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R. A.
Mashelkar, one of India's foremost technocrats, sounds
an optimistic note on India's chances of ascending to the
elite club of the world's knowledge powers
Briefly said, Dr R. A. Mashelkar's
story is about a small-town boy from a modest background making
the most of his tremendous talent to scale the peaks of achievement.
Currently the director general of the Council of Scientific
and Industrial Research (CSIR) — with 40 laboratories and
some 23,000 employees, the largest institution of its kind
in the world — Dr Mashelkar is widely recognised as one of
the country's foremost technocrats.
An outstanding scientist, Dr Mashelkar's pioneering research
in polymer science and engineering has won him many laurels.
Much as his genius in the field of science stands out, Dr
Mashelkar is equally gifted as an administrator. This was
evident during the period between 1989 and 1995 when he was
director of the Pune-based National Chemical Laboratory (NCL),
the organisation that pioneered India's emergence as a global
platform for research and development (R&D). Dr Mashelkar's
contribution to CSIR has been in similar vein, transforming
it into an institution that has used innovation to increase
India's economic and social wealth.
Nominated for numerous awards and other honours nationally
and internationally, Dr Mashelkar is a rare amalgam of scientific
brilliance, administrative acumen and nation-building vision.
Here he speaks to Christabelle Noronha about innovation,
knowledge creation and how cutting-edge R&D is advancing
India's cause.
Nearly 80 per cent of India's spending in the science and
technology sphere is done by the government. How can spending
by industry in this area be increased?
If you look at the western world or at Japan, the ratio is
exactly the reverse. The reason for this is simple: India
grew in a protected economy till 1991, with little or no competition.
Indian industry thinks of innovation only when faced with
competition, but the situation is changing. For example, in
the pharmaceutical industry expenditure on R&D used to
average 1-2 per cent of turnover a year; now it is about 10
per cent. This is happening because on January 1, 2005, patent
laws affecting the industry will change. Pharmaceutical companies
won't be able to produce copycat drugs anymore; they will
have to discover their own.
Another industry where R&D is in the ascendant is automobiles.
Today the wheel has turned full circle: from the days when
the British Morris Oxford was sold as the Ambassador on our
roads to the Indica is being sold as the 'City Rover' on London
roads. The Tatas are investing in R&D, Bajaj is investing
in R&D, Mahindra and Mahindra is investing in R&D,
all because competition has come marching in. As the industry
faces more competition and protection is reduced, you will
see R&D spending increase.
What do you think is hampering such breakthroughs in other
industries?
It will happen. Take the telecom industry, for instance. As
India's telecom share gets larger and larger and as the market
expands, innovations will happen, and different people will
invest differently. Some companies will get into knowledge
partnerships to derive more from the same investment. Reliance
has a partnership with NCL for its polymer and polypropylene
business. NCL helps Reliance understand the polymer at a molecular
level, compare and contrast it with the competition, and improve
it. This is not the kind of R&D where you try to create
your own parts; it is about getting more out of your investment
by doing process innovation in diverse sectors.
Unless you are threatened with extinction, innovation happens
far too rarely. It is equally true that profitability is linked
to innovation; if you innovate, there are profits to be made.
What are CSIR and other such organisations doing to turn
India into a knowledge power?
There are several steps that are being taken and I will highlight
some of the more important ones. To emerge as a knowledge
power we must not only create new knowledge, but knowledge
that can be protected, so that we can secure wealth from it.
Six to seven years ago, CSIR hardly got half-a-dozen US patents
a year. Last year, it had 142, which is 40 per cent of all
the patents that have been granted to CSIR. It is not just
important to be aware of patents or to file for and get them;
it is equally important to validate them. Today CSIR has created
partnerships with five companies, three in the US and two
in India, to see how its patents can be licensed.
CSIR is also creating public-private networks where the excellence
of the network, rather than individual institutions, is emphasised.
We have launched what is called 'the new-millennium Indian
technology leadership initiative'. Under this the government
gives soft loans at 3 per cent interest, which are written
off if the project does not succeed. We bring public and private
partners together and look at areas where we can lead and
have a sustainable comparative advantage.
Within two-and-a-half years of the programme being launched,
more than150 private institutions have been networked. It's
the biggest public-private partnership, or knowledge partnership,
this country has seen. New products are emerging from this
initiative. For example,
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has been involved in a
major effort to develop new software in biotechnology and
a product called Biosuite is to be launched soon. TCS and
20 other institutions worked together to create this new product.
