Imprint India: Govt's Initiative to Encourage Research in India

By siliconindia | Thursday, 05 November 2015, 12:39 Hrs

BENGALURU: To encourage scientific research in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Pranab Mukherjee commenced Imprint India, an Inter Ministerial Group. It aims to encourage sectors that depend on foreign countries for studies and progress.

With a total of 1,000 crore project budget, this will be funding a lot of research work. It’s a platform to get research ideas from various institutes of the country. The same will also contribute to develop affordable technology.

The idea of Imprint India had came up in August 2014 during a conference among Chairmen, Board of Governors and Directors of Indian Institutes of Technology with the President at Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Modi’s suggestion of national institutes being linked for the research they conduct is also added to the same.

In a tweet about Imprint India Modi shares, “science is universal, but technology has to be local.”

Imprint India focuses to find out subjects of immediate importance in the Indian society that needs innovation, research on these areas, look upon the funding of different research plans and measure the end results of the conducted studies upon Indian life.

Ten themes by top institutes are presently in prime focus by Imprint India: IIT/IISc, namely health care (IIT Kharagpur), computer science and ICT (IIT Kharagpur), advance materials, (IIT Kanpur), water resources and river systems (IIT Kanpur), sustainable urban design (IIT Roorkee), defence (IIT Madras), manufacturing(IIT Madras), nano-technology hardware (IIT Bombay), environmental science and climate change ( IISc, Bangalore) and energy security (IIT Bombay).

Each of the institute short listed these topics after intense research and keeping implementation idea in preview.

During the launch of Imprint India, the Prime Minister highlighted on the importance of skills for Make in India initiative.

The opening ceremony at Visitor’s Conference of Imprint India has been participated by IITs, NITs, IISc, Bangalore, IISERs, IIITs, NIPERs, NIFT, IIEST, Shibpur, RGIPT, Rae Bareli, RGNIYD, Sreperumbudur, School of Planing and Architecture Bhopal and New Delhi and senior government officials.