An elite institute so inclusive…

Amrit Mahotsav years Icons – 1 IIT-M

IE has had the privilege of covering the momentous developments of close to six decades. The precious opportunities that came in our way to look at development issues in India and several countries abroad enabled us to record the exciting aspects of development in India as also to compare these with the progress made in several others. We could witness the excitement of the strident growth recorded in the post war years at the US, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Singapore… as also to look with amazement at the strident growth in later years of China. Several countries in South East Asia; the alacrity with which oil producing and exporting countries in the middle east, Russia, South America… could catch up for the lost time. There have been exclusive opportunities thrown up by the science and technological developments.

Through these 75 years of Independence India has also recorded spectacular progress in economic and social spheres. There were impressive, even explosive, advances in several spheres. Look at any area – the agriculture revolution, operation flood that helped India emerge the largest producer of milk. The strides made in space, IT software, the telecom revolution or the prestige earned for the country in higher technical education.

For IE with the mission of expanding awareness on economic issues, there is a bewildering range of subjects to cover. We have selected a few icons. These are not exhaustive or placed in order but have been striking for their impact. We have selected a few to highlight the freedom years’ striking advances. We are starting with the IITs focusing on IIT-M. For the aspirational middle class, the offer of high quality technical education at low, affordable  fees/cost and selected countrywide on merit, helped turnout high quality engineering graduates. These earned for the country a lot of prestige and admiration.

In the Ivy League institutions of the US, I find the ratio for admissions to applications was less than 3 per cent. For the IITs it was much tougher. I had seen over 400,000 competing with tough written examinations and just 4000 getting selected. The ratio, 1 per cent! In the initial decades several of these successful candidates migrated to more developed countries, mostly the US, for higher studies. These were avidly absorbed on attractive terms by a wide range of renowned corporates, academia, financial institutions… The cream of Indian youth seizing such opportunities was characterised for a few decades as the brain drain.

With the economic growth recorded by India over the years and with the expansion in numbers, this flow
decelerated. In fact, India became more attractive to work and helped reverse the brain drain!

In the 1950s India started with IITs at Kharagpur, Bombay, Madras, Kanpur and Delhi. Soon the Banaras Hindu University was also designated as an IIT. Their numbers increased with demand from other states. Today 23 IITs are spread across the country.  The intake is estimated around 16,000 per year and the range of subjects covered and facilities for postgraduate and doctoral programmes expanded.

The collaboration with renowned institutions of the west, the opportunity for faculty to move from one IIT to another, were of special help in the initial decades. IIT-M had collaborated with Germany and was liberally funded through KfW. The exposure of the faculty to German systems and quality of education were of special help. It was also headed by several visionary directors like A Ramachandran, P V Indiresan… The latter, with eloquent communicative skills and gregarious nature, focused on social relevance. He set-up a Centre for Rural Development and was widely involved experimenting with low-cost housing, imparting technical skills to the community around…  Such experiments were obviously much ahead of time and his successor did not pursue these.

Happily, the reputation, the financial strength and succession of visionary leaders like M S Ananth, Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Bhaskar Ramamurthi and now V Kamakoti are providing new thrust for its massive expansion. Listen to Jhunjhunwala who heads the IIT-M Research Park: “this place is not for mere real estate; the company that comes here must do R&D. We created a system that for every 1000 sq.ft hired, the company must earn 150 credits every year. Otherwise, they have to move out. This helped develop industry-academia interaction… We set up an Incubation Centre and have created 250 start-ups in 10 years. 85 per cent of our companies are doing well. They are valued Rs 30,000 crore.”

This innovator of rural telecommunication stresses efforts to create world class engineers: “we will motivate, reignite their dreams, give them challenging environment and help them become the top 2 per cent engineers of the world, he said

The IIT-M Research Park is proving the model for institute-industry collaboration with its focus on applied research. Listen to present Director V Kamakoti: “Prof Ananth began the focus on translational research. It was taken forward by Prof Bhaskar Ramamurthi. I am continuing with this commitment to translational research. The Shakti Processor is a result of this.

“Fundamental research will give close insights. If there is no fundamental research, there is nothing to translate. 20-30 per cent of our faculty do fundamental research. I believe, at least 50 per cent of our faculty should do translational research building on the findings of fundamental research. The IIT-M Research Park is the centre for this.”

