ENOUGH ARYABHATA! · I hear the all-too-familiar reasons. ... 10 years of telecom will be like the last 10 years” ... SuccessFactors’ Lars Dalgaard is going

T E L E C O M ’ S N E W D E A L

ENOUGH ABOUT

CUTTING-EDGE SCIENCE IS COMING BACK TO INDIA

18 INDIAN SCIENTISTS WHO ARE CHANGING THE WORLD

I NDIA

PRICE RS. 100. MARCH 2, 2012

ARYABHATA!

INSIDE

Plus

Leading the world in science

5

L e t t e r F r o m T h e E d i t o r

March 2, 2012 | FORBES INDIA

I wasn’t the science teacher’s pet in school. And I can’t confess I know too many scientists either.

Yet, over time, I’ve come to appreciate the role of science in our society. And I have often wondered why India produces so many brilliant minds in the world of science—each of whom leave their impact on our world, but choose to work out of laboratories many thousands of miles away.

I hear the all-too-familiar reasons. That our scientists are prone to writing academic papers, but can’t apply their knowledge to solving real-life problems. Our research institutions don’t have a culture that rewards the discovery of new ideas. Our innovation system is broken. So, even the few ideas that do come through don’t end up getting funded. And what’s more, our business people don’t see the value of research. They’d rather rely on that much-abused term: Jugaad.

So how is it that countries like China, Singapore, Korea and Israel have almost a decade’s lead over us in research-based innovation? Amidst all the hoopla about the India growth story, this is an area that never quite gets its place in the sun. We’re instead more involved in debating whether the Eurozone will collapse. While the

rest of the world was predicting its demise, guess where the most advanced original research in science is taking place? Yes, Europe is all set to lead the world in science. As my colleague and Associate Editor Seema Singh tells me, the European Union upped its research budgets by a whopping 45 percent to €80 billion till the end of this decade.

Our special package on innovation is important for one solitary reason: Change is in the air. India is fi nally joining the race to build an innovation eco-system that will do justice to the wealth of talent it has. Initially, even Seema, who has been writing on science for more than a decade now, wasn’t quite sure that the signals she was picking up were for real. But for the past three months, she has spent hours talking to researchers, heads of research institutes, business folks and policymakers all over the world. The arduous process of reinventing our decades-old research and innovation system has started. Even though I’m pretty excited, I’m not about to give away the story here. I leave it to you to discover it for yourself on page 63.

And if you care about making India a leader in science and innovation, join us on forbesindia.com for more conversations. We’ll be waiting for you.

Best,

Indrajit GuptaEditor, Forbes India

Email: [email protected] id: @indrajitgupta

INDIA IS FINALLY JOINING THE RACE TO BUILD AN INNOVATION

ECO-SYSTEM THAT WILL DO JUSTICE

TO THE WEALTH OF TALENT IT HAS

-------

March 2, 2012 | FORBES INDIA8 9FORBES INDIA | March 2, 2012

I NDIA

Volume 4 | Issue 5 | Ma rch 2 , 201 2

Contents

14 Letters to the Editor16 Exit Interview18 Close Range20 World Watch124 Thoughts

REGULARS

38“The iron ore mining in Liberia is going

to be another chapter of growth”- Vedanta chairman Anil Agarwal

41“If we don’t get it right this time, the next

10 years of telecom will be like the last 10 years”- Sanjeev Aga, former CEO of a telecom company

50“Self-confi dence has many facets”

- Ashok Soota, former chairman, MindTree

GLOBAL GAME36 A Beautiful Mine?Sesa Goa’s acquisition of the Liberian mines could make it a top global player

SPECIAL REPORT 40 A New DealThe government has an opportunity to restart the telecom sector. Will it come through?

ZEN GARDEN48 As the Paths DivergeFormer chairman of MindTree Ashok Soota talks about self-awareness and moving on

CROSS BORDER52 Why Ford Should WorryThe company may have avoided bankruptcy, but they are not out of the woods yet

56 SAP Gets a Pit BullSuccessFactors’ Lars Dalgaard is going to provide the German giant the voice it needs

60 The Cure for Road RageDriving on the streets of Los Angeles has never been better, thanks to its one of a kind connected traffi c network

64 Comeback ScienceIndia is ready for a renaissance in innovation

90 To Reinvent the WheelsTata Motors is focussing on R&D to transform into a global company

93 A Few Good MenA Bangalore-based scientifi c institute is leading the way in innovation

96 How to ‘Upgrade’ a Country’s TechnologyYigal Erlich, the founding father of Israel’s R&D ecosystem, talks about his country’s experience in fast-tracking innovation

FEATURES

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66The wheels have been set in motion to win back some of the fi nest minds of Indian origin to align forces with their country of origin

The 18 Great Minds Who Are Doing Cutting-Edge Work

Sangeeta Bhatia

Health Sciences

Prashant Kumta

Medicine & Energy

Ajit Lalvani

Tuberculosis Research

V. Ramanathan

Climate Change

Rakesh K. Jain

Cancer Research

Vivek Sharma

Sub-Atomic Particles

Vamsi Mootha

Medicine Research

Ajay V. Bhatt

USB Devices

Chaitan Khosla

Chemical Engineering

Anil K. Jain

Computer Science

Aravinda Chakravarti

Computational Biologist

Krishna Palem

Nanoelectronics

Rajiv Doshi

Sleep Apnea Therapy

Chennupati Jagadish

Optoelectronic Devices

Rakesh Agrawal

Chemical Engineering

74 On a Power TripProf. Baliga’s invention saves power and reduces pollution

78 A Man of SteelHarry Bhadeshia’s passion has helped him make new alloys of steel

70 Mysteries of the Human BrainMriganka Sur is revealing the secrets of the brain

I N S I D E

Government policy, academia, research institutions and the industry are all coming together to create an eco-system for cutting-edge scientifi c research in India● Comeback Science/ PG 64

● 18 of the fi nest Indian minds/ PG 70

(including Mriganka Sur, Jayant Baliga and Harry Bhadeshia)

● How We Selected/ PG 82

● Tata Motors: To Reinvent the Wheels/ PG 90

● NCBS, Bangalore: A Few Good Men/ PG 93

● Yigal Erlich: Lessons from Israel/ PG 96

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TEMPLE OF LEARNING Ruins of Nalanda, one of

the fi rst great universities in recorded history. India

is now pushing ahead with a range of new policies

to bring back its brains trust in the West and to

stimulate a renaissance in the innovation eco-system

ComebackSCIENCEThere is enough evidence on the ground to indicate that the innovation eco-system has vastly improved in the country. India is ready for a renaissance in innovationBy SEEMA SINGH

A couple of weeks ago, some of us got into an interesting conversation with Howard Gardner, who was on a visit to

India to deliver a series of lectures. He is widely regarded as one of the most infl uential psychologists in the world today. Author of 25 books that have been translated into 28 languages and best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, in 1995, he mounted a study that lasted until 2006 and involved 1,000 American journalists and geneticists. The question he was seeking to answer was an intriguing one. Why are journalists an unhappy lot while geneticists a happy bunch?

The answer was interesting. Journalists, he concluded, were idealistic individuals who got into the profession and hoped their work would change the world. Once they were in though, they fi gured, the business was run by people whose interests were focussed almost entirely on the bottom line. The real world was out of sync with everything they had imagined it to be.

Geneticists, on the other hand, as much idealists as journalists are, had everything going for them. The Human Genome Project was the Holy

Grail that needed to be cracked. The geneticists therefore had to focus on nothing but their work; the American government was solidly backing every gamble the geneticists wanted to take; venture capital funding was chasing them in droves because they knew as well the Holy Grail needed to be cracked, and the only way it could be was by supporting the best minds America had. And if need be, do what it takes to get the best talent from across the world.

