Scientists and their research must connect with the lives of the common people and the research has to be time bound” said Dr Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister for Science and Technology in Bengaluru on Friday.
He also expressed concern over the scientific community not taking up their work on a time-bound manner while it had also failed to have a better connect with common people.
The Minister said the Union Government was seriously thinking to fix time limits for research projects and also fix time frame and responsibility for the scientists.
He was in Bengaluru and spoke to the media after his visit to Raman Research Institute (RRI) a premier Institute on Astronomy and Astrophysics, light and matter physics, soft condensed matter and Theoretical physics.
He said, “Now what I observe is that research on many scientific projects go on, while the outcome had little impact on the lives of common people. This has to end and there should be better connect between the two communities as well as outcome of research achieved earlier. Time bound research work is the need of the day.’’
‘’We need to trigger a big movement of scientific research that benefits the people. But what I see now is that the passion is somewhat missing compared to earlier decades. CV Raman and Jagadish Chandra Bose worked with little resources but now the scientific community has best of facilities comparable to world standards,’’ he observed.
According to Minister, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a meeting with top scientists and wanted the scientific accomplishments to play a key role in implementation of various programmes of the government like Swatch Bharat, Digital India and Smart City missions.
He appealed to scientists to focus little more in focused areas, be proactive at work to strategise better, think out of the box and produce path breaking research.
‘’Earlier they used to say that there should be a policy for science, now the Government’s thinking is that science should shape its policies,’’ he added.
The Minister called upon the RRI to invite people to witness the research work done in the institute and hold such a meeting on November 21 this year, which is death anniversary of CV Raman.
He visited various labs in the sprawling institute engaged in path breaking research efforts with in-house designing apparatus, telescopes, algorithms. Various cells are grown, manipulated and analysed in Biophysics lab.
Cosmic microwave background distortions lab at RRI is designing and building precision spectrometers for field deployment in remote sites for cosmology studies.