I welcome you all to this conference on global corporate sustainability and coupled with that the lecture on Education at Crossroads. It gives me great pleasure to welcome Prof Partha Pratim Chakrabarty director of IIT Kharagpur who has kindly taken the trouble to join us this morning and deliver the keynote address. After our inauguration here this morning and initial discussions, the core of the conference will be held at the campus of the Calcuta Business School on Diamond Harbour Road tomorrow and the day after (Dec 16 & 17).
The name of Calcutta Business School is known to our friends here but let me spend a couple of minutes – briefly introducing it again – it is a relatively recent entrant in the field of higher level management education and this was sponsored by the well known and long established Shikshayatan Foundation Calcutta which runs various education institutions. The inspiration for this institute came from Mr B M Khaitan and we worked closely together to establish the same.
It will only be appropriate to voice our deep gratitude to Dr Subir Choudhury, former director of IIM Calcutta, who provided us with very valuable guidance and inputs to establish the institute. I would also like to voice my thanks to the present director of the institute Dr Goutam Sengupta for organizing this important conference in the memory of my late father Sri L N Birla who was himself deeply interested in providing better standards of education and even several years ago promoting environmental concepts.
Friends as we all realise the world as we see it today has no resemblence to what it was some 15 or 20 years ago. With this have come in very significant developments and thinking and behaviour on all fronts- technological, economical and cultural. In spite of the earlier radical differences within societies the trend today is veering slowly towards the thought processes of various countries to meld together and we can no longer afford to think and act in isolation. One sometimes wonder whether we are really going in for the liberal concept of one world as envisaged by the 40s author Mr Wendell Willkie. Of course among factors the reality of global warming and the resultant climatic change is also making this impact felt in no small measure.
The road of business and industry in this changing environment, therefore, is an important aspect which needs to be studied in greater depth along with development in various other sectors and this is where we come in. This end requires managers possessing different skills with innovative and different mindsets so as to align their operations to a sustainable future. Our Business School feels that it is essential for the education process itself to address these emerging needs and train the new generation managers on this aspects. Virtually this brings us to crossroads in the educational field – the traditional and the new. I am therefore glad that Calcutta Business School has taken the initiative to organize this conference to address this important matter. With these words friends I again welcome all of you and our keynote speaker Dr Chakrabarty and would request him to kindly deliver the keynote speech.