Briefing: Nanotechnology

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POLICY: INDIA NEEDS INFRASTRUCTURE FOR WORLD-CLASS RESEARCH

In 2009, when Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was announced as one of the winners for the Nobel Prize in chemistry, the nation erupted in celebration. Encomiums poured in from all quarters, and Ramakrishnan was so overwhelmed with the reception that he actually asked people from India to stop contacting him with congratulatory messages and good wishes, which some in India found offending. Ramakrishnan emphasized how it wasn’t important that a person from India had helped understand ribosomes, which are the protein-producing factories in cells, and it was significant because it was a fundamentally important scientific discovery.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was born in India in 1952. He graduated from the Maharaj Sayajirao University of Baroda in 1971with a Bachelor degree in physics. He then obtained a PhD in physics from Ohio State University in 1971, and went on to study and conduct research in biology at the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University. Today, he leads the group working on understanding biological structures at Cambridge University’s Laboratory for Molecular Biology, the same laboratory where Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA in 1953.

It is important to ask the question why Ramakrishnan chose to leave the country in 1971. If he had stayed in India after completing his studies at Baroda, he would not have been able to conduct the cutting-edge research that he did in laboratories across the U.S. and UK because India lacked the research infrastructure, even though a full generation had grown up since Independence was achieved in 1947. Moreover, it would have also been almost impossible for him to build a research career in biology after completing a PhD in physics. It is likely that Ramakrishnan would not have been able to do the work which ultimately won him the Nobel Prize if he had remained in India. Science would have been poorer. Nanotechnology is an enabling technology, and is based on the design and engineering of materials at length scales of below 100 nanometers to obtain unique and novel materials properties that would otherwise not be achievable. It’s common experience that a cube of sugar takes much longer to dissolve than the powdered form. Certain material properties are size-dependent and it is this principle that is at the core of all nanotech innovations, which are rooted in breakthroughs in basic sciences and engineering.

Recently, clean technology has become an area which is seeing the widespread application of such novel materials, including nanomaterials. Venture capital investment in nanotechnology and materials- based technologies has increased at a rate of over 40 percent annually worldwide since 1997, according to New York-based research firm Lux Research. India received just two percent of global venture capital investment in 2008, compared to 10 percent for China and four percent for Israel, a country whose economy and population is many times smaller than India. As Asian countries such as China and India industrialize, productivity gains and process efficiencies derived from advances in nanotechnology and advanced materials will be critical to ensure that the consumption of naturally- occurring minerals and commodities is optimized and waste is minimal.

According to numbers published by the Government of India’s Department of Science and Technology, investment in research and development has languished between 0.85 percent and 0.90 percent of GDP since 2000. Moreover, since 1998, private sector investment in R&D has grown substantially to contribute over 25 percent, while government investment has declined. This means that while tax receipts have increased in the period alongside the boom in the economy, the government’s research funding has declined in relative terms and the gap has been bridged by the private sector. The bulk of R&D investment has traditionally come from the government, and this imbalance is being corrected. Nevertheless there is a case for increasing government investment.

The substantial growth of the economy has not seen a commensurate increase in the establishment of more science and engineering universities and government R&D investment. Instead, we have seen a rationing of existing supply, with increased reservation of seats at the IITs and other centrally-funded universities, policies which can compromise merit and quality. We should be focusing on increasing capacity to such an extent that everyone has opportunity and nobody is left behind.

Nanotechnology also presents some unique risk management challenges for health, safety, and the environment. These real and perceived risks must be duly evaluated within a well-defined regulatory framework, else nanotechnology might go the way of genetically-modified foods. International cooperation has been strong in this area, and India should work with the international community to formulate appropriate standards.

It is not just the dearth of financial capital which makes building nanotechnology and advanced materials businesses difficult for entrepreneurs. Another severe constraint has been that of human capital. High-quality scientists and engineers like Ramakrishnan have frequently chosen to live and work abroad given the lack of access to leading-edge equipment and low budgetary allocation for research in science and engineering in India. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), two of the nation’s leading research institutions, were established by private trusts controlled by the Tata Group. Much before the IITs, the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, opened its doors in 1929 in the middle of the Rajasthan desert, offering courses in engineering from 1946. Indian science owes a lot to the vision of industrialists JN Tata, GD Birla, and JRD Tata, who played key roles in the establishment of IISc, BITS, and TIFR.