In an interview to IE, Prof Kamakoti pointed to making IIT, considered the exclusive privilege of few entrants, inclusive: “the JEE is not an examination of selection, but of elimination. You may be good, but you don’t get in because better people are around.”

Kamakoti devised a new scheme in which if one got a basic qualifying mark, he/she can get in on the online mode. If a student takes a course under the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) devised by Prof M S Ananth and his team of dedicated faculty in 2005, he/she can register for pursuing the B.Sc degree course of IIT-M.

Kamakoti said, already 12,000 have registered for this course: “all girl students from families with less than Rs 5 lakh annual income are sponsored; we offer significant fee concession for families with less than Rs 1 lakh annual income and the balance is covered through CSR.”

Look at the opportunity for these to pursue further education and more importantly, research at IIT-M! This elite institution is indeed inclusive.

Years ago, there was a suggestion of IITs to offer medical education as well. Kamakoti points to IIT-M getting ready to diversify into this rarefied field for research: “medicine is an area where technology is used very big. We plan a medical school where we will initially bring a MBBS/MD grad to pursue a PhD. We will guide these with a strong faculty from engineering and medicine. We will also tie-up with local hospitals to carry on clinical research to pursue their PhD dream,” he said.

Recently IIT-M has designed and developed the Shakti Processor. Kamakoti explained the imperative and importance of research and development of such processors: “in digital technology, electronic gadgets have a processing element. If we import this, it is all a black box. We do not have the right to alter it. Imported processors do not reveal critical information on the processor that cannot be altered by us. We need our own processor to protect data… Our team of 40 plus developing the processor that was conceived in 2012, received funding in 2017. We fabricated three chips in 1.5 years and they were all successes. We work on commercialising this. We share all the knowledge involved and put it as open source.” A big milestone indeed.

Universities in the US receive substantial support from the government, the community around and, more importantly, from the alumni. I understand the Columbia University has a corpus of a billion dollars (around Rs 8000 crore). In India, a welcome development is the increasing size of support by the alumni. A few months ago, we heard of the couples, Susmita and Subroto Bagchi and Radha and NS Parthasarathy jointly donating Rs 425 crore to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). The donation is for the establishment of a post-graduate medical school and an 800-bed multi-speciality hospital in the IISc campus at Bengaluru. The prosperous, new-gen millionaire alumni from the middle class have been generous in liberally sharing their wealth with their alma mater.

In the recent 59th convocation, Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran, IIT-M Chairman, Dr Pawan Goenka and Director V Kamakoti made detailed presentations on the state of higher education and the contribution of IIT-M. Excerpts from these are presented.

Five major trends that would shape the world*

Let me congratulate IIT Madras for all those recognition for the institute, for the faculty and the NIRF rankings as number one for the sixth consecutive year… Some of us have the opportunity to visit world-class institutions in several parts of the world and I say this with most sincerity that in my mind there is no doubt, if a world ranking is done, IIT Madras will be among the top most institutes in the world.

It’s a great privilege for all of you to have had the opportunity to study in this wonderful institution. I am pretty sure it has prepared you in multiple different ways, you probably would not recognise today.

We thought that the pandemic is over, global economy doing good, we are going to be in a high growth environment even though there will be high inflation. And then you see a commodity crisis, a supply chain crisis in semiconductor and a war; suddenly the global growth tapers down and we are going to be in a low growth, high inflation environment, definitely this year and probably longer.

But in spite of all these, it is the most exciting time with immense opportunities for everybody and especially for you graduating from IIT Madras in 2022. I would like to talk about the five major trends that will demonstrate the opportunities.

digital world, digital economy…

It’s going to be a digital world and digital economy. The adoption of digital in the last two years – by businesses, societies, rich and poor people, developed and developing nations, men and women, the young and adults – has demonstrated that it has become a behavioural change for billions of people.

Whether it is artificial intelligence, data, IoT, cloud, deep tech or any other innovation, research is going to be at the centre.

Already businesses that have propriety AI and data are way ahead of the curve differentiating themselves. Businesses in the future have to lead with AI, data and deep tech. It is true not only for tech companies or consumer goods companies; it is true for every company. You have got to lead with AI and digital that requires tech talent. There will be no domain that’s going to be led by itself, whether it is healthcare or biology, you have to marry
biology with deep tech. Manufacturing has to be led with AI and digital data that can happen only if all of you play a role and it is going to be an exciting role in the transformation of the whole industry across sectors.

