Dhankhar exhorted students to “avail opportunities and script the blueprint for a ‘New India’ at 2047 when the nation celebrates the centenary of its independence”. “It will be the young generation who will take the country forward when many of the older generation won’t be there. You must feel proud to be Indian.”
Vice President and Panjab University (PU) chancellor Jagdeep Dhankhar has said that the varsity has great potential and can become one of the best universities in the country. While addressing the annual convocation at PU, Dhankhar said, “Various Presidents, Vice-Presidents, Prime Ministers and Chief Justices of India were products of this university. It speaks volumes about the quality this varsity has to offer. I feel that the university can reach greater heights.”
The Vice President comes at a time when PU's rankings have witnessed dipped compared to some of the other private universities in the region. In the 2023 Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, PU was placed in the 801-1,000 bracket, behind many private universities in the region. The varsity also slipped in the Union education ministry’s National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2022
Dhankhar exhorted students to “avail opportunities and script the blueprint for a ‘New India’ at 2047 when the nation celebrates the centenary of its independence”.
“It will be the young generation who will take the country forward when many of the older generation won’t be there. You must feel proud to be Indian.”
He said India has an edge in technology, and mobile internet usage and online payments have bridged the digital divide. Sharing how education was a tool for social empowerment, Dhankhar shared his example and said “How if he hadn’t received a scholarship, he may have ended up elsewhere in life.”
Dhankhar asked the students to be fearless and confident. “No one has accomplished great heights and brought changes in society without failure,” he said, adding, “Be bold, be creative, be innovative, be confident, dream big and work hard.” He congratulated students and added on a kind note that academics weren’t everything. “Everyone has experienced failure in some form or the other, and students must not fear failure,” he said before ending with the popular quote from the Hindi film, Sholay, “Jo dar gaya, so mar gaya”, amid applause from the audience.
