Sibal urges public-private research

Kapil Sibal has called for more public private partnerships in the advancement of science in India.

Speaking to the media here on Sunday after meeting the directors of 38 CSIR labs in the country, the minister of state for science and technology and ocean development who is also vice-president of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), said: "The basic criteria which we discussed was that any scientific advancement in the country should not bypass the rural population."

As nearly 700 million of our population was under the poverty line, all technological progress should ensure that these people were part of it.

"Various issues such as water desalination, agriculture, healthcare, employment generation were discussed with the directors. I have asked them to adopt more public private partnerships in their work so that actual research reaches the common man."

He added that with the advent of a product patent regime from January 2005, reverse engineering of drugs will not be possible and the Indian pharmaceutical industry should put in more efforts to discover new molecules.

"Efforts are being put in by CSIR in this regard and we should emerge as the pharmaceutical superpower. We need to spend more on R&D and currently it accounts for only 0.87 per cent of our GDP as against the target of 2 per cent. Developed countries spend nearly 7-8 per cent of their GDP on research and it is imperative that we step up in this aspect," Sibal said.

He noted that CSIR has been performing admirably well and has filed for nearly 146 patents during last year. CSIR plans to file 200 patents this year and the network of national laboratories has slowly been getting global recognition for its work.