Eventually, the project was completed in 2003 and the euphoria lasted a while. Over time though, it started to diminish and, much like in journalism, confl icts began to erupt between the various stakeholders. The geneticist’s idealism now fi nds itself at odds with an eco-system starved for funds and hell bent on maximising profi ts. As Gardner wryly says, “It is diffi cult to do good work that is both technically excellent and carried out in an ethical way when a market is down.” To that extent, it wouldn’t be way off the mark to argue the golden age of American science is waning. Of course, as Gardner quickly adds, “All misalignments are temporary.” But in one man’s misery, even if it be


temporary, lies another man’s fortune.Which is why, policy makers in

India, which for decades has exported its fi nest minds to countries like the US, are wringing their hands with delight. By all accounts, the wheels have been set in motion to win back some of the fi nest minds of Indian origin to align forces with their country of origin—either by coming back home, or by helping set up the framework that will stimulate a renaissance.

To get a sense of the minds now being wooed by the government and businesses in India, starting Page 70, we’ve put together a list of 18 scientists of Indian origin who’ve had enormous impact on the disciplines they operate in. It includes areas as diverse as nano particles to treat cancer, global warming, landmark discoveries on diseases until now thought of as untreatable, biometrics and pattern recognition, regenerative medicine, and technologies we now consider ubiquitous like the humble USB port.

BITS TO TORRENTS

G. Rangarajan is already preparing for his visit to Stanford three months from now. A professor of mathematics at the Indian Institute of Science, he will descend on the university’s campus as part of a delegation of directors from some of the leading institutes

that include the IITs, the National Institute of Technology and the Indian Statistical Institute. This crack team intends to address an audience of academics, mostly of Indian origin, and urge them to consider a career in research back home.

Rangarajan, who is coordinating the visit, has a deck of slides ready, which off er a graphic picture of academic life in India. It even gets down to brass tacks like salary structures,

what pay hikes to expect, consulting opportunities available, startup grants on off er and even domestic help—a carrot unavailable in the West.

“We have an acute shortage of these professionals, especially in computer science. So we decided on these road shows to spread the word that life here isn’t bad,” says Rangarajan. To buttress his case, he argues that adjusted for purchasing power parity, a full professor’s salary in the US at $12,500, is on par with the $2,900 on off er in India. This isn’t the fi rst time government-backed institutes have been on such a man hunt. Two years

ago, a similar exercise was conducted at Brown University in the US and a handful of researchers bit the bait.

The department of science and technology stepped up its initiative last November. T. Ramasami, the secretary who looks after the department, was able to collect at least 330-odd resumes from leading universities in the US. “I have sent the CVs to various institutions for consideration. In the 12th Plan, my department will give a start up research grant of Rs. 50 lakh each to 1,000 people who return to India. This will be over the salary or research facilities that the hiring institution provides,” he says.

Last year, M.K. Bhan, a senior bureaucrat in the department of bio-technology, was able to attract 300 researchers back to India. All put together, over the last three to four years, he’s managed to attract 800 people back to various Indian institutions.

But getting the brightest talent is just one way to catalyse innovation. It won’t work until the rest of the eco-system is geared to support the infl ux. Countries like Korea, China, Singapore and Malaysia fi gured that more than 10 years ago and are now beginning to reap the dividends.

That explains why on January 3 this year, Prime Minister Manmohan

T H E W H E E L S H A V E B E E N S E T I N M O T I O N T O W I N B A C K S O M E O F T H E F I N E S T M I N D S O F I N D I A N O R I G I N

Singh announced that by the end of the 12th Plan in 2017, India would more than double its annual research and development (R&D) budget from $3 billion in 2011 to $8 billion, or 2 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP)—a measure of the total value of all the goods and services produced in a country annually. It now stands less than 1 percent as opposed to China’s 1.6 percent.

But this is only the fi rst step. “Research can convert money into knowledge,” points out R.A. Mashelkar, former director at CSIR and now president of the Global Research Alliance. “But you need innovation to convert knowledge into money,” he says. And this, he says, is where India has faltered historically.

In the post World War II era, no other nation could innovate as well as America. It put into place a great system of universities, enabled intellectual property rights, and promoted commercialisation. “The US is probably the only example of government-funded research that becomes a company or even an industry that creates wealth and jobs,” points out Pradeep Khosla, dean of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Understandably, many nations have tried to emulate it, but haven’t quite made the mark.

The fi nancial meltdown in 2008 changed much of that. Since then, the famed American model has begun to develop cracks. Budgets have shrunk; the focus of research has narrowed, and policy makers now want more bang out of every buck spent. It is a view supported by A. Raghuram, head, department of mathematics at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune. After 10 years at Oklahoma State University, he moved to IISER in December. What swung the decision for Raghuram: An overall change in the scientifi c

community and the possibility of making a “fundamental diff erence”.

Sensing the opportunity, the Indian government is pushing ahead with a range of new policies aimed at not just attracting its brains trust in the West—but also fi lling voids in the innovation infrastructure.

Taking a leaf out of the Singapore experience, in the 12th Plan, Ramasamy proposes to create 1,000 doctoral and 250 post-doctoral fellowships in foreign universities, where his department provides monetary support to Indian candidates selected by universities such as MIT, Caltech, Stanford and others. The hypothesis: Many of them will come back after their doctoral studies.

Bold ideas that require long gestation periods will also get government funding. The evidence is on the ground: � In 2010, the department of science and technology became a lead investor in the Nasscom-promoted India Innovation Fund. � In November last year, the Cabinet approved the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council, which will fund science-based

ideas from its 12th Plan budget. � The National Policy on Electronics, 2011, now in its fi nal stages of approval, will have an Electronics Innovation Fund. � In early February, the government approved Preferential Market Access in public procurement for locally developed and designed products, a policy that Israel has eff ectively used to build its high-tech industry. (See story on page 96) � A group under the Planning Commission is evaluating attractive “exit options” for investors who fund risky, innovative ventures—something that doesn’t exist today.

But problems exist.

GROUND REALITIES

After a bold biomedical sciences initiative in 2000, Singapore decided to attract 1,000 Singaporeans in 10 years. Today, half of 2,500 researchers of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star), the lead agency fostering scientifi c research and talent creation, come from 60 countries. “These investments have brought substantial returns for Singapore. Between 2000 and

One programme of DBT which

funds risky ideas from the private

sector shows that it has motivated

companies to innovate. In three

years of its existence (December

’08 to July ’11) it supported 82 proj-

ects, at a cost of Rs 570 crore, of

which 65% (370 crore) came from

the private sector, 35% (Rs 200

crore) came from the government

THE BIOTECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY PARTNERSHIP PROGRAMME (BIPP)

Rs 570 croreTOTAL APPROVED COST

COMPANY CONTRIBUTION

BIPPCONTRIBUTION

Rs 134 crore AS LOAN

Rs 66 crore AS GRANT

Rs 370 crore

Rs 200 crore

65%

35%

67%

33%

WHERE US FIRMS PLAN TO EXPAND R&D OPERATIONS(in %)

11OTHER ASIA

24NORTH AMERICA

30CHINA

24INDIA

6JAPAN

16EUROPE

10EASTERN EUROPE 22 REST OF THE WORLD

Source: Battelle, R&D Magazine Survey

68 FORBES INDIA | March 2, 2012

2010, biomedical manufacturing output has almost quadrupled and now accounts for about 8.6 percent of our manufacturing output” says A*STAR Chairman Lim Poh Chuan.

