BackScience, technology can catapult India on the global stage
It's the country's achievements in science and technology that will continue to offer hope for a truly Shining India
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Mumbai: However sanguine one’s disposition, it’s not easy to envision a shining India on the eve of the 69th Independence Day.
The washout of the monsoon session of Parliament that ended Thursday, delay in passage of bills like the much-needed one on goods and services tax (GST), weakening of the rupee, outdated labour laws, confusing tax structures and poor infrastructure definitely cast a shadow over the Narendra Modi government’s ability to take India purposefully into the 69th year of Independence and place it firmly on the global stage.
But then, while the never-ending rivalry of political parties at both the centre and in states will continue to delay reforms on some pretext or the other, it’s the country’s achievements in science and technology that will continue to offer hope for a truly Shining India.
India has many scientific and technological achievements to its credit. Not to mix these up with the mingling of science and psuedoscience that stirred a hornet’s nest at the 102nd Indian Science Congress this January.
To begin with, on 24 September 2014, the Indian Space Research Organization (Isro) successfully got the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) spacecraft to orbit the red planet on its maiden attempt, joining an elite Martian club—the US, Russia and the European Space Agency. Costing about ₹ 450 crore, it was the least expensive Mars mission.
While the mission is expected to help India develop technologies required for design, planning, management and operations for an interplanetary mission and offer a deeper exploration of the Mars surface, Isro is planning its second interplanetary mission—Mangalyaan 2—between 2018 and 2020.
Not one to ignore the moon either, Isro is planning to launch Chandrayaan-2 by end of 2017 or beginning of 2018.
Lesser known achievements include the fact that India is a partner in the Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT) project at Mauna Kea in Hawaii, US. About 70% of the country’s contribution to the estimated ₹ 1,299.8 crore project (from 2014-23) will be in the making of quality mirrors and engineering. Other partners include the US, Japan, Canada and China.
India has also commissioned a high-performance computing resource of 800 teraflops for weather and climate modelling—the most powerful machine in south east Asia. A Flop, or floating-point operation per second, measures computer performance. A teraflop is 10 (to the power of 12).
And while India’s achievement pales in comparison to that of countries with supercomputers like the US (233) and China (37), 11 supercomputers from India found their way into the list of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers that was released in July. These included two in the top 100. The list is published twice a year by Jack Dongarra, a professor at the University of Tennessee who has been involved in the making of the list since 1993.
The scene is bound to look up as India aims to build exascale (10 to the power of 18) computing as part of its National Supercomputing Mission (NSM), with a total budget outlay of ₹ 4,500 crore over seven years along with the department of information technology.
Supercomputers are used in oil exploration by companies such as Oil and Natural Gas Corp. Ltd. They are used in climate modelling to detect trends like global warming. Supercomputers are also needed in space programmes, nuclear reaction simulations, bio-technology and gene sequencing, and a whole range of scientific applications—calculation-intensive tasks such as problems involving quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modelling and physical simulations.
All these applications are connected by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing on the national knowledge network (NKN) and have used the grid computing model since 2005.
India’s supercomputers lack speed, confined as they are to performing teraflops (trillions of calculations per second). Getting to the petaflop level would mean increasing the processor power by 10 times, the cooling to 4,000 tonnes and higher floor space, all of which require a new supercomputing architecture.
Experts estimate it will cost about ₹ 500 crore to build a petaflop supercomputer.
Meanwhile, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) may have a poor track record in getting its Doppler predictions right about India’s rainfall, but the country does have a tsunami early warning system that provides advisories to all Indian Ocean Rim countries.
Other than that, India has a Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council that supports companies and entrepreneurs. It has also decoded the wheat genome in partnership with 15 other countries that joined hands to complete the huge task of decoding 17,000 million bases.
India plans to build a Neutrino Observatory—a major high-tech Make in India initiative in collaboration with the department of atomic energy.
Neutrinos are sub-atomic particles produced by the decay of radioactive elements. They lack an electric charge and are the tiniest and lightest, and almost weightless, particles. The 1,500 crore project in Tamil Nadu is expected to make India a major nuclear physics research hub.
Moreover, Isro’s answer to Google Earth, Bhuvan, as we in the media called it when it was launched in mid-August 2009, was a geoportal that allows users to explore a virtual world for free in a 3D environment, with specific emphasis on India.
Not much was publicized in the following years. But on 12 August, the government in a press statement released new applications for Bhuvan which include 1 million satellite images for over 300 cities in the country; a national database of national highways and toll plazas; geotagging and controlled-crowd sourcing application for the AP Housing Corporation Ltd, which has enabled geotagging of 3.8 million houses in Andhra Pradesh.
The applications also include an Islands information system for developmental decision making to manage borders; a live link of the GIS (geographical information system) databases of the north east region that showcases tools for better planning and development of states in the region; and even a tool called ‘Bhuvan Ganga’ to allow people to participate in providing vital information for the government’s Clean Ganga project.
Citizens may not perceive direct benefits from any of these long-term projects, and in many cases even wonder why the government is spending taxpayers’ money on projects like interplanetary missions (Does India’s Mars Mission make sense?) when the country’s infrastructure needs a major uplift.
One can debate the topic till the cows come home but it’s outside the purview of this article.
There are other programmes, though, like that of distributing nearly 900 million Aadhaar numbers that use biometrics to identify citizens. While Aadhaar undoubtedly is helping the government plug leakages in its subsidy programmes, the use of these numbers have larger ramifications of security and privacy of data.
The Supreme Court on 8 August reiterated that Aadhaar identification cards are not mandatory to avail benefits of government welfare schemes.
More ambitious, and much more relevant to the over 1.2 billion citizens of the country, are the government’s Make in India, Digital India, Skill India and Smart City programmes.
The government, for instance, hopes to make India a truly digital nation by offering a plethora of e-governance services across sectors like healthcare, education and banking—all in a bid to introduce transparency in the system and enable inclusive growth. The plan will be implemented in phases till 2018.
The whole ecosystem will undoubtedly benefit from the government’s plans to start with at least two semiconductor wafer fabs (the project is yet to get off the ground); the fact that the country has nearly 1 billion phones of which over 970 million are wireless; the presence of many e-commerce companies that are banking on India’s slightly over 350 million Internet users (over 150 million of them surf on the mobile handsets), of which about 127 million are from rural areas; and the thousands of start-ups for which the government promised ₹ 10,000 crore in the Union budget for financial year 2015-16 (but the break-up or details are yet to be provided).
To be sure, the foundations of a digital nation were laid down in bits and pieces by previous governments, especially over the last decade, with the National e-Governance Plan approved in 2006 under the Congress regime. But the loose ends of the vision are finally being tied up by the current government that is using technologies like mobility, analytics, cloud (it calls this Meghraj) and the Internet of Things to implement the Digital India vision that dovetails with its other initiatives like Smart Cities and Make in India.
Execution, though, will remain a challenge. While the programme will be coordinated by the department of electronics and information technology, the implementation has to be done by all government departments, state governments and union territories.
It’s here where politicians come back into the picture. Hopefully, they will see more reason and not spoil India’s Independence Day parties.
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