Nirmala Sitharaman, the Union Finance Minister, claimed on Friday that since the administration led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014, the nation's educational infrastructure has expanded significantly.

She claimed that the country was now seeing new institutions at the rate of one university every week, one Atal Tinkering Lab every third day, one college every second day, one Industrial Training Institute (ITI) every day, and one Indian Institute of Technology every year while delivering the convocation address at the 13th convocation of the VELS Institute of Science, Technology and Advanced Studies (VISTAS) in Chennai.

Additionally, she claimed that in the last nine years, the number of MBBS seats had virtually doubled. All of these demonstrated the value that the government places on education.

She said that because to the government's encouragement of innovation, there are now 30,000 authorised patents annually, up from 4,000 in 2014. Similar to this, the number of trade marks registered has climbed from 70,000 to 2.5 lakh annually.

She said the government was also focussing on skill development and employment. While 4.38 lakh youths have been provided employment through six rozgar melas organised till now, she said the number of government employments provided will increased to 10 lakh by 2024.

The Minister claimed that several of the agreements made during Mr. Modi's recent trip to the United States were expected to increase employment opportunities for young people in Chennai and the surrounding areas. With India now emerging as a global information powerhouse, graduates with strong degrees had a wealth of options to benefit from and advance the nation.

Besides the graduating students of the institutions who received their degrees in various disciplines, Anju Bobby George, vice president, Athletics Federation of India, Girish Mathrubootham, founder and CEO, Freshworks, R.S. Munirathnam, chairman, RMK Group of Institutions, and M. Ramakrishnan, professor, Department of Urology, Hindusthan Hospital were conferred honorary doctorates (honoris causa) during the convocation.