In 2006, when China announced

its 15-year plan to make science and technology the backbone of future economic growth, it fi rst introduced sweeping reforms to its educational institutions. The message was clear: Don’t follow the leader. Innovate.

But, laments DBT secretary Bhan, India’s institutional leadership “doesn’t push for excellence”. Our institutions train PhDs for faculty positions, not for innovation. To start with, he now has the approval of the Planning Commission to build full-fl edged centres that will operate inter disciplinary centres. Until now, only programmes have existed like the ones between the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and IIT Delhi to develop new medical devices.

Fact of the matter is, older institutions may fi nd it tough to adapt to this new scheme of things. Ramasamy admits institutional mechanisms need to change. But he doesn’t approve of radical reforms, least of all the Chinese-way. “China is north of Himalayas and India is south of Himalayas. We have a diff erence in polarity: They prioritise economic freedom over political freedom. We prioritise political freedom over economic freedom,” he says.

Be that as it may, in the short term, indecision and delays are hurting the cause. It’s the lack of speed in implementing policies that is hurting India says Mashelkar. He cites the example of the all-composite trainer aircraft from National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL), which fi rst took to the skies in May 1998. But it was only 13 years after Mahindra & Mahindra (M&M) got into a joint venture with NAL that the venture was commercialised.

But that isn’t to say business has played its role to the hilt. Until now, very few Indian companies, other than those in pharmaceuticals and automotive, have focussed on

research-based innovation. “We are not focussing enough on this as India Inc. We are happy with the CAD/CAM work at $9 an hour, compared to $30 that people have to pay elsewhere in the world,” says Pawan Goenka of M&M.

Many don’t have internal capabilities and some others don’t show the willingness to spend on R&D; they believe it should come “free”, says Battelle India head Shalendra Porwal. A contract research agency, Battelle India is recognised by the Department of Scientifi c and Industrial Research.

In December 2010, Ratan Tata, who presides over the IISc Court, the topmost decision-making body at the institute, said it is not doing enough research of greater global relevance. “If I look back on what I have been trying to say in a very polite and in a very careful manner, it has been my perception that this institute, which is a great institute....has not perhaps changed as much as one would like to see. ...I have mentioned that we should perhaps be looking at greater change, research of greater global relevance and I have used my words carefully,” Tata reportedly told the Court.

CHANGING TIMES

A “big fan” of research-driven innovation, veteran venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who has made a living hunting for radical ideas that he can then fund and build businesses out of, suggests getting top notch talent to either start projects or mentor people. “If you set up centres of excellence and put thought leadership in research, great product ideas will fl ow from it. China has done that fairly well.”

Many critical areas that need research over the next 20 years don’t need extraordinary infrastructure he says. “What you need is culture

DST has been running an India Innovation

Growth Programme (IIGP) with Lockheed

Martin and IC2 institute, Texas University,

and FICCI for fi ve years. This year they

got Datamonitor to evaluate the economic

impact of IIGP which has funded 60

innovative technologies from a wide

range— aeronautics to biotechnology

to electronics to petrochemicals.

The cumulative revenue generation (by

these 60 funded entities) from 2007 to

2011 is estimated to be Rs. 490 crore

IIGP 2007-2011:AWARDED TECHNOLOGIES BY ORGANISATION TYPE

Government Laboratory

Pre Start-up

Institutions and Universities

Start-up

Existing Small toMedium Enterprises

8%

8%

14%

31%

39%

March 2, 2012 | FORBES INDIA 69

and role models. Once people are there, things will happen. Attracting world class researchers will attract business and investors,” he says. The good news is there is consensus among decision makers around this thought. New institutions coming up, and some of the old ones as well, are looking at good scientists, regardless of their areas of expertise. This is in contrast to the US, which today has specifi c requirements, says Collins Assisi, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.

Assisi, who has decided to relocate to India, has interviewed at a few places, including IISER Pune. “I really liked their commitment to teaching,” he says. It’s clear they are not just coaching students to be scientists, but to apply their work to life and go into government, management or industry. “That’s a refreshing change from what you see in typical graduate teaching in the US or older Indian institutions,” he adds.

Rahul Siddharthan, a computational biologist at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, reckons India ought not to restrict itself only to people of Indian origin. The economic climate has many foreigners, particularly the Europeans, interested in India today. The recent relaxation of rules on work visas by P. Chidambaram (for people earning more than $25,000/year) should be used to get good talent.

The thought gains currency when you factor in that copy-the-West used to be the norm in earlier days. But in a globalised world where everybody knows what the other one is doing, you’re better placed as an innovator than a copier, says Supratim Guha, the director of physical sciences at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Centre in New York.

It is a lesson inStem, at NCBS has taken to heart. Since the science

of stem cells is far from defi nitive, along with applied work in cardiac hypertrophy and cancer, inStem has taken a new approach to study basic biology. It is developing Hydra and Plenarium as model systems to study biology. “This is something you’d never be able to do in the West today [because the disease relevance is not apparent today, but will be only in 10-15 years],” says dean S. Ramaswamy.

Removed from the world of academia, state-run power equipment maker BHEL increased R&D investment 21 percent last year. Private companies like L&T are upping the ante on application development. M&M has moved 1,200 people to its research centre in Chennai and the number will increase to 2,000 this year. Most of its new products are being designed in-house. Much the same can be said of Tata Motors (See story on pg 90).

A lot of development work is happening, says V. Sumantran, executive vice-chairman of Ashok Leyland and a former member of the PM’s Scientifi c Advisory Council. “Research is limited to small pockets. But a lot of multi-national companies are beginning to tap into them,” he says.

But in the end, from a holistic prism, quite clearly, there is enough evidence to indicate that all the “trustees” needed to kick start the innovation eco-system in India—as Gardner would say—are aligned. The government seems to be getting its act together; businesses where the money lies to fund these projects seem keen; and most importantly, the brains that can power these projects are buying into the promise as the following pages will demonstrate. It would only be fair to assume therefore the golden age of Indian innovation has just about begun.

AMERICAS

ASIA

EUROPE

CHINA

US

JAPAN

INDIA

REST OF WORLD

SHARE OF TOTAL GLOBALR&D SPENDING

37.8

201020112012

32.8

36.9

32

36

31.1

34.3

11.8

12

24.8

2.6

3

2.8

3.1

2.9

3.2

35.5

11.4

13.1

24.5

36.7

11.2

14.2

24.1

(in %)

Source: Battelle, R&D Magazine Survey

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Mysteries of theHUMAN BRAIN

Neuroscientist Mriganka Sur is deepening our understanding of how the brain works and the

“mis-wiring” that causes mental disease

How is the brain wired? How does it code and decode information? What causes developmental disorders like

autism and diseases like Alzheimer’s? These are the questions that have occupied neuroscientist Mriganka Sur over the past 30 years.

By studying the connections in the brain—and by making connections in the lab through an interdisciplinary approach—he has transformed not only his own work, but neuroscience as well.

It was in the late ’80s that Sur rose to fame when he ‘rewired’ the brain of a small animal, a ferret, at Yale University.

In that experiment he showed, for the fi rst time, that the brain is ‘plastic’. He demonstrated how the brain changes in response to

the external environment even as it continues to develop.

“That result was stunning; it beautifully combined physiology and behaviour and demonstrated his outstanding ability to hit the big questions without any fear,” says K. Vijayraghavan, director of the National Centre for Biological Sciences, who was

Sur’s junior at IIT Kanpur. After fi nishing at IIT, Sur

moved to MIT; he wanted to combine technology and science.

At MIT, he ensured that other labs got interested in pursuing this goal. The result, in the 1990s, was the development of extensive toolkits that allowed researchers to image the brain at its barest: A single neuron.

