IITBHF and IITBAA (http://www.iitbombay.org)

Dr. Kasturirangan, the Chairman of the Board of Governors, Professor Ananth, distinguished members of the Board of Governors, members of the Senate, faculty, students, guests and invitees, ladies and gentlemen and my dear graduating students, it gives me great pleasure to be amongst you today to address the 40th Convocation of this prestigious Institution, participate in your proud moment of success and glory and share a few thoughts with you.

It is now more than 50 years since the first IIT at Kharagpur was established as a sequel to the vision of independent India achieving self-reliance in her technological needs. Then the IITs were described as "fine monuments of India representing India's urges, India's future in the making, symbolic of changes that are coming to India".

It is now almost certain that the objective of IITs becoming world renowned technological Institutions has been realized. Their highly successful alumni all over the world have brought an added aura and brand equity to the IIT name. There is no denying the fact that their successes are in no small measure due to their basic grounding in engineering education at the IITs.

It is also a fact that major and important contributions have been made by a large number of IIT graduates who chose to remain, in the nation's scientific and technological achievements in the area of defence production, atomic and nuclear energy, space technology, chemical and other industries. IITs have also contributed immensely to the development of human resources in other educational institutions, research laboratories and industries in India. In these efforts, I wish to proudly recall the benevolence and munificence of my Government in generously funding the various activities.

On this joyous occasion of your graduation when many of you are eagerly looking forward to pursue your higher education in other reputed universities abroad, I hope a strong sense of national feeling, a spirit of patriotic fervour reminiscent of the golden era of freedom struggle will fire your enthusiasm and bring most of you back to help solve many of the unsolved challenges and problems specific to our country.

The Government is more than a willing partner in this noble endeavour. The last few years the Government has initiated innumerable measures to facilitate the task of nation building with the IITs. The funding pattern to IITs has again been changed in this period from the earlier block grant scheme to one of performance-based funding. The Government is currently entering into an MoU with individual IITs with the aim of preserving their character of national importance and promoting technological excellence in the country.

The Government has increased the level of fellowship for the post-graduate programmes substantially. To further the cause of research it has funded generously the IITs to access on-line a large number of data bases and journals through the Consortia and Indest modes. There are plans also to increase the connectivity by providing adequate bandwidth. A new technology channel (named Ekalavya) has been launched in the Doordarshan network (gyan darshan) whereby a large number of important courses developed in the various IITs by their faculty are beamed continuously for the benefit of a wide cross-section of students in the country. A National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) has also been initiated with generous funding with the Director of your Institute as Coordinator so that video-based and web-based courses can be made available to the large number of engineering colleges in the country. IITs are at the fore-front of this endeavour.

The Government has also constituted a Review Committee under the chairmanship of Prof. P Rama Rao to look into the functioning of IITs and suggest modifications and directions for the future. The team had already visited a number of IITs and will shortly submit its report. Implementation of the recommendations of the Committee will also be considered by the Government in order to enhance the capabilities as well as the research-productivity of the IITs.

Realizing the importance of post-graduate education and research in science and technology the Government has promulgated a well-thought out and well-articulated Technology Policy. Some of the important provisions of the framework is to increase students intake in the post-graduate courses and research programmes so that the present levels will be doubled in the next five years, to take steps to attract foreign students to post-graduate programmes in our country, encourage industry's participation in the post-graduate programmes, institution of National Doctoral Research Fellowships, constitution of special research groups in challenging and emerging areas to function free from all institutional bottlenecks, expansion of the quality improvement programme, encourage government funding from other ministries to support post-graduate programmes in chosen institutions. A Committee under the Chairmanship of Dr.R Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India has come out with a proposal of Industry-Academic collaboration whereby fresh employees of industry will be sent to the IITs to do Ph.D. on industry specific problems.

Now, I want to recall here my speech delivered on the occasion of the Technology Day 2000 while awarding the National Technology Award to TELCO for the development of the automobile INDICA. Many of the issues I had raised then about sustainable technology and consumption are also very relevant to this occasion when I am addressing some of the best of technological brains in the country.

