iNDIA - Science : A champion of new technologies

ASHOK PARTHASARATHI
Ashok Parthasarathi is at the Centre for Studies in Science Policy, the School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India.

Despite its strengths, India needs to invest far more to retain its lead.

Over the past 30 years, India has built up technological independence in many areas. The government's strategy of maintaining the science base has resulted in a steady increase in research and development (R&D) expenditure as a percentage of gross national product (GNP). Here I review India's many technological strengths, focusing on telecommunications, solar energy and supercomputers as examples.

Although strong in these areas, India must undertake 'mission mode' R&D — technology development and commercialization programmes — to exploit its advantages and/or to respond to pressing national needs. It is particularly important for these initiatives to be undertaken as government–industry partnerships.

As long ago as 1938, India gave pride of place to science and technology. After independence in 1947, Prime Minister Nehru was fond of saying: "The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science." Ever since then, the promotion of science and technology and their use in social, economic, commercial and security spheres has continued unabated, with financial investment in the two steadily increasing.

Domestically developed technologies must be internationally competitive. But India has a barrier: the legendary reluctance of large-scale Indian industry — both public and private — to invest in and undertake R&D and innovation on a substantial and sustained basis. Government initiatives in the development of human resources, fiscal and financial policies, the building of institutional capacities and direct funding of R&D institutions and industry, provide hope that such objectives will be increasingly achieved over the next decade. But the journey will not be easy.

Industry's reluctance to invest adequately in R&D is a problem facing many 'intermediate' countries, including China. But developments in the 1990s seemed to suggest that India was pulling ahead. For example, in pharmaceuticals and agrichemicals, R&D-to-sales ratios of many of India's leading companies grew rapidly from less than 2% in 1990 to close to 6% last year. The same upward trend is seen in the number of international patents obtained by such companies. Solar energy is a particularly good example of an area in which there is both strong research and a high number of commercial products in use.

This improvement is a result of an investment initative begun by the government four years ago. It selected strategic areas of indigenous technologies for development, including biotechnology, vaccines against prevalent communicable diseases, microelectronics, advanced batteries and technologies in atomic energy, space and defence.

The selection criteria varied. For example, biotechnology was chosen partly because of its impact on agriculture, health, industry and the environment, and partly because of heavy product patenting by foreign companies unwilling to license technologies to Indian companies. Vaccines, on the other hand, were picked because little R&D was being done in the industrialized countries for the tropical-disease market. Advanced batteries won their place for their potential to reduce costs and improve solar photovoltaic-based power sources (solar energy), as well as potentially enabling electric vehicles to become economically viable. Microelectronics, atomic energy, space and defence technologies won out because they were restricted by export controls.

Over the same four years, the government provided incentives for industry to invest in R&D. These included tax concessions; excise duty waivers on products covered by patents taken out in North America, the European Union or Japan; and an incentive scheme for 'R&D companies' undertaking in-house R&D and licensing the resultant technology.

Solar energy

In response to the price hike of crude oil in August 1973, and as a result of the vision of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, India began a solar-energy programme in 1975. This effort was reinforced when the Department of Non-Conventional Energy Sources was established in 1982, the first, and so far only, government agency in the world for renewable energy.

India now has 9 manufacturers of solar photovoltaic cells and 20 manufacturers of photovoltaic panels, with an installed production capacity of 20 MW per year. This is the fourth largest capacity in the world and is by far the largest in a developing country. About 900,000 commercial photovoltaic systems have been designed, developed, manufactured and installed across the country to provide electrical energy that is desperately needed in rural, remote and industrial areas.

The energy provided is used for a wide range of essential services, including water pumps for drinking and irrigation, street lighting, refrigerators for storing vaccines in rural health centres, warning systems at unmanned rail-road crossings (of which India has more than 9,000), communication equipment, water desalination plants in desert settlements, anticorrosion protection systems for cross-country oil and gas pipelines, and the communication and control systems on offshore oil and gas platforms.

Telecommunications

In 1984, the government found that the telecommunication switching systems designed and engineered abroad were not really optimal for Indian applications and caused operational problems. So it set up the Centre for the Development of Telematics (C-DOT), an autonomous design and engineering organization aimed at developing digital switching systems.

This decision to develop a fully digital exchange came at a time when many international companies were still trying to sell obsolete analogue systems to India. Over the next decade, C-DOT worked closely with the electronics industry to develop a family of switches, ranging from small 128-line systems designed to work in harsh rural environments, to international state-of-the-art, 40,000-line capacity exchanges for cities, all mutually compatible.

Distinctive features of the technology include the use of the most powerful software available, a wide base of component suppliers to feed the assembly lines, and a 'model' plant built just outside Bangalore. This plant was set up by the public-sector company Indian Telecommunication Industries to produce and test pilot exchanges in the telecom network under live operational conditions. High-quality technical documentation was generated to cover the engineering, manufacturing, testing, evaluation, installation and commissioning of the network, as well as the training of operating and maintenance engineers.

