The US' 14 engineering targets should get us thinking along similar lines, but strong inter-disciplinary activity and cooperation between academia, government and industry is vital for this, says Dinesh Mohan.
At about the same time that the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) was announcing plans to open new IITs, IIMs and other central universities, a high powered diverse committee of experts, some of the most accomplished engineers and scientists of USA, met and proposed a list of 14 grand engineering challenges facing us in the 21st century. The panel, which was convened by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering at the request of the U.S. National Science Foundation, did not rank the challenges selected, nor did it endorse particular approaches to meeting them.
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The authors of the report did recognise that "Foremost among the challenges are those that must be met to ensure the future itself. The Earth is a planet of finite resources, and its growing population currently consumes them at a rate that cannot be sustained". So they exhort engineers that "...in pursuing the century's great challenges, engineers must frame their work with the ultimate goal of universal accessibility in mind". However, they did not focus on who consumes the resources at unsustainable rates. They also include "terror" prevention technologies as major objectives for engineers in the 21st century and the issue turns up repeatedly in the report. They believe that "engineering solutions are badly needed to counter the violence of terrorists". If the world actually moves toward universal accessibility, one would think that causes for young people taking up arms would reduce. However, the authors of the report do not appear to have much faith in this future. A pity, but this obviously reflects the fear psychosis surrounding the rich and powerful of the world in general and the USA in particular.
Out of the other 13 challenges about 4 have to do with energy and the environment, 3 with health and medical sciences, 4 with education and information technology and 2 with infrastructure. The report's authors are convinced that "Engineers must also face formidable political obstacles. In many parts of the world, entrenched groups benefiting from old systems wield political power that blocks new enterprises. Even where no one group stands in the way of progress, the expense of new engineering projects can deter action, and meeting many of the century's challenges will require unprecedented levels of public funding. Current government budgets for U.S. infrastructure improvement alone falls hundreds of billions of dollars short of estimated needs". They do not clarify who these entrenched groups are, but one can attempt a guess on their prejudices. What is as worrying also is the perceived dependency on huge amounts of money by American standards. If enough money is not available there, then what is the rest of the world to look forward to? There is little discussion on how some of the future solutions might depend on lowering the cost of doing things and use of less energy overall.
If we ignore the philosophical and ethical conundrums implicit in the report, then it makes interesting reading for an engineer. The report is an engineer's delight! Fusion, solar energy and carbon sequestration are considered the main solutions because "it remains unlikely that fossil fuels will be eliminated from the planet's energy-source budget anytime soon, leaving their environment-associated issues for engineers to address". For the environment, "A major need for engineering innovation will be in improving the efficiency of various human activities related to nitrogen, from making fertilizer to recycling food wastes" because human activity has doubled the amount of fixed nitrogen over the levels present during pre-industrial times. For water availability they lay stress on various nanotechnology approaches, such as nanofitration membranes that can be designed to remove specific pollutants while allowing important nutrients to pass through.
Health care issues focus on developing methods for representing biological knowledge so that computers can store, manipulate, retrieve, and make inferences about this information in standard ways, and rapid deployment of vaccines and drugs to contain epidemics. The engineering approach includes developing better systems to rapidly assess a patient's genetic profile; another is collecting and managing massive amounts of data on individual patients; and yet another is the need to create inexpensive and rapid diagnostic devices such as gene chips and sensors able to detect minute amounts of chemicals in the blood.
Interestingly enough, improvement of urban infrastructure and transport facilities has been included as an engineering challenge for the 21st century. The summary presented does not indicate any fresh way of thinking. One sentence in particular astounded me: "Bridges, buildings, and even freeways contribute to the aesthetical appeal of a city, and care in their design can contribute to a more enjoyable urban environment".
I suppose if a bunch of engineers technocrats and scientocrats from India got together and produced a report, it may end up sounding very similar and may include very similar goals! It is quite clear to me that we might go very wrong in India if our scientific establishments ape the concerns of the US report. Unless we chart out a less expensive and lower-energy course of action, we really may not have a future. Though the US report keeps mentioning concern for the disadvantaged of the world, the prescriptions included are not likely to go far in solving many of our basic problems.
The report should, however, make us sit up and rethink our priorities in the area of science, technology and education. All of the engineering challenges included in the report pre-suppose three things: (a) strong interdisciplinary activity, (b) close cooperation between bureaucrats, research institutions and industry, and (c) excellence in all areas of endeavour – life sciences, physical sciences and social sciences. At present, we are not well placed on any of these fronts.
Interdisciplinary work in India will remain a distant dream as all our elite institutions (IITs, IIMs, IIITs, medical schools, design schools, etc) exist in splendid isolation and faculty members work happily in silos. It will not do to just open a few small new departments in our narrowly defined institutions. Research institutions will have to widen their scope of learning and teaching by collaboration between the existing institutions. For example, in Delhi, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, IIT Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Indian Statistical Institute exist in close proximity. We could make a start by allowing students in one institution to take courses in any other. Slowly collaborations and interaction may follow. As a policy, we should not establish any more narrowly focussed institutions and reform our old ones into multidisciplinary places of research and learning.
Collaboration between industry, government and academic institutions is in a very nascent stage in India and there is very little demand for good researchers - lower than the number of MTechs and PhDs produced in the country. This when India's production of such postgraduates is less than a fifth that of China's. Studies from Europe and the USA show that industry funds only those universities for research in science and technology that have previous heavy investment by the public sector. The second condition to be met is that professionals with PhDs exist in significant numbers both in industry and the public sector. In the absence of this, private companies and government organisations do not have the skills and the network necessary to monitor research projects at universities in any intelligent manner.
We are a long way from this situation. The only way forward is for the government to have a targeted plan to increase employment of postgraduates to more than 30% in all public sector institutions. Once these researchers reach a critical mass in each institution, collaboration may follow. The overall research capability in most private industrial groups is still very weak. This makes it impossible for them to sponsor meaningful research. It is only when companies spend more than about 2% of their turnover on research and development and employ PhDs that the activity becomes important for the top management. Most companies spend much less.
It is necessary that we came up with our own engineering challenges for the 21st century. It would be useful to remember that a vast majority of our workers of tomorrow will be ill educated and a substantial number functionally illiterate. This includes more than 60% of those under fifteen years old enrolled in almost dysfunctional schools. More than 80% of our young engineers of today have graduated from capitation fee colleges and received little education. They will be the senior professionals of tomorrow. Therefore, our engineering challenges will have to include development of modern technologies that work efficiently with a large labour component. In parallel, low-cost and huge mid career skill up gradation programmes would have to be put in place.
Examples of engineering challenges for India would include agriculture technologies, new designs for railways, highways and urban transport, more efficient energy form coal, water conservation, less energy consuming housing technology with more efficient cooling systems, and affordable effluent treatment techniques. As far as health, education and "terrorism" are concerned, we should think of focussing on a more equitable and fair society instead of depending on engineering challenges for our nirvana.
