'"Thanks to the coaching classes today, the quality of students entering IITs has gone lower and lower… They somehow get through the joint entrance examination. But their performance in IITs, at jobs or when they come for higher education in institutes in the US is not as good as it used to be".
Infosys chairman emeritus N.R. Narayana Murthy addressing the IIT 2011 global conference in New York (October 2)
"What is the purpose of a clean candidate if the party is not right? Is Manmohan Singh not clean? The problem is that he is remote-controlled."
Social activist Anna Hazare at a press conference in Ralegan Siddhi (October 3)
"It is politics, not religion, which causes communal carnage. Amongst many factors that help in creating communal hatred is the doctored history we teach in our schools…. a vast majority who attend government-run schools or schools run by communal organisations are imparted skewed knowledge and understandings of social and historical values."
Social activist and writer Asghar Ali Engineer (The Times of India, October 7)
"Our universities are in a mess and standards cannot be raised if individual institutes are scattered across the country. Research in even the IIMs is virtually zero. To me, an IIT is an export unit which has fed economies abroad. Has an IIT produced a Steve Jobs?"
Well-known social scientist Shiv Visvanathan (Times of India, October 9)
"Western nations and east Asia reaped the benefits of the demographic dividend, now the fruits of this dividend are seeded in India, the Middle East and Africa. The youth here represent the powerhouse of the global economy but the quality of education continues to remain a matter of concern."
Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal at the 36th General Conference of UNESCO in Paris (October 28)
"Egos are clashing, but this is participatory democracy in a little park."
Justin Strekal, a college student taking part in New York City’s Occupy Wall Street protest which has been going on for a month (Time, October 31)