Years of investment and effort in developing scientific and technological capabilities, in nurturing innovation, in empowering our scientists and technologists and in creating Science and Technology institutions of excellence culminated in the demonstration of our national ability to deliver some of the most sophisticated and complex technological systems known to humankind. Much still remains to be done. The long chain of linkages backwards and forwards between academia, basic theoretical research, applied research, public R&D institutions, corporate R&D, financial institutions, entrepreneurship development, business incubation, industry and the markets, needs new tools and instruments of integration and networking. We need a bold new architecture of governance. We need new managerial technologies. We need new partnerships. We need to set our goals much higher. We need to become global leaders in niche areas of technology.

We have to shape our vision into missions which are India-centric, action oriented, focussed on regional needs and aspirations, and establish new partnerships between scientists, technologists, industrial organizations and communities and aim for a strong societal impact. The Department of Science and Technology has undertaken mission projects in the areas of Bio-Technology, Atomic Energy, Space, Environment and Forest, Electronics, Agricultural Research, Scientific and Industrial Research, Health and Ocean Development covering a multitude of fields including food security, plant genetics, bio-diversity, genomic research, medicine, disaster management, ocean-thermal energy and technologies for the visually impaired. Together these missions constitute a newer, more vibrant agenda and a means of knitting diverse people and disciplines into a new kind of commonwealth of knowledge and action. I understand that IIT Madras has been very active in research in many of these areas.

I would also like to highlight the specific field of Bio-Technology and Bio-Tech. Industry. All the IITs have started a Bio-Technology programme in their Institutes. Just as much as we were part of the Information Technology revolution we should also be part of the Bio-Technology revolution. Bio-Technology for health of the people and Bio-Technology remedies, vaccines, treatment systems, bio-seeds, bio-fertilizers, bio-genetic engineering, all hold great promise for solving some of our hitherto most intractable problems. The participation in the Bio-Tech revolution can be achieved only through investments in R&D and enabling the accelerated commercialization of useful research findings.

Just as there has been a "digital divide" we should also be wary of the "genetic divide" in the wake of the emergence of the new bio-technology. This is likely to have serious consequences for the developing countries because of the implications for agriculture, human health and environmental management. There is a real danger that industrialized countries' needs will shape the technological trajectory of bio-technology in ways that will exclude many developing countries from its benefits viz the choice of crops, products etc. as well as regulatory requirements would serve to restrict the technology in specific niches. We must avoid the danger of "genetic divide" by launching key programmes in bio-technology where the choice of problems will be decided by India-centric needs.

The promise offered by technology for building a resurgent and powerful India is immense and we have made significant beginning in this direction. However, we should also be aware of the shortcomings of a purely technocratic vision of development with blind faith in science and technology as a panacea for all our ills. We know that technology has often led to the oppression and the manipulation of the individual, to the wide spread destruction of the natural environment and the depletion of world's supply of natural resources, to the creation of weapons of mass destruction. Technology, originally developed as a means of eradicating poverty, drudgery and ill-health also looms as a large threat to its sanity and survival.

We cannot look at science and technology in isolation. These exist on unbroken wholeness between man and eco-system, the eco-system and our planet, earth and the universe. Different constituents of this cosmic unity are interdependent and their relationship is symbiotic each sustaining the other. No human problem can be solved without taking into account its interaction with the social, the economic, the cultural, the political and the natural environment. The complex web of causality between poverty, malnutrition, environment, education, health, societal value systems and form of production and consumption enables us to use science and technology to set in motion a virtuous cycle of increasing human knowledge, health and productivity. We need a deep introspection of the social, cultural and ethical context in which the production of scientific knowledge takes place.

The concept of sustainable development should also go hand in hand with sustainable consumption. As long as the measure of progress is based on unlimited and unabashed consumption, the tyranny of technology will remain. It is therefore necessary that for sustainable consumption we have to respect Nature and consider the limits imposed by it as sacred. I am happy to learn that IIT Madras is aware of these issues and also working actively in many of the areas mentioned. We should also recognize that ethical values are absolute and we should distinguish between good and bad technology and bring about a shift in control and power over technological processes from technocracies to the community, the family and the responsible individual.

