Eminent nuclear scientist and member of the Atomic Energy Commission of India Padma Vibhusan Dr Anil Kakodkar on Monday spelt out a two-pronged strategy for the country’s rapid economic growth. The first placed a strong emphasis on innovation on all fronts with specific emphasis on technology. The second stressed upon application of those innovations to develop products, processes and solutions to problems of the common man.
Kakodkar, who was the chief speaker in the 16th National Technology Day of Nalco, gave an outline of a roadmap to achieve the objective. He started with the plans to sharply boost the quality and quantity of research in science and technology education, established the link between progress of research into economic growth and then shared his idea of how the spinoff of the growth in research and economy could be channelised to help solve the problems faced in their daily life by the common man.
“India’s huge demographic dividend can be encashed only through rapid innovations in several domains, technology being one of them,” said Kakodkar. He said the large educational domain in the country must be linked to research which in turn must boost economic activity and added that the emphasis must be on number of researchers as well as on the efficiency of the research process.
Making some radical suggestions to modify the education process, Kakodkar suggested that every student have a choice of concurrent education and training in all learning domains including opportunities to do so across institutions. He also said effort should be made to catalyse the process towards student-centric education in an open learning framework.
Moving on to application of the fruits of research, Kakodkar cited the example of several countries including Sweden and Israel to emphasise that a close seamless interaction between industry and academia is the need of the hour. He also advocated a cultural change that allows failures in research to be allowed to be forgotten as only 20 per cent of the results of research is likely to be of commercial or operational use but our review system expects each project to meet its stated objective completely which can demoralise other researchers.
“Wealth must be created at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” stressed Kaokdkar and recounted his experience in the Bhaba Atomic Research Centre to highlight the spinoff benefits of research and the mechanisms required to carry it to the people which demands a strong involvement for industry, NGOs and educational institutions.Chief guest Dr Anup K Pujari, Union Mines Secretary, emphasised on small and incremental innovations in all aspects of operation including the technology deployed.
Nalco CMD Ansuman Das, who presided over the function, dwelt on the significance of the National Technology Day. He stressed upon a change of mindset on R&D for technological development and innovation of business processes including production operations. Nalco Director (Project & Technical) NR Mohanty stressed upon the need for innovations to meet market challenges, reduce cost and enhance efficiencies.