The Infosys Science Foundation on Wednesday announced the winners of the Infosys Prize 2023 at an event in Bengaluru.

Speaking on the occasion, Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy said that India needs to invest at least $1 billion annually for the next 20 years to train its primary and secondary school teachers, thereby leading to better outcomes under the New Education Policy (NEP) introduced by the Modi government.

“One possible way of accelerating NEP’s outcome is to invite 10,000 retired highly accomplished teachers from the developed world and from India in STEM areas to create 2,500 ‘Train the Teacher’ colleges in our 28 states and 8 union territories. The training programme should be year-long,” Murthy said. STEM is short for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

He added that each set of four trainers could train 100 primary school teachers and 100 secondary school teachers a year. “We will be able to train 250,000 primary school teachers and 250,000 secondary school teachers every year by this method. These trained Indian teachers can themselves become trainers over a period of 5 years.”

Murthy, the son of a teacher himself, said India must show respect and pay better salaries to its teachers and researchers. “We should pay about $100,000 a year.” So, at $1 billion a year, the programme will cost India $20 billion over 20 years. “Our nation, targeting a GDP of $5 trillion soon, will not find it a big financial burden,” he added.

Murthy went on to say that India must aspire to become an inventor of new processes, products, and services, mirroring the success of the US, EU nations, Japan and Australia. For this, improving the quality of primary, secondary and higher educational institutions to promote independent, critical and analytical thinking was a necessary requirement.

Last month, the Infosys founder found himself embroiled in a controversy of sorts when he said that young people should be prepared to work for 70 hours per week to elevate the country’s work culture and compete effectively on the global stage.

Coming back to the awards, the winner in each of the six categories was handed a gold medal, a citation and $100,000. The recipients are:

Sachchida Nand Tripathi, professor of sustainable energy engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (Engineering and computer science)
Jahnavi Phalkey, founding director of Science Gallery Bengaluru (Humanities)
Arun Kumar Shukla, professor of biological sciences and bioengineering at IIT-Kanpur (Life Sciences)
Bhargav Bhatt, Fernholz joint professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University (Mathematical sciences)
Mukund Thattai, professor of biochemistry, biophysics and bioinformatics at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (Physical Sciences)
Karuna Mantena, professor of political science at Columbia University (Social Sciences)