It is not only that we have been unable to harness technology for preventing the misery that periodic drought conditions create, or mitigating the distress situation, but that our technological growth has been at the cost of the traditional methods and technologies that communities had evolved over centuries for protecting themselves from similar situations. In India, in particular, we had some of the most astonishingly ingenious systems of water harvesting, storage, conservation, management and distribution especially in water scarce regions, which have either disappeared or fallen into disuse. These systems and technologies exemplified community empowerment and community capability. The model of individualistic pursuit of technology growth motivated primarily by human selfishness and greed has hit at the very roots of our social and communal fabric. We need to ponder on how we can restore community control of ethical regulation, of innovative management of moving from a strategy-structure systems model to the purpose-process-people model, of protecting traditional knowledge systems, of enlarging the sphere and range of each person's competence, control and initiative limited only by other individuals' claim to an equal range of power and freedom and a vision based on spirituality and ethics.

The restoration of the paramount nature of the human mind and the recognition of its role as the prime mover, the engine of growth is a development of overwhelming significance for the Indian civilization. As a civilization we can differentiate ourselves from many others by the extra-ordinary sophistication, complexity and richness of our traditions in the pursuit of knowledge. At a time thousands of years ago, when many societies were still struggling to negotiate the basics of material existence, we already had a body of thought and knowledge which was breathtaking in its range - cosmology, astronomy, mathematics, linguistics and grammar, logic, ethics, aesthetics, architecture - there was not a branch of human thought which had not been irradiated by the rays of human brilliance.

We never had a conflict between religious and scientific thought because our way of life was governed not by primitive awe, superstition, dogma and doctrine but by an awareness of that deep and meaningful resonance between the human mind and the underlying organization of the natural world. I cannot recall any other society, which has throughout its history accorded such primacy to the quest for knowledge, untrammelled and unbounded by theocracy. The Western notion of a conflict between religion and science, never existed in the Indian mind, because our culture, our way of life, our religion was always a scientific quest, a journey into the unknown.

The reason why I am referring to our rich tradition is because I believe that every society inherits a certain "genetic software" and that in our case we have inherited our traditions of pursuit of knowledge, including the pursuit of knowledge qua knowledge as our genetic software. This gives us an unparalleled edge to emerge as a formidable power in a globalised, networked environment. Some years ago the British socialist historian, EP Thompson, was struck by this characteristic of our civilization and remarked thus - (I quote) "India is .. perhaps the most important country for the future of the world. Here is a country that merits no ones condescension. All the convergent influences of the world run through this society: Hindu, Moslem, Christian, secular, Stalinist, liberal, Maoist, democratic socialist, Gandhian. There is not a thought being thought of in the West or East which is not active in some Indian mind" - (unquote).

When we view this heritage in the context of a knowledge economy; when we realize that this heritage is not the preserve of a few and that in every Indian, however poor by the measures of conventional economics, we have a repository of traditional knowledge of astonishing richness, we can see the unique opportunity before us. It is our bounden duty to harness the technological means available to us to convert every knowledge holder into a dynamic producer of knowledge - not merely a passive recipient of information created by others but a creator, a generator, an entrepreneur of content. This places a demand on our scientists and technologists to make technology available, accessible, affordable and controllable. The question before you has to be whether you will be in a position to respond boldly and imaginatively to this demand placed on you. Let us strive for a technology with a human face.

I also gave three examples of application of science and technology with a human face on that Technology Day three years ago: the development by Shri Himanshu Parekh of a concept of slum networking and the development and design of an e-commerce portal for Indian craftsmen and artisans by the students and faculty of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and the project of DST for integrated application of Science and Technology for the development of the central Himalayan region covering the whole range of concerns from natural disaster management mitigation and control, to conservation, propagation and utilization of natural resources. These examples demonstrate that the use of high technology of international standards can serve the requirements of the economically poor but knowledge rich. It is my abiding belief that for technology to grow, it must be green, it must be ethical, it must have a human face, it must be gender sensitive, it must be region and context-specific and it must empower the community as a whole and not merely a section of it. I believe that it is only these abiding principles which will enable us to make our true tryst with destiny.

I wish once again to express my extreme happiness to be present today with you and share some of my beliefs. I congratulate all the graduates who are taking their degrees at this Convocation and all the prize winners and the proud parents. I wish you all the very best in life and success and hope you will emerge as great leaders in realizing a modern and resurgent India. Jai Hind.

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