VOTE OF THANKS
 

Please permit me to express, on behalf of my esteemed colleagues from the States, other members of the Board and myself our gratitude to you, Madam Prime Minister, for the trouble you have taken to come over here and to give your illuminating inaugural address. We are very much encouraged to hear from you that education should receive a higher priority. We do hope that this will imply a change in the attitudes of the Planning Commission and the Ministry of Finance who are often swept away by different considerations.

Madam Prime Minister, I would make only one or two points for your consideration. The first is that education should receive greater attention in the 20-point programme whose outward appearance shows that the points directly related to education will barely come up only one and a half or two. You wilt however agree that the impact of education on the social, economic, political and other spheres of life is much more immense and far reaching than what is usually supposed to be. It is education which will enable our agriculturists to produce more; it is education which will make it possible for our industrial workers to participate more effectively in management; it is education which will turn out more and better engineers, doctors and other professionals and will also make it possible for the entire citizenry to be more enlightened and responsible.

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Respected Madam, you have expressed some doubts whether the decisions or recommendations of the Conference are followed up. In this respect I may submit that, for the last two or three years, under the leadership of the Union Education Minister, Prof. Nural Hasan, we have been functioning more or less as a united single family. Almost all the recommendations have been taken seriously. The fact that some States have been lagging behind is due to some of the peculiar disadvantages facing those States. Our appeal to your goodself, as the Head of that family, is that you should kindly instruct the trea- surer or the Financial Controller of that family to loosen the purse strings (which are very tight at the moment) a little more for the educational development of this country.

You have also made the suggestion that we should try to effect certain changes without existing resources. I entirely agree with you on this point. Probably the scheme of non-formal education aims at doing this. I may also inform you, respected Madam, that the trends in most of the States in the present period have been in the direction of the consolidation of existing facilities rather than for creation of new ones, except of course at the elementary or primary stage.

In, the end, I repeat, Revered Leader, that we are extremely fortunate that you are with us this morning even for a short while. We are delighted and grateful for your illuminating address in which you have covered almost all the important aspects of education. We are determined to implement the 20-point programme as a whole, including the educational part. We are also hopeful that, at your kind intervention, the allocation for education will be raised, at least to the level where it stood sometime ago.