In the following decade, Sur and his team went on to resolve this further with even higher resolution imaging. They could now see a single neuron and all its processes, even at the level of a single synapse, in the living, intact brain.

Now he’s shedding light on what happens if the brain gets “mis-wired”. The holistic understanding of plasticity has allowed Sur to

By SEEMA SINGH

H E D E V E L O P E D E X T E N S I V E T O O L K I T S T H A T A L L O W E D R E S E A R C H E R S T O I M A G E T H E B R A I N A T I T S B A R E S T : A S I N G L E N E U R O N . T H E Y C O U L D N O W S E E A S I N G L E N E U R O N A N D A L L I T S P R O C E S S E S , E V E N A T T H E L E V E L O F A S I N G L E S Y N A P S E , I N T H E L I V I N G , I N T A C T B R A I N


bring a magnifi cent shift in how people study mental disorders.

In 2009, he shot into fame again when he showed that it’s the immaturity of brain circuitry that causes Rett Syndrome, a subset of autism. A disease that is on the rise, autism ranges from mild communication diffi culties to severe conditions, even mental retardation, and aff ects about one in 150 children anywhere in the world.

Sur represents a new class of molecular neuroscientists who, equipped with a powerful understanding of the brain, are now applying that knowledge to diseases, says Sumantra Chattarji, a neuroscientist at NCBS, who studies Fragile X, a subset of autism.

It’s strange that pharma companies never studied plasticity at its most basic. The result has been several failed trials and no breakthroughs in diseases like schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder and Alzheimer’s.

“If you now look at what these companies are doing, they are hiring some of the people in the forefront of plasticity, be it Roche or Pfi zer,” says Chattarji.

Lest we start reading too much into this, Sur is quick to add that brain disorders, developmental disorders in particular, are complex; more so because children cannot be administered new drugs. His

goal is to try existing drugs.Will the problem be solved

anytime soon? He doesn’t think so. Will we make progress? You bet. “We already have begun to,

given that there was nothing available until now,” says Sur.

He is helping a group at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi to start a similar study in India where no data exists on the incidence of autism.

In January, Sur stepped down as head of the department of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT to lead a new Simon’s Center for Social Brain at MIT that became possible with a $26 million grant in December.

“We think that just as the brain has modules for vision, audition and action—which function seamlessly—there is a social module, one that mediates diff erent components of social interactions.” Understanding what it is and how autism makes it go wrong is a very big frontier of neuroscience, says Sur.

Sur has always sought new frontiers, even as a school boy. In Class XI at St. Joseph’s High School in Allahabad, when

every student had to choose either the math or the biology stream, he decided to do both—he was the only student in the school to do so.

Later, at IIT Kanpur, he studied electrical engineering as there wasn’t any life science course. But when he was doing his Ph.D at the University of Vanderbilt, in Nashville, Tennessee, he made sure he did his thesis research with somebody who studied the brain. “The American system allows you to do that,” he says.

The ethos of interdisciplinary work that he picked up at Vanderbilt has been carried forward through

his discovery-fi lled career. His philosophy: All interdisciplinary work fi rst begins in the mind.

“It’s possible to work in diff erent subjects and link them all in the brain,” says Sur.

That belief, he says, was inculcated in him in childhood, particularly by his mathematician grandfather, who worked in the education department in Allahabad.

Over 30 years of active research, Sur has made several discoveries that link engineering, computation, imaging, molecular biology, genetics and a host of other disciplines. For example, the fi rst computer that he programmed was a PDP-8 with 8 kilobytes of memory at Vanderbilt, for lab work. “I was the only one around who could analyse the data using principles of engineering,” he recalls.

More than 30 years ago, Sur refused a job in India, the only one off ered then, by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. But in the last 15 years, he has been associated with Indian science and institutions in ways that sometimes surprise him.

His association deepened in the ’90s when the government wanted to set up the National Brain Research Center (NBRC) in Haryana. The relationship was formalised in 2010 when the department of biotechnology (DBT) off ered him distinguished professorship at NBRC, an institution he is keen to handhold to international standards.

“Sur is one of those classy Indian scientists who are thriving in the US, but want to deeply engage with India now,” says M.K. Bhan, secretary, DBT.

Given his involvement in various Indian institutions, and his passion for active research at MIT, the pull of India could get overwhelming. “It’s fun. You never stop being Indian,” he says.

J U S T A S T H E B R A I N H A S M O D U L E S F O R V I S I O N , A U D I T I O N A N D A C T I O N —W H I C H F U N C T I O N S E A M L E S S L Y — T H E R E I S A S O C I A L M O D U L E , O N E T H A T M E D I A T E S D I F F E R E N T C O M P O N E N T S O F S O C I A L I N T E R A C T I O N S

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On a POWER TRIPWhile working at GE, Prof. Baliga invented a device that reduces electricity consumption, saving consumers money and reducing pollution

As a child, everyone has a favourite boast about their daddy. But few would have a story to match Prof. Jayant Baliga’s.

“The fi rst TV broadcast into a home in India occurred in my house.” In true tradition of a man of science this isn’t an empty boast. It really did happen. “My father, B.V. Baliga, was chief engineer of All India Radio after Independence. There was an exhibition in Delhi in the 1950s where they were using the All India Radio’s setup of a camera and a transmitter to show a TV telecast within the exhibition premises. My father wanted to test if the signal could be received at a farther distance.” He had a television set installed at his house at Teen Murti Marg. “It caused quite a sensation in the neighbourhood,” says Baliga. B.V. Baliga went on to head Bharat Electronics Limited, the heavyweight electronics public sector undertaking.

One might have expected Jayant to go fi rmly towards the future then: Computers. Instead, he invented something that joined two sister disciplines: Electronics engineering and electrical engineering. That device was the IGBT (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor), a switch just like the ones in any house. It is just that the one Baliga invented is super-small, can switch on and off 100,000 times a second and handle really high voltage power.

Baliga’s invention has resulted in cost savings of over $15 trillion for consumers. “Because of the IGBT the world has not had to build at least 600 hydroelectric dams of the size [of the] Hoover Dam!” says Baliga. Today, his invention is forming the basis of the emerging smart grid. These electrical supply networks of the future will replaces large and less effi cient components with small, cheap and effi cient semiconductor

equivalent. One emerging device that is holding out great hope is the transformer-on-a-chip. All of us have seen the large distribution transformers in our neighbourhood. Imagine that being replaced by something that is many times smaller!

It was the late 1970s and Baliga was heading a team of 40 scientists that was working on power semiconductor devices and high voltage integrated circuits at General Electric’s Research and Development Center in Schenectady, New York. By then, the transistor—the device

that makes computers possible—had been discovered and commercialised. Since Baliga was at GE, he focussed on a complementary area. He tried to develop a semiconductor device that could control equipment like compact fl uorescent lights, airconditioners and electrical motors. Essentially, the heavy duty stuff . All these applications need power electronic circuits that operate at high effi ciency continuously. This reduces heat dissipation, which reduces the size and cost of the electronics. This also reduces electricity consumption, saving consumers money and reducing environmental pollution.

At that time, companies like GE and Westinghouse were developing their bipolar transistors for high-power devices, while another group led by Siliconix and International Rectifi er was developing another type of transistor called the power MOSFET. The feeling in the industry was that the two technologies were incompatible because of diff erent manufacturing practices and end customers. It was Baliga who thought of combining the physics of the two. “There was a vice-president in GE who was developing a heat-pump for air-conditioning applications. He was frustrated that the exiting transistors were failing and that the circuit needed to drive the motor pump was too big, expensive, and very

By SHISHIR PRASAD

“ B E C A U S E O F T H E I G B T [ I N S U L A T E D G A T E B I P O L A R T R A N S I S T O R ] T H E W O R L D H A S N O T H A D T O B U I L D A T L E A S T 6 0 0 H Y D R O E L E C T R I C D A M S O F T H E S I Z E [ O F T H E ] H O O V E R D A M ! ”


cumbersome to assemble,” says Baliga, who had already been working for fi ve years in this area. He rose to the challenge and created a mechanism by which the power surges did not blow out the transistor he had developed.