ACCESS and JOBS…

Coming to the social sector, India has two problems – access and jobs. 300-400 million people don’t have access. We have a shortage of doctors, hospitals, teachers, judges, infrastructure…

Any of this cannot be solved quick; we cannot create half a million doctors in the next five years. Everything has to be solved by technology, by getting things done using tech and by low skilled people; the high skilled and specialists can focus on things only they can do and that’s going to be the norm in every industry.

Today 200-300 million people don’t participate in the formal economy. They don’t have market access. They will come into the formal economy and consumption will come.

We see it in the aspiration of people across our retail and consumer companies, not just the people in tier one big cities. The demand is in tier two, three and four cities and rural areas. Their hunger for anything and everything is mind-boggling.

No chip, no industry…

The second trend is sustainability. The energy transition is real. It is not about renewable energy, renewable power, batteries, storage, hydrogen… All of this is going to happen in India very soon and will have new energy capacity higher than the present thermal energy of about 300 gigawatts. New energy being added will cross that number very soon in this decade. We will be one of the very few nations who can do that.

So much more innovation is going to happen. Because there is going to be a lot of supply chain issues, sourcing issues in materials. Innovation in materials is the key. We are talking only about lithium, nickel, solid state… But there are going to be more new technologies. So, we have to lead this transition with research, innovation, start-ups… I am glad to see this happening in the start-up world.

There are already 123 unicorns in India and I was told that there is one unicorn surfacing every week this year. But some of them will succeed, many of them will fail. When we went to school and were graduating, the only thing we aspired for was to get a job. But today you have the ecosystem and, more importantly, the mindset to take risk. There are also people willing to fund.

This energy transition is going to accelerate and it is not by the technologies we know today. Yes, they are all important. We are betting big on all these technologies. We are putting up a large scale battery plant. We will be getting into semi-conductors. We are looking at packaging the entire spectrum. But a lot of new things are going to come. There will be demand and supply pressures on all of you. that is an opportunity for all. There’s going to be chip everywhere. Without chip there’s no industry.

Supply chain resilience

The third thing is the supply chain resilience. The world supply chain evolved over last several decades, is efficient and agile. Only two things mattered: lowest cost and speed and that’s going to change.

In my entire career I have never done a business plan based on supply. We always made a business plan based on demand. Now you’re thinking yes, the demand is there but what is the business plan? What is it going to look like based on available supply?

This never happened and that needs to get fixed. So, while resilience, agility, speed and economics are important; more important is availability and resilience and that is going to happen. I am very convinced of these about India.

I’ve been coming across this term “India Plus model.” There are going to be a vast number of things for which we have to create businesses – semiconductors, batteries, new materials, new formulations… These require talent, tech talent.

So whether you want to play big in a high tech area through a large enterprise, through a start-up or be an entrepreneur, this is your time.

Look for talent from anywhere….

Fourth, I know that the future of work and the future of talent are changing. I can see some semblance of what it is going to look like; but I have no finger on exactly how it is going to look like. It is not going to be work from home fully, it is not going to be limited to being in physical spaces. Organisations will not be able to have fixed hierarchical structures; they have to transform to be able to accommodate networks. Organisations have to give less importance to titles. Talent from anywhere can make a big impact.  We need to  harness the best of talent available in India and elsewhere. So to my mind the opportunity in front of you is enormous.

Healthcare–biology–health tech will make waves…

In the coming 10-20 years healthcare- biology- health tech are going to make the biggest waves. Not only we will solve basic health care problems; the whole invention of drugs will change. There will be research on brain, in which IIT Madras is involved; ageing problems will be solved. Anti-ageing will become real.

People want to live at 40, suddenly they will become 40 and say I am going to be 40 for the next 10 years. People will extend their lives. You will start having active brain with a weaker body and then that will get solved between the brain and artificial muscle interface. Because you will have to replace the aged body with synthetic muscles.

I mean so many exciting things are going to happen. There will always be issues. Our problems will be sometimes the economic cycles, sometimes demography, sometimes geopolitics.

