Indo-US technology forum seeks public-private partnerships

Thursday, 02 December 2004, 20:30 IST   |    8 Comments
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NEW DELHI: Minister of State for Science and Technology Kapil Sibal Thursday called for leveraging science and technological advances in the US and India to achieve the goals of globalisation. Sibal said that while globalisation denoted many things to different people, "it is the inevitable march of modern science and technology led by giant trans-national corporations into new markets and the subjugation of diverse economies into a homogenized common economic order". He was addressing a roundtable on Indo-US Public-Private Partnership in research and technology organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and attended by Norman P. Neureiter, co-chairman of the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum and director of the Centre for Science, Technology and Security Policy. Neureiter emphasised "the need for identifying innovative ideas and using its expertise to concretise them into implementable technologies". Sibal expressed the hope that the Indo-US forum would "now explore through this roundtable the 'public-private partnership' mechanism in an effort to guide its programme initiatives". Sibal said the Indo-US declaration of "the next steps in strategic partnership" announced by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had not only expanded the horizon of cooperation but opened up possibilities of venturing into the domain of high technology cooperation. This could include space, use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, defence and knowledge based industries like biotechnology, IT and nanotechnology. "In this new paradigm, the existence of the Indo-US Science Forum provides the science and technology communities of the two countries a unique platform to foster the new spirit of a partnership based on equality," Sibal said. The minister urged greater harnessing of the strength of scientific establishments in both countries "in order to nurture a sense of excitement for the young and old alike in developing scientific entrepreneurship". Sibal expressed hope that Indo-US cooperation would help enable India to bypass the lack of physical infrastructure. "The Indo-US Science and Technology Forum can make this happen," he said, adding that the country could ill afford to get bogged down by the huge requirement of funds and time for bridging infrastructure gaps. The forum, he said, was outside the pale of being an enterprise between the two governments and had created an identity of its own with the ability to outlive governments. "This affords the forum the opportunity to develop a critical mass of human resource in the two countries and use the synergies to build scientific institutions which can translate science and technology for the prosperity of the masses in today's globalised world." V.S. Ramamurthy, co-chairman of the Indo-US forum and secretary of the department of science and technology, suggested that the "forum must take up technology demonstration programmes and come up with a flagship programme that enthuses the scientific community in both countries into concerted action".
Source: IANS
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