“It is a research that requires not only knowledge and creativity, but also perseverance. Jay [Baliga] exhibited all of these attributes. With his detailed knowledge of silicon fabrication methods and these transistor devices, he invented the IGBT,” says Jim Bray, chief

scientist, Electrical Technologies and Systems, GE Global Research.

The device was considered such a breakthrough for GE that Baliga personally briefed Jack Welch. “It wasn’t a very usual practice for a scientist to brief the chairman. He came down from Connecticut to Schenectady,” says Baliga. Welch decided that the discovery should be kept a secret.

“I wanted to publish about the invention, but that was embargoed for several years. But GE also

rewarded me by making me a Coolidge fellow, the youngest ever in the history of GE,” says Baliga.

The extent of Baliga’s contribution to the world and the US Economy was recognised in 2011 when US President Barack Obama presented him with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. This is the highest form of recognition given by the US government to an engineer. After that, while Baliga remained in academia, he also

founded three companies between 1999 and 2011 to commercialise various semiconductor technologies.

Unfortunately, his association with India, which was fairly high in the 1980s, has declined. “In the 1980s and 1990s, I was visiting India every two years and would make the eff ort to meet with scientists at universities and government organisations (BEL, BHEL). During my biennial visits, I gave lectures at BEL, BHEL, CEERI-Pilani, IISc-Bangalore, and IIT-Madras. At the present time, I am not connected to any Indian science fraternity,” he says.

One issue that has held him back is perhaps the lack of progress in India in semiconductor technology. And developing this does require a huge amount of capital investment. “My impression is that it would be very diffi cult to develop the types of semiconductor chips that I work on in India due to lack of infrastructure,” says Baliga.

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A Man of STEEL

Scientist Harry Bhadeshia’s passion for steel has helped him invent some of the best alloys of the metal

steel for 15 years before clearing it. For Harry Bhadeshia, who led

the team that along with British Steel (that eventually became Corus and later acquired by Tata Steel) invented the steel, this only reiterated his belief that the metal has an “unbelievable variety that remains unseen by the outside world.”

This is not the only invention that has come out of the lab of the renowned metallurgy scientist and Tata Steel Professor of Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge in his 40-year research career. From making better steel pipes to transport oil to coming out with a ‘unthinkable’ and ‘super strong’ steel that is now being tested in defence and aviation sectors, Bhadeshia’s research has invoked serious debates and produced inventions worth millions of dollars, and much more in impact.

Looking back, it only seemed natural that Bhadeshia would choose a career in research. Growing up in Kenya, where he was born to his Indian parents, one of the fondest memories for Bhadeshia was a “small laboratory with a chemistry set, a plastic skeleton, a microscope, a self-assembly radio set and a variety of electrical items” that his parents had helped to set up.

By the time he fi nished his schooling in 1970, the family was forced to leave Kenya and move to London. This was when “fate,” as Bhadeshia’s friends term it, came into play. Keen to contribute to his family, the teenager landed a job at a metallurgical lab owned by the British Oxygen Company. In the lab, he got hooked to the “excitement and responsibility” that came in testing tiny samples, whose results were crucial in building large plants. .

The fascination turned into a passion when Bhadeshia explored the world of steel, which was

Every year, 17 million people use the Channel Tunnel, the undersea rail network that connects the United Kingdom

with north of France. Considered as one of the Seven Wonders of the modern world, 37.9 km of the 50.5 km-long tunnel passes under the sea. To make sure that each and every part of this sophisticated transport network

is as safe as possible, authorities recently opted for a new kind of steel that is used to lay the tracks.

Unlike the earlier version, the new steel doesn’t have any carbide and is rich in silicon. In other words, while the new steel is hard and wear-resistant, it is not brittle like the earlier steel, making it much safer. The authorities had tested the new

By PRINCE MATHEWS THOMAS


complicated and at the same time had an “unbelievable variety” that remains unseen by the world at large. Explains Bhadeshia: “Every year, 1.3 billion tonnes of steel is produced, but there is no need for the outside world to understand it…it is a product made in an extremely sophisticated and controlled environment…it is so reliable that no one needs to worry about it. On the other hand, everyone needs to worry about the operating software in their computers as these are not very well developed products!”

In 1979, when Bhadeshia published his doctorate thesis at Cambridge, an old, but still simmering debate was ignited once again. Since the 1930s, the metallurgy community had been debating on the process that leads to “phase transformation”

of steel. Bhadeshia showed that one of the phases in steel, bainite, is formed through a process of “diff usionless transformation” and not by “diff usional transformation.”

Says Bhadeshia’s former Cambridge student S.B. Singh, who is now professor, Department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering at IIT Kharagpur: “His work settled the debate. Sure, there are still some who would think otherwise, but even my studies thereafter have vindicated Professor Bhadeshia’s thesis.”

Immediately after the blockbuster start to his career, the Fellow of elite Royal Academy of Engineering focussed on research at the intersection of lab and its practical

application in plants. “We usually claim that fi ndings in the lab can be extrapolated to large-scale production. But I realised that in a lab we try to oversimplify the practical challenges of running a plant…in labs we tend to reduce the problem and fi nd solutions without worrying about the original problem. By collaborating with industry, we can avoid this,” says the scientist.

Not surprisingly, two of Bhadeshia’s most infl uential fi ndings have come at this intersection—the rail steel used in the Channel Tunnel and superbainite. The second is Bhadeshia’s personal favourite.

“It is the strongest low alloy steel ever produced and is more than six times stronger than ‘mild’ or conventional steel. It is also the world’s first bulk nanostructured material. Superbainite is something that people couldn’t even think of being possible,” says T. Mukherjee, a metallurgist and former joint managing director at Tata Steel.

Meanwhile, Bhadeshia continues to be a teacher and a guide to research students. His lectures

in Cambridge are popular for simplifying complicated scientifi c theories. “At those rare times when he doesn’t know the answer to a student’s question, he is honest enough to admit it and asks for time before he can get back with the answer,” says Singh. Adds Bhadeshia’s Cambridge colleague Mathew Peet: “He always makes a great contribution and expects/demands a high level of quality. This means we can produce much better research by working with Harry.”

Outside the lab and the classroom, Bhadeshia bonds with students by talking about cinema over a cup of coff ee or tea. More often, he has everyone in splits with his “corny jokes.” When the conversation does

lead to metallurgy, a tech-savvy Bhadeshia uses his smartphone to draw pictures to make his point clear. These talks have also led to useful innovations. “His students in South Korea made some applications for the smartphone so it is possible to index electron diff raction pattern or make calculation about steel transformation using the phone these days,” says Peet.

Even when in India, Bhadeshia likes to keep interacting with students. The aff able scientist has “strong links” with Tata Steel and has made a few trips to the steelmaker’s facility. “At Jamshedpur, even while Bhadeshia would spend time with company offi cials at the plant, he loved to go to local schools and spend time with them,” says Mukherjee.

Bhadeshia has also had other collaborations in the country of his origin. This includes sabbaticals at IIT Bombay and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, where he has held mathematical modelling workshops. This year, in November, the scientist will be in attendance when IIT Kharagpur inaugurates a new steel research centre. He is also working on a project at the institute that is trying to develop a new steel plate material.

