The union government will soon launch a hub and spoke model to set up science cities and science centres to encourage science and technology (S&T) incubators and create an enabling environment, according to YS Chowdary, Minister of State for Science & Technology and Earth Sciences.
“The entire country can be divided in five zones so that each zone can have a science city, so that number of science centres can be there whereby rural population and youngsters can have a lot of access,” said Chowdary yesterday while inaugurating an Assocham Summit on ‘India: Entrepreneurial, Creative & Innovative’.
He added, “In addition to that if we create a proper ecosystem like bird migration we can definitely attract many scientists from foreign countries because of environmental conditions. Our country gives them very good weather conditions as there are many countries where we do not have productivity more than 4-5 months, at the most six months, so that is one area where we are seriously thinking.”
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Science & Technology and Earth Sciences is also working on a system called ‘five year rolling plan,’ to measure the plans and their implementation for both politicians and the bureaucrats. “One of my observation, particularly for the past 18 months having been in the government, we keep doing planning but we do not have any proper tools to measure whether we have achieved or not. So if we can introduce a rolling plan for five years, the successor can always refer what has happened, what was being planned, to what extent one has achieved and what are the things to be achieved,” opined Chowdary.
Highlighting that is not difficult to address supply side related issues using information technology (IT) tools, the minister said that both the government and the industry need to look towards improving the consumption side by creating a proper ecosystem.
“There is a need for us to spend more time on blueprint rather than on trying to execute, particularly from government’s point of view, as once blueprint is prepared properly with all kinds of IT tools the execution can be done perfectly,” said the minister.
Chowdary also stressed upon the need to focus on preventive healthcare so as to bring all resources together whether it is infrastructure, human resources, finance and others to prevent maintenance of warm bodies.
“If we spend Rs 100 on preventive health, I think Rs 2,000 in financial terms can be saved, in addition to this productivity goes up and when that happens a person will think of earning by himself rather than looking at the government for freebies, then happiness index will definitely go up,” Chowdary added.
