Inaugural speech by The Hon'ble MOS (S&T) Shri Bachi Singh Rawat

Past President, FICCI, Sri. K.K. Modi, Sri P. Murari, Sri R. Natrajan, Shri Jagdish Singh, Captains of industry, proud award winners, ladies and gentlemen and Media Friends,

It gives me immense pleasure to be amongst this multi-splendoured gathering of the captains of Industry, luminaries from academia and the national laboratories and decision makers from the Government. At the outset, my hearty congratulations to the National Award winners. The nation is proud of their achievements. I hope their example will be emulated by many more firms. I am particularly happy to see that 7 out of the 8 award winners this year are units in the small and medium scale sector. It shows that the culture of R&D is now spreading across this sector as well. In recent times a large number of technology-based entrepreneurs have established high tech industries based on their own R&D. This augers very well for India.

It is obvious that a knowledge revolution is leading to knowledge centred trade and industry. We can see dramatic changes in international trade today. It was previously dominated by primary products such as iron ore, coffee, unprocessed cotton etc. It is now moving to knowledge intensive goods. The high technology goods have doubled their share of world merchandise in the last twenty years while at the same time dropping the share of primary products by half. More than half of the GDP in major OECD countries is attributed to the production and distribution of knowledge.

Conversion of existing knowledge to new knowledge requires innovation. Further, the conversion of knowledge to wealth is also done through the process of innovation. Thus innovation is the key to competition for the firms and for the nations. In recent years, multi-sourcing of innovations has gained enormous prominence. This has happened due to a variety of reasons. There is an increasing pressure to shorten international market penetration times for new products. Consequently, there is an increasing pressure to shorten R&D times and also to decrease the market life times for new products. Innovations are beginning to have multiple geographical and organisational sources of technology with increasingly differentiated and innovation specific patterns of diffusion. R&D in high-technology industries such as biotechnology, microelectronics, pharmaceuticals, information technology and new materials has become highly science based .The costs of doing R&D are also increasing phenomenally. For example, the cost of introducing an entirely new molecule as a new drug in the market is slowly but surely approaching a billion dollar!

In this scenario, India has some real and unique opportunities. India can become a true global R&D platform? Why do I say this? Firstly, We have a world class technical manpower. India has over 250 universities, 1500 R&D units, several IITs and engineering colleges. It has the world's largest chains of publicly funded R&D institutions. The cost of doing R&D is a fraction of that in the developed world. Last year, the entire spend of India's R&D was US $ 5 billion, less than the R&D budget of one company like Pfizer alone! A dollar in India delivers so much more than anywhere else in the world.

Let me explain this by taking the example of our space programme. The R&D budget of this programme was less than half a billion dollar last year. In contrast, the R&D budget for General Motors was around 10 billion dollars that means twenty times more. What is it that our space programme has achieved for 5% of the budget of a single company? Today, we design, develop, test and fabricate our own launches. We have moved from one sophisticated launching vehicle to another. We have moved from ASLV to PSLV to GSLV. We have done it without any help from anyone, since for love or for money, no one will give us the technology in these strategic sectors. We have launched several world class satellites so far, of which many are Indian launches, many are in orbit, many are geo-stationary. Not only do we launch our own satellites today but that of our foreign customers too and that includes Germany and Korea. And all this is done for a budget that is just 5 % of a single company in USA!

This cost-cum-competence advantage is evident in industry also. I am very proud to see that 'Scorpio' of Mahindra & Mahindra has won the technology prize this year. 'Indica' has won the CSIR Diamond Jubilee Technology prize. Both 'Scorpio' and 'Indica' were developed at a fraction of the cost that would have been incurred in USA or Europe or Japan. We must, therefore, benefit from this great advantage that we have.

I see another trend. There is a shortage of R&D personnel in some emerging high technology areas in industrialised countries. Companies are, therefore, trying to bridge that demand supply gap in skills. This is leading to contracting out R&D to publicly funded R&D institutions or universities, setting up of joint R&D ventures, acquisition and mergers of R&D intensive organisations and so on. In the extreme, R&D centres themselves are being set up in India. Obtaining access to high-quality scientists, engineers and designers in India is on the top of the agenda of many major companies now. This is why more than 100 companies have set up their R&D centres in India.

The implications of these changes for India are enormous. For example, as India becomes a global R&D hub the demand on science will increase enormously. This will lead to the demand on the creation of new human capital, both in numbers as well as quality. Production of 5000 Ph.D.s annually is too small a number for India, which is one sixth of humanity! This number had not grown, since there was no demand for science in Indian industry, with some notable exceptions. This number can be raised to 25,000 Ph.D.s or even higher. This will augur well for India's emergence as technology superpower.

The second implication is the gradual reversal of brain drain. A normal Indian scientist would love to stay in India, provided he is given a challenging job here. He would love to have his children grow up here in India. All this would become possible for him as India becomes a great R&D web, with world's best companies doing their most challenging R&D here in India - whether it is Intel designing its latest chip - or GE designing its latest aeroengine !

Exports are crucial for India not to merely earn foreign exchange but to establish our competitiveness, more so the exports of high value added products and technology exports, which generate further demand for export of capital goods, raw materials, intermediates and services of the trained manpower. The first task in technology exports is that we must generate exportable technologies, which brings to focus the need for forward looking innovative R&D. Our industry must innovate on its own and use every bit of the national resources available, whether it is the R&D capability of government funded institutions or capital goods manufacturing capacity or the capacity of the other partners in the private sector. Our national R&D system is now not only eager but geared to network more and more within and outside India.

I have spoken about public institutions, industry &I exports etc. But let me remind you that individual creative Indians have high native creativity and inventiveness. We need more mechanisms to support development of idea and inventions of individuals in the non-formal sector. DSIR and DST have scheme to promote individual innovators to become techno-entrepreneur, the Techno-Entrepreneurs Promotion Programme (TEPP) - where not only financial assistance but also informational, S & T based and other support are provided. The scheme has already made a decent beginning. I would like my industry friends to participate in it as its patrons and help bring in the culture on growing small Techno-Entrepreneurs venture.

I wish the deliberations of the Conference all success and I look forward to receiving the recommendations of the Conference. I have great pleasure to inaugurating the seventeenth National Conference on in-house R&D industry.

Jai Hind Jai Vigyan