A DIFFERENT LEADERSHIP
ROLE IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Rajendra Prabhu *
To talk of a "leadership
role for India in science and technology" at first glance
appears a daydream if not a political rhetoric. But it is not
politicians alone like Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and
the Minister of Human Resource Development and Science and Technology,
Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi who are asserting that such leadership
is an attainable goal. Top level scientists in this country and
abroad are one with our political and industrial leaders in claiming
that India could achieve it within a short time frame.
"My vision"
, said the Prime Minister inaugurating the 90th session of the
Indian Science Congress at Bangalore in January 2003, "is
to embrace science and technology in all its true spirit, to realize
our dream of making India a developed nation". In some way
the election of a distinguished scientist to be the President
of India itself expressed this vision in more concrete terms.
It was a commitment to the nation that at the highest level science
and technology on the one hand and developmental policies on the
other will coalesce. The President, Dr.A.P.J.Abdul Kalam, himself
leaves no opportunity unused to stress that India not only can
but also should be a leader in science and technology.
This is also in line with India’s fundamental civlizational quest,
as Dr. Joshi points out: "The Indian civilization is one
of the few for whom the scientific impulse to know, to enquire
has been a defining feature of its existence."
The leading scientists
and science administrators have for sometime now been defining
the road map to this leadership role for India. At the Indian
Science Congress in Pune in the year 2000, the general president
of the meeting, Dr. R. A. Mashelkar, envisaged an India in the
next 20 years where our scientists would have won some half a
dozen Nobels in different disciplines. Three years later, Dr.
K. Kasturirangan, the president of the recent Science Congress
session in Bangalore, declared last January that the "moment
has arrived to firmly establish India as a global R&D platform
and strengthen symbiotic links between industries and R&D
system, on scales which are unprecedented." Several initiatives
in the last five years have given this confidence, initiatives
like the millennial programmes in selected areas of science and
technology, the Swarna Jayanti scholarships and massive improvement
in R&D institutions and their networking for specified goals.
In March 2003, a
panel of scientists and industrialists including leading researchers
from abroad like Dr. Inder Verma from the Salk Institute, USA
and Dr. Craig Venter, the scientist who led the team to sequence
the human genome, had one firm affirmative reply to the question
whether India could be a global R&D hub. "It is already
happening" Dr. Verma told an ASSOCHAM-organized discussion.
He quoted the success India was having in exporting Indian-designed
and made Hepatitis-B vaccine at a price far below what the made
abroad variety cost. At the same discussion group, Dr. Mashelkar
was more specific in asserting India’s potential to be the global
leader in R&D. " Already over 100 companies from abroad
have set up their R&D centres here in the last five years",
he recalled. Among those companies is the US-based global company
GE " whose R&D budget at three billion US Dollars, exceeds
our entire national R&D budget". Yet, the same company
executives say that India’s R&D output is "fantastic"
for the comparatively small investment needed.
That is just one
of the many reasons why global companies are selecting India as
their R&D base. But there are other, much weightier reasons.
Compared to the global
expenditure on such cutting edge technologies as nano sciences,
energy abundance, genome research, future trends in medicine and
immunology and transport systems, the total Indian commitment
in the 10th Plan for S&T at Rs. 24,000 crore might look puny.
Yet, it is exactly double the allocation that S&T got in the
9th Plan. What Dr. Kasturirangan and others in science policy
implementation areas are emphasizing are the capabilities created
in these cutting edge areas. They are asking the skeptics to consider
their claim in the context of the network of S&T institutions,
and their recent sensitization to the advantages of working with
industry and pursue the benefits of a patent regime.
This network now
involves six major scientific departments, 400 national R&D
laboratories, 231 universities and about 1300 in-house R&D
units in industry. To Dr. Kasturirangan this "represents
one of the world’s largest systems for generation of creative
science and technology".
To those who have
watched these very institutions in the past mired in personality
conflicts, bureaucratic disputes over seniority and indifference
to the requirement of local industries, the change that has taken
place in most of them strikes as remarkable. The Prime Minister,
Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee, himself mentioned the "clear winds
of change in the CSIR" which under Dr. Mashelkar has moved
into a vibrant partnership with local industry needs. Recently
it received its 100th US patent and is vigorously building up
a digital directory of indigenous technologies so that in future
the recent stories like the attempt to patent turmeric preparation
abroad do not succeed. Every lab under the CSIR has to earn a
part of its upkeep from services rendered to local industry or
community.
