The Hindu : 'India must reap the benefits of technology'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Aug 27, 2002

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'India must reap the benefits of technology'

By Our Special Correspondent

HYDERABAD Aug. 26. The time has come for India to reap the benefits of the strong foundations it had laid in science and technology and leapfrog into the developed nations' club. The country should determine its own technological imperatives which were quite distinct from those of the developed countries and make sure that it was not dominated through mechanisms such as intellectual property rights and technology control regimes, nuclear scientist, R. Chidambaram, said here today.

Dr. Chidambaram, who is the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, was delivering the 11th Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Memorial Lecture organised jointly by the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) and the A.P. Akademi of Sciences.

While stating that technology is power, he said the country could become developed when all the parts and segments of society developed fully. But it was crucial to achieve a several-fold increase in per capita power consumption, improve life expectancy from 62 to 80 years and attain near 100 per cent literacy and societal equity.

For this, the choice of proper technology and its management was important. Its purpose was to create national wealth, improve the quality of life particularly in rural areas, enhance food, energy and health security and develop infrastructure for research. Critical technologies must be selected on the basis of national perspectives. For example, the country must go in for fast breeder reactors, a move that would be opposed by the United States on various grounds, including the low international prices of uranium.

Dr. Chidambaram said the critical technologies that India needed could be classified into strategic (nuclear, space and security-related), dual use and technologies for creating energy, health, water and environment security besides IT and bio-technology. While lauding India's leadership in computer software, he said there was need to build an infrastructure for manufacture of hardware.

The facility of supercomputers was denied to India forcing it to use parallel processing computers. He said he believed that India could be considered developed only when the quality of life in rural areas became comparable to that in non-urban areas of already developed countries. This could be possible when farmers resorted to value-addition and when technology was downsized to meet their needs.

Stating that the "velocity of R&D" in the country was slow due to reasons like infrastructure weaknesses, bureaucratic delays and lack of synergy between universities and laboratories, he urged the industry to realise the need to support basic research as otherwise they would lose out in the IPR regime. Earlier, the IICT Director, K.V. Raghavan, addressed the gathering.

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