A liberal immigration law is required to attract foreign faculty and students to work and study at leading Indian educational institutes such as the IITs, according to Nobel Laureate Kurt Wuthrich.
Countries including the US and Switzerland have strong research base thanks to the large number of immigrants. In some of the leading universities in Switzerland, nearly 20 per cent of faculty are immigrants, he told newspersons.
Wuthrich was awarded the top honour in the field of chemistry in 2002 for developing ‘nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy’ for determining the three dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution. He contributed to significant advances in the technique of using NMR to study protein structure.
He was here to deliver the inaugural talk in L&T Construction-sponsored Nobel Laureate Lecture Series at IIT Madras.
B. Nagarajan, Deputy Registrar (Media Relations & ICSR), IIT Madras, agreed with Wuthrich that India needs a liberal immigration law to attract foreign faculty and students. Government rules and regulations make it difficult for them to come to institutes such as the IITs but private educational institutions can attract them.