The partnership with
industry is built into several research projects of the Technology
Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC) which
had enjoyed the leadership from Dr. A.P.J.Abdul Kalam and his
executive director, Y.S.Rajan. Out of these projects have come
varied products from human and veterinary diagnostics, specialised
high value materials to short-range civilian aircraft. Recently
TIFAC, Madurai Kamraj University and a number of industrial concerns
joined together with a Singapore institution to work on nano technologies
and to look for futuristic products at the level of a millionth
of a centimetre dimension—the way all manufacture will be recast
in a decade or two.
The existence of
a network as vast and varied as the 40 labs under the CSIR, the
many centres of the Defence Research and Development Organization
(DRDO), the excellent institutions like BARC, TIFR, CAT, the Saha
Institue of Nuclear Physics, Institute of Plasma Research, all
under the Department of Atomic Energy, and the different centres
of research and development under the ISRO is guarantee enough
to expect world-class science from them. What gives hope that
the doubling of the funds for S&T would produce world class
science is the recognition in the scientific community itself—apart
from that in the government—of their weaknesses. The recognition
of the weaknesses is the first step that remedies could follow.
The Prime Minister’s recent address to the Science Congress listed
some of these weaknesses like the disconnect between science and
policy, insufficient linkages between R&D and broader economy,
need to convert innovations at the grassroots level into profitable
enterprises and bureaucratisation of R&D establishments. This
recognition of internal weaknesses is an assurance that the quest
for leadership role in S&T for the country would not remain
a mere rhetoric.
Dr. Kasturirangan
has listed the reform agenda. These include creation of an environment
for dynamic assessment and appraisal, periodic reviews on issues
of progress, criticalities to enable mid-course corrections and
courage of programmatic decisions to phase out activities that
have outlived their relevance. What further supports the hope
that S&T would work in partnership with industry is the change
in the attitude of industry itself. It is now seeking support
from the research community as foreign technology holders are
increasingly reluctant to share technology for joint ventures
with Indian enterprises. Centres of excellence in various disciplines
are now set up by the Department of Science and Technology only
on condition that there are industries willing to support these
centres for research partnership on a long-term basis. Technology
has become a major factor in competitive ability in the emerging
globalized economy.
The success of Indian-designed
and made vehicles Indica and Scorpio in an environment of competing
foreign models are only two of the several instances of Indian
industry now beginning to understand that the days of technology
import, are over. In the liberalized environment the Indian industry
must have its own technological strength to be globally competitive
as technology is a major factor in competitive ability. There
is thus an increasing convergence of science-seeking industry
and industry-seeking local scientific talent. As the President,
Dr. Kalam told the Millennium Biotechnology Meet, "the economic
strength of our nation has to be powered by competitiveness and
competitiveness has to be driven by knowledge power." When
even GE, IBM and Matsusushita are knocking at our R&D doors,
how could Indian industry be far behind?
The third factor
in this emerging scene is what Dr.M.M. Joshi has stated as the
"thrust towards integration of science and technology with
societal concerns" clearly visible in the new Science Policy
which has done away with the distinction between science and technology.
Behind it is the recognition that the poor countries with capabilites
in S&T must help themselves to develop products relevant to
their specific needs. Only India could have developed the simputer
- the low-cost handheld device that even barely literate villager
could use for data entry or retrieval the global giants like IBM
or HP would not be interested in it. Developments like the low-cost
asthma drug, Asmol, or the many human and animal diagnostic kits
or the anti-cerebral malaria drug, anti-leprosy vacccine and Hepatits-B
vaccine were the result of our science being infused with societal
concern. The search for computer key boards for all our over 200
languages and dialects and capabilities for translating them from
one to the other is another societal need that only Indian R&D
would be interested in. Media Lab Asia’s project supporting this
multi-lingual effort is another example of research meeting societal
need.
What is considered
hi-tech research like solar energy conversion, the cracking of
the energy in our abundant thorium reserves or the invention of
hydrogen-based portable energy packs and the exploiting of condensed
methane deposits in the coastal sea, are more relevant to us who
even now have a huge energy gap to make up. We already import
over 70 million tonnes of oil and oil products. With a population
that is likely to grow to 1.5 billion by the year 2050, this gap
would only widen. It should be good news to be told that in all
these fields we are now almost at par and in some respects even
further ahead as in the thorium utilization technologies as Dr,
Anil Kakodkar, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, pointed
out at the Science Congress, compared to the front-line technology
work in advanced countries in these areas. That is what the presentations
at the recent Science Congress in protein- DNA information exchange,
thorium utilization, fusion and fuel cell technologies and developments
in immunology and spacecraft and delivery systems, demonstrated.
