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‘Chak de CSIR’, Kapil Sibal tells scientists

NEW DELHI: The stunning victory of the Indian team at the Twenty20 World Cup cricket tournament could not have come at a better time for Indian science. Speaker after speaker at a function to celebrate the 65th foundation day of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) here on Wednesday drew heavily from the match to press home the message that scientists need to play a more important role in the socio-economic development of the country.

Exhorting the scientific community to excel, Union Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal said there was a need to adopt the slogan of ‘Chak de CSIR’ after the sportsperson’s mantra of ‘Chak de India,’ with scientists working in the laboratories of the council striving to improve the lot of the poor through team effort.

Noting that the world today was dominated by four major developments in the form of technology revolution, managerial revolution, capital and manpower flows across borders and globalisation, he said the scientific community in the country need to be nimble enough to respond to global developments swiftly.

Delivering the keynote address, agricultural scientist M.S. Swaminathan said the victory was a great lesson for the country as a team of young players were able to achieve the resounding success, despite the absence of the veterans.

“It must be remembered that giants were not there.”

The scientific community, he said, needed to follow their example and work as a team. Among other things, there was a need to launch a scheme to create opportunities in rural areas for skilled non-farm employment so that the problem of rural poverty was tackled at the earliest.

The scheme, he said, could be patterned on the lines of the Spark programme of China, which helped to shift over 100 million rural men and women from farm to non-farm employment within seven years and which subsequently grew into what is currently called the Township and Village Enterprises programme.

China’s ability to become a global outsourcing hub for manufactured products was largely due to the emergence of the town and village enterprises, he said.

The CSIR could join hands with other institutions to launch its own version using technologies developed by the laboratories under it in relation to post-harvest processing and value addition, biomass utilisation and efficient natural resources management.

The scheme, he said, might be launched to begin with in areas where there had been large number of suicides by farmers and suggested that the CSIR might also collaborate with China’s TVE programme.

“It [the TVE programme] was the beginning of the economic revolution in China.”

The scientific community, he said, also needed to promote the scientific temper among the people.

He recalled the speech of Jawaharlal Nehru, at the 60th birthday of the first director of the National Physical Laboratory, K.S. Krishnan, where he jocularly criticised him for believing in ‘Rahu Kalam’ and said that while people had the right to have their beliefs and faith, there was also a need to foster scientific values.

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