If you want to become a knowledge power, your strength in
science, technology and engineering has to be high; you have
to develop human capital. We have just one
Indian Institute of Science, which is why the government
has decided to set up four national-level institutions devoted
to fundamental research. Since a large number of Indian Institute
of Technology graduates choose to emigrate, what we did in
1999 was set up a committee which recommended that regional
engineering colleges (RECs) should be lifted to the status
of 'national institutes of technology'. It was also recommended
that RECs' governance structure be changed and that funding
be taken over by the central government so that these colleges
are not impoverished.
This report was accepted in 2002 and has already been implemented.
Today all 19 RECs have been converted into national institutes
of technology. Similarly, there are 100 engineering colleges
all around the country that have been identified for modernisation
and upgrading in a similar way.
The government is continuously increasing the resources allocated
to science and technology. India's investment in science and
technology has gone up in recent times from 0.65 per cent
of GDP to 1.1 per cent, with the immediate goal being to raise
it to 2 per cent. Whether it is increasing human capital stock,
enhancing investments, creating public partnerships or developing
an intellectual property wave, there are several individual
steps that have been taken to move down the path of knowledge
creation.
The basic criterion in the granting of patents is that
innovation must have elements of novelty, non-obviousness
and utility. But most of our R&D institutions and industrial
firms focus on imitative research and reverse engineering.
How does one address such a challenge?
I was faced with this dilemma when I was the director of NCL
back in 1989: any time we did something novel and went to
the Indian chemical industry, they would ask me whether they
had done it before, because, if they had not done it, how
could we? I used to wonder whether we were destined to just
copy and reverse engineer all our lives. The problem was it
was the national context which defined our content, and the
national context was that we were a protected industry. I
could not change the national context, but I could change
the local context and the local content. So I said NCL should
look at exporting knowledge.
Now, I cannot export knowledge to American companies by copying
their product; I had to be ahead of them. That's how we started
creating a culture of patenting. It helped enormously since
we raised the bar on innovation.
The point I'm trying to make is that it is the frame of reference
within which you work that has to change. Some of us change
it ourselves, some of us wait for others to change it through
competition, liberalisation, opening up, etc. Five years back,
no Indian company figured in the list top 50 list in patent
applications. Today the list has 15 Indian companies, mostly
pharmaceutical and biotechnology enterprises. This is a continuing
phenomenon; you will see a dramatic change for the better
in the next three-four years.
What have major innovators such as the US and Japan done
to merit their status of being knowledge economies?
Well, different countries have followed different models.
What Japan did was invest in international technology transfer
and then move forward aggressively through strong local R&D
to create globally competitive products. This happened in
cameras, cars and electronics. Cleverly designed national
policies do stimulate this drive towards 'learning by doing'.
Innovative ways of linking universities and industry, creating
fiscal incentives to promote R&D by private firms, venture
capital financing etc are just some of the proven ways of
promoting this process. The difference between Japan and us
was that when we acquired a technology, we did nothing to
assimilate it.
As far as the US is concerned, it has always placed a premium
on being No 1 - being a leader in technology and being open
to ideas to such an extent that anybody with a great idea,
no matter where he or she comes from, is welcome to participate.
The US has an open-door policy in attracting the very best
talent in the world. Europe, on the other hand, did not have
this culture, but that is changing. By 2010, Europe, as a
whole, is going to have 3 per cent of its GDP invested in
R&D. This will require 7,00,000 additional researchers,
and officials say they will complete these numbers with talent
from the third world.
That would mean a big opportunity for Indians?
A tremendous opportunity, but one that will create competition
for us in terms of brain drain. We will be at greater risk
of losing more people, which entails being more attractive.
This automatically implies that we will have to create a hassle-free
environment to keep these researchers with us.
Indian industry will have to offer competitive salaries and
challenging and fulfilling jobs that match those offered by
foreign R&D outfits.
What is the next big business opportunity for India?
I personally believe that biotechnology is going to be a big
opportunity for India and the reasons are simple. You require
human capital in biotech, which we have. You require genetic
diversity, planned diversity of a huge kind, and that too
we have. You also require markets, whether in agriculture
or biotechnology, and we have them in both. We have a huge
agriculture base and, when it comes to medical biotech, we
have a huge population, so we have large internal markets.
Additionally, this is an industry with extraordinary potential
for technological growth.
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Uploaded on August 9, 2004
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