The Hindu Business Line : Role for private cos in telecom R&D centres

THE Government is planning to rope in private telecom operators, equipment manufacturers and state-owned technology companies like C-DoT to jointly set up two research and development centres in the country.

One centre will be exclusively dedicated to develop products for rural applications and the other will be responsible for development of future technologies for the converged telecom services.

The Government is also considering to partly finance the first centre through the Universal Services Obligation fund, which has been set up for rural telecom projects.

According to a proposal mooted by a high powered committee in Department of Telecom, the projects would enable the benefits of research to flow to both public and private sector companies. The projects will also have collaboration with leading institutions such as Indian Institute of Science and Indian Institute of Technology.

"It will be funded by all stakeholders such as service providers, equipment manufacturers. Partnership with educational institutions will be developed to create a pool of highly skilled knowledge workers for the telecom sector," said a DoT official. Researchers like Prof Ashok Jhujhunwala from IIT, Chennai, who has developed some breakthrough technologies for rural communication, may also be roped in for the projects.

Though India has a high knowledge base in technology development, most of the R&D in telecom is currently happening in Europe and the US. Equipment manufacturers such as Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola have slowly begun to do some part of the R&D in India.

State-owned companies such as C-DoT and C-DAC have so far been working on old technologies but are now looking to move to next generation network applications.

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