By the end of March 2002, about half of the 37 million lines in the Indian telecom network had C-DOT switches. C-DOT licensees have secured significant orders and exported switches to about 12 developing countries against stiff competition from multinational companies. This has been possible because C-DOT switches are not only technologically state-of-the-art, but are also 30% cheaper than those of its competitors.

Supercomputers

In 1989, recognizing the need for high-performance information technology, the government set up the Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). This was a national initiative to design and produce supercomputer systems based on parallel-processing technology. C-DAC has since brought out three generations of PARAM supercomputers, which have increasingly advanced technologies and computing power, with an equivalent of US$25 million in investment.

Typical scientific and engineering applications for C-DAC's supercomputers are in weather forecasting, seismic data processing, computational fluid dynamics, structural mechanics and bioinformatics. A particularly successful use, which is of crucial economic and social importance, is the modelling of the monsoon by the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting in New Delhi.

The price:performance ratio of C-DAC's supercomputers is better than those of any North American, European or Japanese supercomputers, in part because of the initial adoption of parallel-processing technology. The PARAM 10000 commissioned by C-DAC in 1998 was at that time the most powerful supercomputer in Asia outside Japan, with a computing power of 100 gigaflops. C-DAC is currently building an even more powerful system, PARAM 20000, with teraflop capability, planned to be in action by mid-2003. This will be used in climate and molecular modelling, genome sequencing, and two- and three-dimensional seismic data processing. C-DAC has supplied more than 50 supercomputers to domestic and export customers, including Russia, Canada, Germany and Singapore.

The next development is an 'iGrid' to link up the main supercomputing sites, providing researchers with access to a high-performance computing facility. This will also build up skills in the front-line area of supercomputing, which will have spin-offs in applications such as networking, security, visualization and large-database management. Locally developed and commissioned iGrids should be two to three times cheaper than imported versions.

Computer software

One of India's major successes in the 1990s is the rapid growth of the computer-software industry, which brought India's high-tech capabilities to the attention of the world. A US$100-million turnover in 1992 grew to an output of US$9 billion in 2001, equivalent to 35% of Indian exports and 15% of GDP for that year, with a target of US$50 billion for 2008.

There have been some accusations that this has been achieved without government support, but the importance of promoting software development, particularly for export, was recognized by the erstwhile Department of Electronics as far back as 1972. Although high trade barriers were then the rule, duty-free import of computers was permitted for companies committing at least 75% of their software output to export. In addition, despite restrictions on direct foreign investment in other sectors, companies that were entirely foreign owned were allowed to set up software export operations in the Santa Cruz export-processing zone on the outskirts of Mumbai. In 1984, the government set up the Software Development and Promotion Agency, but the accelerated growth of the computer industry posed several problems, requiring rationalization of these incentives to promote software exports.

In 1986, software was identified as one of the key sectors on India's agenda for overall export promotion, and emphasis was placed on the importance of integrated software development for both domestic and export markets. Commercial incentives to software companies included a ten-year tax holiday, 100% income-tax exemption on software-export earnings, export subsidies, and duty-free imports of hardware and software for export purposes. In the 1990s, entry barriers for foreign companies were removed, restrictions on foreign technology transfers lifted, and venture capital was provided to finance software development.

At the same time, free-trade zones for software (software technology parks) were set up with public funds to provide infrastructure for software export. There are now 18 such parks containing 5,600 software export units, which together account for about 70% of India's total software exports.

The government also launched a huge training programme and funded numerous related R&D projects. Without these and other large investments, India's emergence as a major force in the software area just would not have been possible.

Other areas

India has also built up, almost completely independently, a nuclear-energy programme encompassing the entire nuclear fuel cycle, from the mining of uranium ore to the design and manufacture of the equipment for nuclear power stations — as well as developing the expertise needed for installing and commissioning this equipment, and operating and maintaining the stations. India became a nuclear-weapon power in the 1990s, despite numerous restrictions in the form of technology embargoes and sanctions by the existing nuclear-weapon powers.

In addition, India is strong in technologies relating to conventional defence systems, such as electronics systems and satellite technology. This includes a remote sensing satellite with resolution better than 1 metre; a satellite containing telecoms, high-power television broadcasts and meteorological operational payloads; and the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, which has not only launched several remote-sensing satellites and multiple satellites in a single launch, but is being prepared for the launch of a 1-tonne scientific experimental payload around the Moon.

There are also, of course, areas in which India has failed to develop and commercialize high technology, notably microelectronics, instrumentation and materials technology. The main challenge for the future is to achieve successes of the kind discussed above on a much larger scale and in many more sectors. Without a doubt, the champion technologies already developed and commercialized must be maintained at such levels and kept internationally competitive.