Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday said that the government has chalked out a blue print for a huge knowledge investment plan to achieve the target of creating a pool of 500 million trained professionals by 2020 by undertaking an 'education revolution'.

Addressing faculties and students in the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, Singh announced that there would be five fold increase to the tune of  Rs 275,000 crore (Rs 2,750 billion)  in the government allocation in education during the 11th Plan period.

This is aimed at massive expansion of elementary and secondary education throughout the country besides setting up a large number of world class institutions in the fields of management, technology, science, education and research.

"We are committed to fulfill our ambitious education development plans to create quality human resources to make India globally competitive. The IITs in the country which have best of brightest brains have the highest tradition of academic excellence and are global laboratories for software revolution in our country. They have served the country with great distinction but the best is yet to come," Singh said.

The prime minister laid stress for collaborative campus based knowledge partnership between the institutes of excellence and the industry and pledged that the government would play the role of catalysts in facilitating close partnership among  the corporate houses, NGOs and community organisations in respect of expansion of higher and professional education in the country.

In response, to a request made by Gautom Barua, director of IIT-G, to permanently exempt IITs in the country from reservation policy in respect of faculty recruitment to help these institutions tackle the problem of acute shortage of faculties, Singh promised to take up the matter with the concerned Union ministry.

The PM also visited the information technology training centre of Tata Consultancy [Get Quote] Service located in the IIT-G campus. The centre is first such collaborative venture between the IIT family and the TCS.