The Hindu Business Line : Step up R&D spend, Sibal tells pvt sector

Kolkata, Sept. 29 The private sector should spend more on Research & Development, said Mr Kapil Sibal, Union Minister of Science and Technology and Earth Sciences, here on Saturday, striking a note that technology should step in as humans were no longer reliable.

The Minister was speaking at an interactive session organised by the Bengal National Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

He said that against the $224-billion spent on R&D by the US, it was a meagre $5-6 billion in India. “Pfizer, at $8-9 billion, spends more on R&D than the total of India’s defence budget,” he said.

R&D spend accounts for 0.8 per cent of the GDP, out of which public funding accounts for 0.6 per cent.

Nuclear energy

Pointing to the gradual shift from services to manufacturing, which called for energy development in a big way to meet the exponentially rising demand for power, the Minister said nuclear energy was one of the inevitable options.

While oil was a depleting source of fuel, coal, by itself, was not a solution to our growing energy demand in the long run, he said

Mr Sibal firmly defended the Indo-US civil nuclear deal, saying that it would work well for India. “We can continue with our weaponisation programme even without being a signatory to the NPT,” he said.

Safeguards pact

The Minister said that India would be the only country in the world with whom the US was going in with such an agreement. According to him, once the India-specific safeguards agreement were in place, “the N-fuel suppliers’ group will allow us to get the fuel from anywhere”.

Some 14 of the 22 running reactors would come under the safeguards agreement. A key element of the pact was the right to reprocess the spent fuel, which, he pointed out, even China is not entitled to. The Minister pointed to the need to create wealth for our countrymen through developments in science and technology, and said that some innovative work was now being undertaken by the Science and Technology department to map regions of the country according to race.

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