Varsities, young intellectuals crucial to bring change: Omar

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah today said that the universities and young intellectuals have a crucial role in bringing about change to ensure the holistic development of society.
Omar was expressing his views while addressing a distinguished gathering of scholars, faculty, educationists, students and others at the Jammu University convocation here.
Describing universities as hardware while students as software of metamorphoses, he said, "the universities, to use a metaphor that all of us can easily identified with, is the hardware of the nature of development while the students and intellectuals are its software."
Omar underlined knowledge and its related themes - human and intellectual capital, the key ingredients and yardstick to gauge success in the present world order.

The Chief Minister said human agency along with dynamic institutions evolve permutation and combinations that lead to a creativity where synthesis becomes vital in the scheme of things.
"Both exist in a symbiotic relationship and find sustenance and nourishment from each other. No one is immune from the winds of change," he said, adding that, those who do not master this change will be severely disadvantaged.
Omar said in the present new world order, "We must shine within to radiate outward. We must allow wide space and scope for human agency and unleash the creative potential to attain new highs."

He said that an institutional matrix complemented by a dynamic policy design and process especially in the domain of education is the prelude to the transformation that is required.