Ignited minds - Getting the forces together

Here is an excerpt from Ignited Minds which talks about the various projects (involving integration of various fields) that Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam undertook while his tenure as a chairman of the TIFAC team.
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I held the position of Chairman of the Technology Information Forcasting and Assessment Council ( TIFAC ) under the Department of Science and Technology, for nearly two tenures ( about eight years ). This period saw the creation of Technology Vision 2020 based on the work of task teams consisting of 500 experts in all who had available to them inputs from 5000 scientists and technologists from different fields. Later, the Technology Vision document and the national security aspects got integrated and the India Millennium Missions ( IMM 2020 ) emerged. When I took over as Principal Scientific Advisor to the Govt. of India, in Nov 1999 , the task was to do detailing and evolve a aworking plan for IMM 2020. It is indeed a roadmap for transforming India into a developed country - the Second Vision of the Nation. Certain experimental work on education , agriculture and also development of a a number of villages in an integrated way is currently progressing.

I worked with the TIFAC teams in three areas - agriculture, advanced education and rural connectivity.

With Prof. S.K.Sinha , a renowned agricultural scientist , TIFAC took up a project to enhance agricultural productivity in central Bihar and eastern India. Six villages in one and nine in another were selected during the kharif season of 1998. The system approach consisted of soil analysis , seed choice, cultivation season, fertilizer selection and training to the farmers. This intensive collaboration of scientists and farmers resulted in substantial increase in wheat yields, which rose from 2.5 tonnes per hectare to nearly 5 tonnes per hectare. When I and Y.S. Rajan visited a few villages where this system approach is used, we found the farmers showing an interest in new issues like equipment for faster harvesting, storage facilities and marketing and banking systems. It was clear that a small team, cutting across various departments could work wonders even in a difficult region , achieving results in a cost and time effective way.

Another experiment under way is REACH ( Relevance and Excellence ain ACHieving new heights in education institutions ). The purpose of this mission is to establish 80 to 100 centers that follow common academic programmes and share the commitment to achieve excellence. In this endeavour, they work together by interchange of faculty and joint research as need be. As part of this, Centers of Relevance and Excellence ( CORE) have been established in Patiala, Dibrugarh, Mumbai, Thanjavur and Surat in the area of agro and industrial biotechnology , advanced computing and information processing, petroleum reservoir engineering, industrial safety, environmental engineering and herbal drugs. Our experience in the REACH programme is that industries are willing to participate in the specialized areas of their interest and they are also willing to invest about 40 per cent of the total expenditure in establishing CORE. In return, they will benefit in terms of skilled manpower and access to the results of research. The willingness of industry to be partners in technology development and education has helped our confidence a great deal. It was also satisfying to see Dr M.S.Vijayaraghavan, Adviser in the office of the Principal Scientific Adviser, blossom into a leader in the integrated learning system. His innovation was to bring commitment of industry to the learning programme.

Another example relates to the programme for rural connectivity evolved under the leadership of Prof. P.V.Indiresan, who was formerly Director of IIT Madras. As mentioned earlier, the fact that there is net migration from villages to cities indicates that they offer more opportunities and the only way to equalize the flow is to develop the rural areas and bring life there on par with that in the cities. Once employment opportunities increase there, as do the amenities available, as per the model created by Prof. Indiresan, rural development may be expected to prevent, if not actually reverse the rural - urban migration. Presently, several technologies exist to make this possible, provided we use the connectivity approach in various areas.

For the rural development programme called PURA, we have introduced the concept of dynamic connectivity of four types called PEEK: Physics, Electronics, Economics and Knowledge connectivities.
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Nice projects na ! Will put up another post someday on the current state of these projects. This book was written in the 2002- 2003 period.

Meanwhile, I hope all the projects have achieved great success in the fields they embarked on.