India’s military should open itself up to private sector research and push for greater indigenisation of products and systems,” Dr Thomas Kailath, eminent Stanford University professor and Padma Bhushan recipient, said at a recent session at the Asian School of Business (ASB) campus at Pallipuram, Kerala.
Kailath noted that in countries like the US and Israel, the defence sector’s R&D tie-ups with the academia and the private industry have resulted in revolutionary technologies and innovations that have found universal applications. “India’s space sector has done admirably in developing less expensive and world-class technologies indigenously under difficult conditions, but despite decades of research into defence systems, the end products still has a very high proportion of foreign-made components. A management revolution is needed to make indigenisation work for the military,” he said.
In conversation with G Vijaya Raghavan, member, Kerala State Planning Board at ASB, he outlined a number of areas that presented interesting challenges and opportunities for innovators and entrepreneurs, including nanotechnology, instrumentation, signal processing algorithms, multiple antenna technology, transportation systems, waste management, bio-engineering and biotechnology and social networking.
Agriculture is another area in India which could do with extensive research and engineering inputs, he said.
“The instrumentation techniques and devices used for measurements in agriculture are still crude. There are better methods out there, but researchers need to come up with innovative ideas and look for projects to work on, while the government should increase funding and encourage competitiveness,” he added.
The biggest lesson to be learnt from the Silicon Valley, he said, was that “failure is not a disgrace”. Venture capitalists actually like people who have failed in their first projects, because they would have learnt important lessons, he pointed out.
He said, education in India should move from simply learning and memorising facts. “The role of educators should be to train students to think and instill in them the confidence to follow through their ideas,” Kailath said.