PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, 86th Convocation by Prof. D. P. Singh

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, 86th Convocation by Prof. D. P. Singh

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 86th Convocation | Tata Institute of Social Sciences 22 August 2026 Prof. D. P. Singh Chancellor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences Former Chairman, University Grants Commission

Dr. C. S. Pramesh, Director of the Tata Memorial Hospital and our Chief Guest today; Prof. Badri Narayan Tiwari, Vice Chancellor; Prof. Sunil Santha, Dean of Academic Affairs; Dr. Narendra Mishra, Registrar; members of the Executive Council and the Academic Council; distinguished guests; my colleagues on the faculty; proud parents and families; and, above all, the graduating students of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences,

To our graduating students: congratulations . This day is yours, and you have earned every hour of it. And you did not earn it alone. Behind each of you sits a family that went without something so that you could sit here today. To your parents, and to everyone who carried you to this morning, this degree is theirs as much as yours. And to my colleagues on the faculty, thank you. Yours are the quiet hands behind this bright day. Now let me speak to you simply, as an older man who is honestly, deeply hopeful about your generation. You are the most empowered young people who have ever walked this earth, and it is science and technology that placed that power in your hands. Just look at what they have given you. A vaccine dreamed up and delivered in a single year. A slab of glass in your pocket that holds more than all the libraries of the ancient world. A signal that lets a farmer read tomorrow’s sky, and a village girl learn from a teacher she will never meet. A hundred years ago, a king could not do what you can do this evening from a bus stop. So do not be shy about that power, or about wanting a full life, good work, a wide world. That hunger is nothing to apologise for. It is the engine of everything you are about to build. And here is the quiet beauty of the education you were given, the idea at the very heart of our National Education Policy. For too long we kept knowledge locked in separate rooms. Science in one. The social sciences in another. Technology in a third. The NEP opened every door, and sat you down, on purpose, at the crossroads where all three meet. You were taught to read a dataset and a human face in the same afternoon, to honour a laboratory and a village with equal seriousness. That is a rare and precious preparation, and you may not yet know how rare.

I dwell on this because something has now arrived that lives at exactly that crossroads where you were taught to stand. Artificial intelligence . It writes, it calculates, it translates, it diagnoses, it predicts. It belongs to no single subject. It moves through all of them at once, through economics and medicine, law and social work, history and design. The very walls your education taught you to climb over, AI simply walks straight through. That is a gift. But, my young friends, it is not only a gift.

Let me tell you why, in the language of our own oldest stories.

You all know the समुद्र मंथन , the churning of the great ocean. Gods and demons set their long war aside for a while, took Mount Mandara for a churning rod and the serpent Vasuki for a rope, and turned the sea to draw out अमृत , the nectar that gives eternal life. Everyone remembers the nectar. But think back to what rose first. Long before the nectar, before a single one of the treasures, the churning threw up हलाहल , a poison so fierce it could have turned all three worlds to ash.

That is the wisdom the old story has been keeping for us all along. Every great churning brings up the poison before it brings up the nectar.

And make no mistake, artificial intelligence is the समुद्र मंथन of our age. The churning has begun, and it will not slow to suit our comfort. It is bringing up real अमृत, wonders that will heal the sick, teach the poor, and lift millions into lives their parents could not have dreamed of. But it is bringing up हलाहल too. And I would be failing you this morning if I sang only of the nectar and said nothing of the poison.

So let me show you three drops of that poison. Plainly, the way a friend would.

The first drop falls on your own mind.

Reason is a muscle. It only grows when it lifts. Every time you wrestle a hard problem to the floor by yourself, you walk away with more than the answer. You walk away a little more able to think. Now picture a tool that lifts every weight for you before you have even reached for it. What a convenience it is. And what a quiet danger. A person who asks the machine before he troubles to think will,slowly and without noticing, forget how to think at all.