But if you want to achieve, we need to dream. You have an advantage, because you can let loose and think of the art of the possible and whatever you want to do. You can imagine what can happen without the burden of experience. We, experienced people, have a burden because the moment we start thinking we say this is not possible.

So you have that opportunity. I invite you to think of a world 50 years from now. Then you will see how all these things that we see today and all other things which we will continue to see in the coming 5-10-20 years and participate in that growth.

Vision: a world class engineering research teaching innovation institute…*

IIT Madras has proved herself yet again by tenaciously holding her top ranks, be it in NIRF or ARYA or in the CIA innovative award. IIT Madras has clinched the number one position among engineering institutes in the NIRF ranking for the sixth year, since inception of NIRF.

IIT Madras was granted the institute of eminent status in early 2020. The grants received for this has been channelised to strengthen our research infrastructure and fund various research initiatives in thrust areas that have global relevance.

Through this exercise we aim to build at least five world-class groups working in areas of global significance. Our strategic plan 2021-2027 to be launched shortly will guide us in furthering our vision towards establishing ourselves as a world-class engineering institution for research, teaching and innovation.

At this convocation nearly 2500 graduates (graduands) will receive their degrees including around 300 PhD students. 11 PhD scholars among them will receive joint degrees with foreign universities.

The first of its kind online BSc degree in programming and data science in the country that provides no age bar and multiple exit options has had very good reach from people in diverse fields and age groups. So far 12,000 students have been admitted in the age group between 17 and late 60s.

Institute for all. Reach out to rural India

As an institute of national importance, we have been constantly focusing on being locally relevant and making IIT M an institute for all with specific focus to reach out to the Rural India: the Centre for Rural Education, Applied Technology and Entrepreneurship, CREATE has been formed.

We have started setting up rural interaction centres enabling interaction between experts and the rural children. 19 RICs are set up in the last four months in Tamil Nadu and we plan to set up 100 centres by the end of this financial year.

Thanks to all the CSR donors for the generous support. We aspire to instill confidence and motivate rural children to take up higher education through this intervention with an aim to increase the gross enrolment ratio, to enable innovation and entrepreneurship in rural India.

We have set up two rural technology centres in the last four months and we plan to scale it up to 25 within the next couple of years. I take this opportunity to thank our distinguished V Shankar for his generous contribution.

Global reach…

IIT Madras has launched these nine interdisciplinary international master’s degree program starting in July 2022. The 10th M Tech program in quantitative finance will be introduced from the next academy year starting July 2023.

These programmes bring together innovative curricula with award-winning pedagogy and research methodology of IIT Madras. These unique two-year M Tech programs will have international students undertaking several core and elective courses in addition to a research project in that area of interest.

The office of global engagement has facilitated IIT M in furthering our international collaborations and working towards increasing the exchange of scholars and students.

The global office had visited Sri lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal to intensify relations. An interdisciplinary MTech in Energy Systems will be offered to Nepalese and international students at the Kathmandu University campus starting July 2022 as a joint degree program.

The international immersion experience program is conceived to partially support up to 100 graduate IITM students going abroad on exchange programs and nearly 45 students stand benefited this year. IIT Madras has partnered with Tata Consultancy Services to launch a web-enabled user-oriented program on Industrial AI that is targeted at upskilling employees in corporates in the applications of AI to industrial platforms.

Today with a vision to build the next gen creative India, we are launching through the IIT M Pravartak Technologies Foundation a course title “out of the box thinking” for which more than one lakh thirty thousand students of age group starting fifth standard and above have registered.

R&D On Speech Technologies…

As a part of the national language translation mission an R&D project on speech technologies in Indian languages has been awarded to a 23- institute consortium led by Professor Hema Murti, where all kinds of speech technologies will be showcased and various downstream applications will be developed especially for the English challenged citizens of our country.

Research work in the laboratories have been continuing in spite of lockdowns and other standard operational procedural restrictions.

The national 5G test bridge project was inaugurated by our Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 18 May 2022 and a 5G call on a fully indigenous network was successfully demonstrated.

This is a multi-institutional project instrumental in development of an Indian 5G standard named 5Gi which has found its place in the international 3GPP Standards. The 5G test bed at the IIT Madras Research Park is now made available for the industry to test their products and deployment.