“There is a lot of work on steel that is being done in India,” says Bhadeshia. In February, his lecture on steel in South Korea will be attended by scientists from the Atomic Power Station in Kalpakkam via a video link.

When not sweating it out in his labs, Bhadeshia likes playing squash. But this is when he is at home in London. Right now the scientist is in South Korea helping the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) set up 12 laboratories to cover all aspects of steel. In everything that he does, Bhadeshia follows a simple rule: “The goal is simply to be much higher than the reach.”

“ [ S U P E R B A I N I T E ] I S T H E S T R O N G E S T L O W A L L O Y S T E E L E V E R P R O D U C E D A N D I S M O R E T H A N S I X T I M E S S T R O N G E R T H A N C O N V E N T I O N A L S T E E L ”


PROFILE: He is chair, chemical engineering; Wells H. Rauser and Harold M. Petiprin Professor in the School of Engineering; Professor of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, and Biochemis-try at Stanford University.

HIS MAIN AREA OF WORK: His research lies at the intersection of chemistry and medicine. He has been working with geneti-cally modifi ed soil bacteria to develop new medicines (called polyketides) to treat cancer, infections, and other diseases.

In 1995, he co-founded biotechnology company Kosan Biosciences, which was acquired by drug maker Bristol Myers Squibb in 2008. Later, he founded Alvine Pharmaceuticals, which is developing an oral enzyme drug discovered in his laboratory for the treatment of celiac sprue—an autoimmune disorder, triggered by gluten in cereals, that aff ects the small intestines.

Yet another company he’s founded, Flamentera AG, is focussed on developing novel biomarkers for gastrointestinal diseases.

In September 2011, he and his research team found that high volumes of biodiesel can be produced from bacteria where E. coli can be used as a catalyst. Khosla and his team are currently trying to fi nd ways to enhance its cellular controls to push this further.

HOW HIS RESEARCH CAN BENEFIT INDIA: A decade ago, one in 1,000 of the population were aff ected by celiac sprue but the occurrence has increased. Today, one in 310 people in India are aff ected by the disease and one in 120-300 of the population in Europe and North America.

His work in biodiesel is globally signifi cant too. If successful, his work could help propel biodiesel to a commercial market from the niche space it occupies now.

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT HIM: “Khosla can tackle huge chal-lenges and makes strong eff orts to move forward. With celiac disease, there was an unmet medical need with no treatment except a lifelong gluten free diet at the time he stepped in. He has showed a strong commitment to do something about this,” says Ludvig M. Sollid, director, Center for Immune Regulation, Research Council of Norway.

- Nilofer D’Souza.

PROFILE: He is head of the Rice-NTU Institute for Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics (ISAI), Singapore.

HIS MAIN AREA OF WORK: His research is focussed on embed-ded computing, including low-energy computing and nanoelec-tronics. He’s pioneered a “pruned” microchip technology. An “inexact hardware” that drastically reduces power demands of microprocessors by allowing them to make mistakes, it is the harbinger of the next-generation power-stingy processors. Called probabilistic pruning, this technology makes the inte-grated circuits perform twice as fast, use half as much energy, and occupy half the space of the traditional circuits. This, says Krishna, is done by cleverly managing the “probability of errors and limiting which calculations produce errors”.

While doing this Palem has showed that the energy consumed by a computation could be traded for its accuracy. For applications such as digital image and video processing or cryptography, such integrated circuits can be designed to produce results to only the required accuracy, and therefore, the power needed for the computation can be drastically reduced.

HOW HIS RESEARCH CAN BENEFIT INDIA: Along with his team, he is creating a complete prototype chip for a specifi c application, a hearing aid to begin with. He has developed a solar powered iSlate, an electronic notepad, which is currently being tested in schools in Mohd. Hussainpalli village in Andhra Pradesh. In its 125th anniversary, IEEE recognised his PCMOS technology and iSlate as one of the seven “world changing technologies”.

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT HIM: “An unwavering theme of his vision has been to address the principal challenges to sustain-ing the performance and economic benefi ts of Moore’s Law. With probabilistic CMOS technology, he has perhaps shown the most profoundly original approach to tackling the barriers of power consumption and noise immunity in the continuation of the decades-long exponential improvement in the area and speed of the integrated circuits, known as the Moore’s Law,” says Moshe Y. Vardi, director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice University.

- S.S.

CHAITAN KHOSLA

KRISHNA PALEM

He developed a treatment for celiac sprue, a disease that affects many in India. His work in biodiesel is globally significant too.

He has deviced a new microchip that uses less energy; also, his solar-powered notepad, iSlate, is being tested in India

PROFILE: He is Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University.

HIS MAIN AREA OF WORK: Imagine being able to print out a solar panel on a fl exible substrate; to be able to spray-on a low-cost nanocrystal coating and assemble a thin fi lm solar plant wherever power is needed. If Agrawal has his way, this dream may well be reality one day. He is working on two types of nanocrystals: Copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS), and Copper zinc tin sulfi de (CZTS). His team has managed to reach 12.5 percent effi ciency with CIGS, which is pretty close to what you get with silicon solar cells. CZTS has only 8.4 percent effi ciency, but utilises earth-abundant materials which will decrease the cost as effi ciency increases.

He is also looking for an effi cient way to convert biomass to liquid fuel (like diesel) that can be used in transportation (which uses up about half the fossil fuel produced worldwide).

HIS APPROACH: Thin-fi lm technologies have made photovolta-ic materials more competitive, but costs need to reduce further. Agrawal’s aims to bring it below 50 cents/peak watt. US solar panel maker First Solar is currently the lowest cost producer of thin fi lms at 74 cents/peak watt. Agrawal’s approach is to utilise nanomaterials that can be suspended in appropriate solvents and then deposited utilising high throughput capabili-ties. He hopes to commercialise the systems when he achieves effi ciencies of about 15 percent.

HOW HIS RESEARCH CAN BENEFIT INDIA: India is grappling with huge energy shortages. If solar cells become cheaper and more easily available, it can change the dynamics of power production and availability in the country.

WHAT OTHERS SAY ABOUT HIM: “Agrawal has been develop-ing what are called ‘ink based’ precursors to make the thin fi lm solar cells of either CIGS or CZTS. The highest effi ciencies re-ported for CZTSSe (Copper Zinc Tin Sulfo-selenide) has been about 10 percent. There appears, at this point, no fundamental reason why it should not be possible to exceed 15 percent effi ciencies,” says Supratik Guha, director, Physical Sciences Department, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

- Cuckoo Paul

RAKESH AGRAWAL

He is working on efficient and cheap energy production from renewable sources such as solar and biomass.


SABYASACHI BHATTACHARYAA Distinguished Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

“Innovation is not a magic potion; it’s a mode of engaging with the world. In our country, the educated are not innovative and the innovative are not educated. The need for change is widely felt today. Hopefully, we will finally take effective steps instead of hand-wringing alone.”

MANO MANOHARANGeneral Manager, GE Global Research Centre, JFWTC, Bangalore.

“The quality of all the nominations was outstanding and it was a tough decision to choose amongst them. It was a learning experience for me personally since I went and read up on some of the topics these experts worked in.”

AJAY SOODProfessor of Physics, IISc, and president, Indian Academy of Sciences.

“Indian researchers are not sensitive to the applied side of their work. We are moving in the applied research direction, but it’s too slow. We have to move much faster.”

How We SELECTED As we went about identifying the leading lights in the fi eld of science and technology, we looked for a good mix of subjects, geographies, topicality and the big-picture aspect of their work. We then asked our panelists to shortlist the three most infl uential scientists, whose work has a far-reaching impact.

THE JURY PANEL

CHETAN CHITNISPrincipal Investigator, International Centre for Genetic Engineering and

Biotechnology, New Delhi.

