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Now, scientists have another incentive to develop solutions that help the common man. Going by Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s Budget announcement, technologies that promise to deliver useful services to people will be given a shot in the arm.
Grassroots innovation
A Rs 200-crore fund will be created to encourage innovations, he said, while presenting the Budget for 2013.
The move comes as a refreshing change, quite distinct from the usual clamour of scientists going after big institutions and large-funded projects in the country’s effort to catch up as a scientific power. A few amazing innovations have been identified by the Principal Scientific Advisor, Government of India, R. Chidambaram, and the Ministries of Finance and Science &Technology.
The Finance Minister said the National Innovation Council has been asked to formulate a scheme and provide guidelines for the management and application of the fund.
He said the Government has decided to fund organisations that will scale up and make these products available to people.
Read in line with Chidambaram’s focus on three faces of India — Women, Youth and the Poor — this move is in sync with the UPA Government’s intentions to reach out to larger sections of the people in the run-up to the 2014 general elections.
The fund should supplement the efforts of the National Innovation Foundation, created in 2000 with a Rs 20-crore corpus as an autonomous body with the DST, to bolster grassroots innovation.
It has succeeded in patenting over 550 innovations, especially in rural India.
Tech focus
To the credit of the Finance Minister, S&T and scientists have found special mention in several of his Budgets.
For example, in the 1997 Budget, he said, while announcing the Swarnajayanthi fellowships (with a corpus of Rs 50 crore) for scientists below 45 to do world-class research: “An MBA graduate, even if he is from Harvard, is not a patch on a scientist.”
He was also instrumental in the creation of the Technology Development Fund, with a corpus of Rs 30 crore in 1996, which he hiked to Rs 70 crore in 1997.
Managed by the Technology Development Board, funds were provided at low interest to take promising, indigenous technologies to the commercial scale.
The TDB has funded over 250 projects across the country.
The Finance Minister has allocated Rs 6,275 crore to the S&T Ministry, Rs 5,615 crore to Space and Rs 5,880 crore to Atomic Energy in the present Budget.
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