In areas where we had once to beg for technology or equipment
as in super computing or cryogenics or composites, we are today
in a position to give others better and far cheaper technologies.
How deep our science
married to societal concerns can go was brought home at the Science
Congress by a cardiac surgeon. Our capabilities in space-based
systems, telecommunications, health care and information technology
have all come together with societal concern in the network arrangement
that a Bangalore cardiac surgeon, Dr. Devi Shetty, has made to
reach out his expertise to a people as far as Tinsukia in Assam
and Bankura in West Bengal, Tripura and in several other places
across this vast country.
With active assistance
from the Indian Space Research Organization Dr. Shetty deals with
cardiac patients whom he "sees" through telemedicine
with the help of a local doctor in those far-off places sitting
in his clinic in Bangalore. Not only cardiac care is given to
the people far away but where major surgery is needed he gets
them to come to Bangalore where treatment for the poor is absolutely
free. Karnataka has caught on to this and is planning to reach
out Dr. Shetty to 27 district headquarters over Dr. Kasturirangan’s
space system. With 2.5 million people needing cardiac care every
year and only 10 cardiac surgeons produced per year, it is telemedicine
alone that could help extend the reach of the available human
resources within the short term. India’s significant progress
in space technology and information technology has helped create
the base for such outreach from metro centres to places far away.
The story is no different whether it is making
nanotags in industrial and health care, attacking illiteracy through
distance education and tracking deforestation and in a hi-tech
institution like BARC making stand alone nuclear power packs for
far away villages and water de-salination plants for coastal habitations.
A distinct quality of the leadership in science and technology
we seek will be in enabling high technology in different disciplines
to work for developing products and services that are relevant
to the poor and deprived at home and other similarly poor like
us across the world. India may not be able to sell switches of
one lakh lines but the 512 line switches of CDoT or the CorDECT
technology for extending wireless telephone lines to rural areas
have buyers in Africa and Latin America. The nuclear power packs
for remote areas that are under development at BARC would certainly
help remote communities the world over where they are living far
away from any energy source. Our hi-tech serves the people at
the lowest rung of society. And our scientists are proud of it.
"Contrary to
the linearity of the earlier paradigms, we now see S&T policy
in more holistic terms" said Dr. Joshi at the release of
the new policy document. "Our belief is that science must
touch every facet of national life". The thrust of the new
S&T policy is to use science as the key problem-solving instrument
in all endeavours, whether it is in agriculture, industry, business,
trade, services as well as in governance. Thus when we speak of
leadership role in science and technology it is not a certain
ivory tower excellence but how far science and technology are
impacting and changing the lives of our people and improving the
quality of their life.
When science and
technology improve the quality of life at the mass level, it gets
the natural public support for governments to seek investments
in it on the "continental proportion" that science leaders
like Dr. Kasturirangan speak of. It also corrects the "disconnect’
between science and policy that the Prime Minister pinpointed.
Five years ago two
events happened almost simultaneously. In May 1998, India under
the leadership of Shri Atal Bihari Vajapyee as the new Prime Minister,
demonstrated its capability in mastering nuclear technology at
Pokhran in Rajasthan all by its own efforts. At the same time,
laboratory heads of the CSIR and science administrators were meeting
in Bangalore with the HRD and S&T Minister, Dr. Joshi, to
create what Dr. Mashelkar termed as "Team India". That
team defined the road map for India to become a global R&D
hub and for science to infuse economic and policy dialogue. The
next year came a National IT Policy that set a specific goal for
the IT sector with an export target of 50 billion dollars ( five
times what India is exporting in IT today) and total IT output
of 80 billion dollars. Communication and biotechnology maps have
also been drawn up. Subsequently, goals have been set in almost
each sector of science and technology.
Looking back five
years, we have had a continuity of government leadership since
1998, the leader of the science team who made the nuclear technology
demonstration possible is the new President of the country, and
almost every month somebody or the other from global industry
leadership is visiting India to explore S&T collaboration
with Indian brain power. In these developments, there is the revelation
that the world is waking up to the fact that with a determined
and committed leadership, India has begun the roll to be a dominant
R&D centre of the world.
*
Senior Science Journalist