“The scientific enterprise is not growing in the West; it’s growing in India. But we have to pick the best people, find ways to attract people who’d have got jobs at places like MIT, Berkeley, or NIH but who still choose to come to India.”


PROFILE: He is founding director, Center for Complex Disease Genomics, McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is also professor, department of medicine, pediatrics, molecular biol-ogy and genetics, and department of biostatistics, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins.

HIS MAIN AREA OF WORK: He is one of the architects of the Human Genome Project, and has been a key participant of the HapMap and 1000 Genomes project. He has provided insights into many disorders. In September 2011, in a study involving 200,000 people across the world, he showed that there are 29 DNA sequence variations in the genome in Asians, Africans, Americans and Europeans, which infl uence blood pressure. The more ways we use to search for blood pressure genes, the better is our understanding of hypertension, he says.

HIS APPROACH: Many groups have rushed to translate the genomic information to therapies, but he says science comes fi rst, therapies later. “Yes, I have hopes that we will understand diseases at a fundamentally better level and then the therapies will come. People believe that if we focus on translation, the translation to medicine will happen. I beg to diff er: I think the translation will depend on a true understanding of the disease.”

HOW HIS RESEARCH CAN BENEFIT INDIA: Since 2000, he’s been working with the Department of Biotechnology and the Council of Scientifi c and Industrial Research. He was instru-mental in setting up the new National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in Kalyani, West Bengal, and the Institute of Molecular Medicine (IMM) in Delhi. The IMM is a private, non-profi t research and educational institution focussed on biomedical research.

WHAT OTHERS SAY ABOUT HIM: “Much of what Aravinda says is right but some bit of translation is necessary, say 10-15 years down the road. It has been proven in physics and chemistry, and in stem cells in biology. It’s true, brute force statistical approach to genomic data has not yielded results. An integrat-ed approach is needed and that’s what Aravinda is now under-taking,” says Samir K. Brahmachari, director general, CSIR.

- S.S.

PROFILE: He is Chair of Infectious Diseases, Imperial College London. The most cited TB researcher in the world, he founded and directs the Tuberculosis Research Unit, a world-leading multi-disciplinary research group. The Unit also researches sarcoidosis (a disease that causes infl ammation in the lymph nodes, lungs, skin, or other tissues) and pandemic infl uenza.

HIS MAIN AREA OF WORK: In 2009 Lalwani devised new diag-nostics which use interferon-gamma release assay (IGRA)—the fi rst major advance over the 100-year-old existing diagnos-tic test for TB. Until then, managing TB involved preventing disease progression from latent to active TB. Through the new diagnostics Lalwani showed that people can be protected against infection too. It now forms the basis of new guidelines for TB screening and prevention throughout the world.

Last year he published a whole new strategy for TB screen-ing in the UK. “We found that if new immigrants from the Indian subcontinent are included for screening and preventative treatment for latent TB [rather than excluded as has hitherto been the case], we could really begin to turn the tide on TB in the UK and decrease the national burden of TB and at the same time improve the health and lives of immigrants from India to UK,” he says.

HIS APPROACH: Investigate a broad spectrum of fundamental questions in tuberculosis from immunology and microbiology to epidemiology, public health and policy.

THE INDIA IMPACT: Since India has a high incidence of TB, Lalvani works with Indian institutions like Hinduja Hospital, Mumbai, and Christian Medical College, Vellore. In 2011, he reported the discovery of a radical new TB vaccine target that could play a key role in making the most sensitive diagnostic test for TB ever. If incorporated into the IGRA that he invented, it could make that test 100 percent sensitive.

WHAT OTHERS SAY ABOUT HIM: “We are looking at latent TB detection in this country and we’ll look at protective correlates of immunity in tuberculosis but it’s too early to say what the research may bring up,” says Dr. Camilla Rodrigues, chairper-son, Infection Control Committee, Hinduja Hospital.

- Nilofer D’Souza

PROFILE: He is Laureate Fellow and Distinguished Professor, Department of Electronic Materials Engineering, Australian National University. He is the winner of several IEEE honours.

HIS MAIN AREA OF WORK: His research group is a leading light in the area of semiconductor nanowires. In the medical indus-try alone, devices based on nanowires are emerging as a class of ultra-sensitive electrical sensors for detecting chemical and biological agents of disease.

His current research is on new materials to replace silicon in solar cells, which will eliminate ‘refl ection waste’. The aver-age solar cell has an effi ciency of about 10 to 15 percent. That is, only about 10 percent of the photons of sunlight striking it are converted into electrons of usable electricity. One of new materials he is testing is a class of semiconductor called III-Vs. With III-V solar cells, you could get an effi ciency of over 40 percent when the cells are coupled with external optical concentrators.

HIS APPROACH: His work is at the intersection of semicon-ductors, optoelectronics, nanotechnology, photovoltaics and materials science.

HOW HIS RESEARCH CAN BENEFIT INDIA: Work in Jagadish’s lab could change the rules of how cells are made through clever use of nanotechnology and exotic structures in III-V semiconductors. India has an ambitious target to generate 20 GW from solar energy by 2022. Several national international research partnerships are being struck towards that goal and Jagadish’s lab could be one such partner.

WHAT OTHERS SAY ABOUT HIM: “Jagadish combines the insights of a physicist with the advanced technical abilities of an applied materials scientist to produce work of exceptional interest. The quality of the unique nanostructures that his group grows is remarkable—and absolutely crucial to making progress in fabricating newly imagined applications including photovoltaics or solar cells and ultrasensitive sensors,” says Howard E. Jackso, professor of physics, University of Cincinnati.

- S.S.

PROFILE: He is professor, department of physics, University of California, San Diego. He is a prominent name in the hunt for Higgs boson, a hypothetical elementary particle that is thought to give all matter mass. Experiments to fi nd out whether or not the Higgs boson exists are currently being performed using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, in Geneva.

HIS MAIN AREA OF WORK: He is now leading a team at CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) detector at CERN that is looking for the Higgs boson, the last missing piece in the prevailing theory of the universe’s tiniest building blocks. To understand the origin of mass, it is important to fi rst fi nd the Higgs boson, says Sharma. Scientists at CERN have narrowed down the range of masses the Higgs could have.

HIS APPROACH: “Assuming we do discover it next year, there is a comprehensive plan of work already in place to measure its properties and pattern of its interaction with diff erent types of sub-atomic particles. This will take about fi ve years or so to complete,” he says. “If instead we manage to rule out the existence of the Higgs boson, then physics will be in chaos just as it was at the turn of the 20th century [brave new theories like quantum mechanics and relativity were born from that chaos].” So, in the no-Higgs scenario, there will be a lot of work to fi gure out the source of mass that we see in the universe.

THE INDIA IMPACT: High energy physicists from India have been participating in experiments at CERN and have contribut-ed in building CMS, by way of hardware, software and analysis. CMS’ success in high energy physics will shape India’s future ambitions in experimental observations about the universe.

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT HIM: “Vivek is an excellent physicist and that is evident from his work, but what is equally important is his ability as a co-ordinator. Analysing data collected by the CMS experiments is an extremely complicated task requiring frontline leadership. He has provided that eminently. Under his leadership, CMS has been able to fi nish analysing almost all the data collected till date using eight to ten diff erent methods of setting limits on the Higgs mass,” says Sudeshna Banerjee, CMS collaborator from TIFR.

- S.S.

