Poging GOUD - Vrij
'EDUCATION CANNOT BE IN VERTICAL SILOS ANYMORE'
Careers 360
|July 2023
Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda, better known as Sam Pitroda, wears many hats. He served as an advisor to the prime minister during Manmohan Singh's tenure, led the National Knowledge Commission and is credited for contributions to India's telecom industry. Pitroda founded the University of TransDisciplinary Health Sciences and Technology (TDU) in Bengaluru in 2013. The University promotes trans-disciplinary research and education in modern and traditional medicine, biomedicine and life sciences. He spoke to Careers360 about the need for transdisciplinary medicine, the controversies around it and concerns about the current education policies.
Q. When you founded the TDU, what was your main objective and vision for education?
A. In 1990, we felt that it is important to have an organised database of all medicinal plants so we started a new institute called Foundation for Revitalization of Local Health Tradition. It took us years to get it running and we finally managed to do so with the help of Danish government funding. The idea was to create a modern computerised database genetic pool in terms of modern chemistry. Then we started a hospital to treat patients with traditional medicines. We realised that there is a big vacuum here between traditional and modern practices.
Modern medicine does not believe in some of these [traditional] practices because we don't have enough data, experiments and proof. We felt that there is a need for transdisciplinary medicine where we take best of both practices and provide services to large populations in rural areas who have access to traditional medicine but don't have access to modern ones. The university came about as our effort to encourage transdisciplinary sciences.
We have leadership lessons in traditional wisdom as well as in modern business administration. Our idea is to merge the best of modern and traditional to create an integrated knowledge base.
Q. You served as chairman of the National Knowledge Commission. What impact did it have?
Dit verhaal komt uit de July 2023-editie van Careers 360.
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