(This story originally appeared in on Nov 27, 2014)

BENGALURU: Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy said it was disappointing that Indian universities do not work with domestic industry the way global ones do."Today, the software industry brings $40 billion to the city (Bengaluru) and we have Indian Institute of Science IISc ) which is hardly about 12 kms away...None of them bothered to come to any of the Indian companies. On the other hand, the president of MIT Cambridge ...you name it and they all came to us saying what problems of yours can we solve," Murthy said at the Commonwealth Science Conference in Bengaluru on Wednesday.He was responding to a question from a delegate on collaboration with researchers in the area of software development. He, however, said that things had improved after IISc's former director P Balaram accelerated collaborative research efforts between academia and industry. "In fairness, I must say, Balaram was convinced about the need for this. Therefore, we have now created an ecosystem where researchers in our higher education institutions are interested in solving problems of this industry," he said.Murthy highlighted many of the software industry's contributions to the country. He noted that the industry had replaced the public sector as the largest job creator in the country. The job creation in turn, he said, created a "positive spiral" in the economy. "The software industry in India employs about 3.2 million professionals and adds about two hundred thousand jobs every year," he said. Murthy said the top IT companies had created more high disposable income based jobs in India than any other company had done in the last hundred years.He said it was thanks to the software industry that India had a strong balance of payments position in spite of oil prices rising. "And wherever you go in the developed world there is a new respect for India thanks to the software industry," he said.