Mechanisation of septic tank cleaning…

Manual scavenging or human intervention for cleaning septic tanks and sewer lines causes hundreds of deaths every year. IIT Madras Team is developing the HomoSep Robot for mechanisation of septic tank cleaning together with implementation partners Solina’s Integrity, an IIT M incubator start-up, supported by CSR partners including the Safai Karmachary Andolan. We have donated two units of the HomoSep to Safai Enterprises being formed by widows of manual scavenging workers and are set to distribute eight more units shortly. Plans for the next year include scaling up to make and distribute larger numbers.

The rehabilitation research and device development funded by our distinguished alumnus TT Jagannathan, chairman of TTK Prestige and headed by Professor Sujata of mechanical engineering department, has developed multiple assistive devices for the physically challenged people and taken the same to market.

The sustainable water management plan of IIT Madras has enabled the reduction of fresh water demand from 3 million litres a day in 2016 to 1.8 million litres a day in 2022 in spite of increase in student and faculty strength. This has been made possible by the establishment of a state-of-the-art 4 million litre per day sewage treatment plant with zero discharge standards at minimal installation cost and reduced energy consumption. The effort is expected to meet the requirement of IITM for the next 50 years.

Mapping human brains…

IIT Madras, with the generous support of our distinguished alumnus Gopala Krishnan, launched the Sudha Gopala Krishnan brain centre to power a large scale multi-disciplinary effort to map human brains at cellular level. The first project of the brain centre, supported by the office of the principal scientific advisor, is imaging post-mortem human brains through our newly developed whole brain imaging platform. Such high resolution maps of human brains will have a transformative impact in the fields of neuroscience and medicine.

Several young faculties have been bestowed young scientist awards and medals.

In 2021-22 the institute received sanctions for 186 ministries-sponsored projects for a value of Rs 611.46 crore that is almost 70 per cent more than last year.

Our collaboration with industry has been increasing year after year and this year 609 consultancy and industry sponsored research projects have been received amounting to Rs 279.61 crore. We filed for 239 patents during the year, of which 70 are international filings and were granted 148 Indian and eight international patents.

Our faculty have undertaken 47 projects in various areas under the corporate social responsibilities at a total value of Rs 106.8 crore.

Record placements…

In 2021-22 the institute witnessed a record-breaking placement season with 1430 job offers, of which 52 per cent were in core engineering and R&D companies, 29 per cent in analytics consulting and finance and 17 per cent in information technology. The placement season also saw a 24 per cent increase in pre-placement offers over last year. A total of 121 companies provided internship offers to 708 students.

In 2022 we have honoured 11 of our alumni with the distinguished alumnus awards for their outstanding achievements in their respective fields. In 2021 IIT-M introduced the Young Alumni Achiever Award to recognize their achievements.

IIT Madras Incubation Cell and its sector-specific incubators for medical technology, biosciences, cyber physical systems and rural technologies continue to incubate around 40-50 companies annually with a cumulative portfolio of 260 deep tech start-ups.

IIT M incubated companies are together valued at Rs 30,000 crore based on their last investment data. 106 start-ups are in the market having generated, despite the pandemic, revenue of Rs 650 crore in 2021-22 and created more than 7000 direct jobs.

IIT-M start-ups have filed over 210 plus patents and 10 per cent of the start-ups are founded by women and 16 per cent by IITM faculty. It is pertinent to note all these are deep technology start-ups.

Marching ahead sky is no more our limit. No doubt AGNIKUL our space start-up will successfully launch its first in-orbit flight.

Disrupting the transportation industry, I have full confidence that our Hyperloop team will successfully demonstrate the half a km test in the next eight months.

We have secured railway support of Rs 8.34 crore to construct a 400-meter-long vacuum tube at our discovery campus by the year end. This will be the only such facility in the world after SpaceX available to hold international competitions. With these the team will complete the full technology stack for hyperloop at subscale.

A start-up company Tutor Hyperloop has been incubated by IIT Madras to commercialise this technology at full scale.

Huge opportunities in space tech…*

It is a matter of great pride for all of us associated with the IIT Madras that it is the best engineering college sixth year in a row. This is a true reflection of the collective commitment of our faculty, administration, staff and students.

