational infrastructure was fine-tuned to cater only to the engineering services segment, and was largely out of its depth in developing engineers for applications to match the challenges of innovation.

The conference explored ways for local technology institutions to collaborate with their globally reputed counterparts to locally produce a large pool of engineering talent that could help bring to complete fruition the 'Make in India' doctrine.

Those who addressed the conference included Air Vice Marshal Vivek Rajhans, Commandant, Military Institute of Technology, Pune, Dr. Eyal Benjamin, Head of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Studies at Tel Aviv University, Bertrand de Hartingh, Director of Institute de France, Ankur Kanaglekar, Head of Strategic Business Development, Boeing, and Sameer Sonpavede, CEO and Managing Director, AvioHeliTronics InfoSystems.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)