This is a very important decade for India. The world order is changing. India today has opportunities like never before across sectors and across geographies and
technology is revolutionizing every aspect of our lives. There could not have been a better time for you to graduate and make a difference to the lives of millions of people.

Tech Revolution driven by young start-ups

What is most heartening is that the new technological revolution across the world is being driven by young start-ups founded by graduates just like you. India too has come of age in its start-up ecosystem and IIT Madras is playing a key role in it.

What I personally appreciate is that IIT Madras incubated start-ups tend to be in deep tech areas like advanced communication, agritech, artificial intelligence, IoT, green energy, space technology, etc.

I am now associated with the space sector. Space has huge opportunities for India and I’m amazed to see the kind of resources India has in terms of talent, infrastructure and indigenous technology. While ISRO has done us proud, going forward, the private sector, specifically start-ups, will play a huge role. Digantara made headlines by becoming the first Indian start-up to send payloads to space aboard ISRO PSLV 53 launch vehicle. IIT Madras is never far behind at anything has also incubated some outstanding start-ups in the Indian space sector.

Kamakoti talked about them, notably Agnikul Kosmos, under the mentorship of Professor Satya Chakravarthi and led by Srinath Ravi Chandran. Agnikul is working on a first of its kind launch vehicle Agniban.

Agniban will be the first commercial launch vehicle to use engines which are entirely 3D printed. Agnikul plans to provide a cab-like service to small satellite manufacturers enabling them to launch from anywhere and anytime from across the globe. Even the prime minister had mentioned this in his Mann Ki Baath programme recently.

IIT Madras incubated his space start-up is GalaxEye Space founded in 2020 by a team of five alumni of IIT Madras. GalaxEye plans to launch a constellation of advanced earth observation satellites capturing data from space. These data will have useful applications in disaster management, marine, mining, defence, energy and utility sectors.

Another IIT Madras start-up, QNu Lab, is working on a breakthrough quantum communication technology which can be used to protect data over the internet in the age of cyber security hacks.

Persist in the face of failure…

Perhaps the most successful example of a space technology start-up globally is SpaceX. SpaceX has redefined aerospace manufacturing and space travel transportation services with its incredible use of technology. It has reduced the launch cost by more than 60 per cent and successfully created reusable rocket launches. Founded by Elon Musk, the SpaceX journey started 20 years ago with 100 million dollar investment in initial years. SpaceX revenues currently stand at 1.3 billion dollars. Valuation jumped from 12 billion to 100 billion dollars with investment of 7 billion. But SpaceX 2 had its share of failures.

The first launch of its rocket Falcon 1 lasted only one minute. The second and third attempts also failed. SpaceX was incredibly close to bankruptcy following the third attempt. On its fourth attempt, however, in 2008 the Falcon 1 successfully reached orbit, creating history and making the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to reach earth’s orbit.

Why I’m telling you this is because I believe many of you will transition into the start-up world and become founders or technology leaders in existing start-ups.

So I wanted to drive home a few points with these examples:

• science and technology will drive the new unicorns and decacons.
• if you believe if you want to make a tech led difference to the world, your technology and innovation must be disruptive, radical and transformational, not incremental.
• Risk taking and perseverance are must for entrepreneurial and personal successes. Take failures on stride just like successes and keep going. Like Elon did in spite of many mishaps of SpaceX rocket launches; one happened just two or three days ago. Persist in the face of failure.
• To create next unicorn and achieve scale, you will need partners who believe in your vision and are willing to invest in your ideas. Hence it is imperative to cultivate this life skill to sell your story and motivate people to join you in your mission.
• And finally, every SpaceX starts off as Agnikul or a GalaxyEye. I hope a good number of you have opted to stay connected with science and technology and will work towards tech-led disruption.

Being an IIT student and now transforming to an IIT alumnus, you are privileged and have a story, a legacy to live up to. Strive to become innovation incubators for India and the world by leveraging your skills in science and technology.

India and the whole world always needs and will always be grateful to bright minds like you.

I would like to thank Prof Bhaskar Ramamurthi for providing 10 years of luminary leadership to IIT Madras. I request you to stand up and give a standing ovation to him.

I’m sure Kamakoti will fill the large shoes of his predecessors. I look forward to Prof Kama taking IIT Madras to new heights…

Dear graduating class, congratulations to all of you on this very special day and wish you all the success in life. God bless…