ARAVINDA CHAKRAVARTI

AJIT LALVANI

CHENNUPATI JAGADISH

VIVEK SHARMA

A geneticist, he has has provided insights into many diseases, including hypertension, which afflicts many people in India

His work could make solar cells far more efficient through clever use of nanotechnology

He’s working on TB prevention, in collaboration with Indian institutes. He’s reported a radical new TB vaccine

He’s a leading name in the hunt for the Higgs boson, which will help us understand the origin of the universe



PROFILE: She is professor of health sciences and technology, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and director of Laboratory for Multiscale Regenerative Technolo-gies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

HER MAIN AREA OF WORK: She uses the tools of engineering, medicine and biology to understand and treat diseases. Her research is focussed on the applications of micro- and nano-technology to tissue repair and regeneration. As an engineer looking at cancer, she reported in 2011 that nanoparticles can be used to increase the effi cacy of chemotherapy drugs in tumours, and also help reduce the side eff ects.

HER APPROACH: Bhatia has built unique human microlivers by borrowing techniques from semiconductor manufacturing for better predicting the safety of drugs in humans. That led her to co-found Hepregen Corp which is supported by The Deshpande Center at MIT. The platform has now been used by over 20 drug companies, leading to redesigning of clinical trials of new drugs.

HOW HER RESEARCH CAN BENEFIT INDIA: Cancer is spread-ing at an alarming rate and soon 70 percent of the new cases will come from developing countries like India. She is also using her technology to develop a platform for drug screening against a form of malaria, which hibernates in the liver and has been part of the problem in malaria eradication eff orts in the past.

PASSIONATE ABOUT: She wants more women in science. “I co-founded an outreach organisation for middle school girls in 1993 and it is still going. We just hosted 30 girls [in November 2011] in our laboratory for hands-on experiments,” she says proudly.

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT HER: “The most innovative work for cancer research is being done at the intersection of biology, engineering and science. Sangeeta is at the cutting edge of this practice and I have high hopes for her research impacting millions of lives in this world,” says Gururaj ‘Desh’ Deshpande, entrepreneur, mentor and member of President Obama’s Innovation Council.

- S.S.

PROFILE: He is associate professor at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and co-director of the metabolism program, Broad Institute, Cambridge.

HIS MAIN AREA OF WORK: His research is mainly focussed on the mitochondrion, the “powerhouse of the cell”, and its role in human diseases. He has been using genomics and systems bi-ology to defi ne the “molecular anatomy” of mitochondria. With this molecular map in hand, he is advancing the study of rare metabolic disorders and common diseases. About seven years ago, he showed a correlation between reduced mitochondrial activity and the common form of diabetes. This work became the most cited (2,000 times) paper on diabetes research in the last decade. Recently, his group showed something happens inside mitochondria that predisposes people to diabetes. “If we could fi nd that pathway within mitochondria, it might provide us with new strategies for preventing or even treating type 2 diabetes, something we desperately need,” says Mootha.

HIS APPROACH: He uses a multi-disciplinary approach that includes mathematics, computer science, biochemistry, and genetics. In a systematic search for the precise function within mitochondria that gets altered at birth or is modifi ed by environment, his lab identifi ed all 1,000 protein parts of this organelle. His lab’s two recent fi ndings on how mitochondria handles its huge appetite for calcium—solution to a 50-year-old mystery—shows it could be an attractive drug target. “We have good reason to believe that mitochondrial calcium handling might represent the link between mitochondria and the development of type 2 diabetes,” he says.

HOW HIS WORK CAN BENEFIT INDIA: His research will go a long way in the treatment of type 2 diabetes, an epidemic in India. “Unfortunately this is a ticking time bomb from a health and fi nancial perspective,” he says.

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT HIM: “Vamsi is one of the most creative and analytical scientists I have ever met. It is unusual to fi nd someone with both qualities,” says Edward Scolnick, director, Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute; former president of Merck Research Laboratories.

- S.S.

PROFILE: Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.

HIS MAIN AREA OF WORK: Theoretical enquiry into climate change and fi eld experiments that have brought unprec-edented understanding of global warming. Until the 70s, CO2 was considered to be solely responsible for global warming, but Ramanathan showed the contribution of trace gases and chlorofl uorocarbons (CFCs) to it. In the 90s, he found that soot from cooking plays a key role in climate change. This led to a pioneering study with Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen that discov-ered the Asian Brown Clouds (renamed to the more politically correct Atmospheric Brown Clouds).

HIS APPROACH: Conducts extensive fi eld experiments using high-tech, unmanned aerial vehicles to study pollutants over vast geographical areas such as the Indian subcontinent.

HIS INDIA LINK: Ramanathan wrote a white paper in 2007 with Kalpana Balakrishnan, Director, WHO Collaborating Center for Occupational Health at Sri Ramachandra University in Chennai, on a global-scale project to reduce soot pollution by replacing traditional cooking stoves with more effi cient ones. Project Surya, which provided biomass and solar cooking stoves to all households, was launched in Uttar Pradesh with UNEP funding in 2009.

HOW HIS WORK CAN BENEFIT INDIA: If Indian villagers are able to reduce soot generation by using effi cient stoves, they could not only help fi ght atmospheric pollution but also earn substantial money from carbon credits.

PASSIONATE ABOUT: Conducting fi eld experiments and invent-ing gadgets for them. Hates to be closeted inside laboratories.

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT HIM: “Project Surya is very chal-lenging, especially because of the complexities in developing countries. What we are trying to do is use high-end science to evolve simple, scalable solutions,” says Kalpana Balakrishnan, who is leading the evaluation of clean cooking technologies

- Dinesh Narayanan

PROFILE: He is University Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Computer Science & Engineering, and Electrical & Computer Engineering, Michigan State University

HIS MAIN AREA OF WORK: Pattern recognition, computer vision and biometric recognition. Jain is one of the pioneers of biometrics (some of the basic text books in the fi eld are written by him, and he holds six patents in fi nger printing).

HIS APPROACH: Jain and his team have found ways to address fi ner issues in pattern recognition using sophisticated image processing and clustering algorithms. Recently, they came up with a solution to identify surgically altered fi ngerprints that automated systems can’t catch.

HIS INDIA LINK: He studied at IIT Kanpur, and after he moved to the US, collaborated with research groups at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He was also a consultant for the UID (Unique ID) project.

HOW HIS RESEARCH CAN BENEFIT INDIA: The far-reaching impact of Jain’s work is likely to be seen in UID. His pioneering work in multi-biometric came in handy when the UID team was taking biometrics of manual labourers with fading fi nger prints.

PASSIONATE ABOUT: Working on problems related to pattern recognition and computer vision, and training and guiding students in the fi eld.

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT HIM: “Prof. Jain was one of the fi rst to understand the biometrics fi eld in its inception and translate the fundamental biometrics problems into mainstream pattern recognition problems,” says Sharath Pankanti, who has collaborated with Jain and works at IBM T.J. Watson Center at Hawthorne NY.

- N. S. Ramnath

SANGEETA BHATIA

VAMSI MOOTHA

VEERABHADRAN RAMANATHAN

ANIL K. JAIN

She uses micro- and nano-technology to treat diseases like Cancer, which is expected to spread at an alarming rate in India

He showed that soot plays a key role in climate change and now wants Indian villagers to help fight pollution by using efficient stoves

He showed a correlation between reduced mitochondrial activity inside a cell and type 2 diabetes, an epidemic in India

He is one of the pioneers of biometrics and his work will come in handy when taking biometrics of manual labourers


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PROFILE: He is professor of medicine, Stanford University; founder and CSO of Ventus Medical; executive director of Stanford-India Biodesign (SIB) Program.

HIS MAIN AREA OF WORK: Doshi recently founded Ventus Medical to develop and commercialise a new class of obstruc-tive sleep apnea therapy, the fi rst in 25 years. Sleep Apnea is a disorder marked by abnormal pauses or low breathing during sleep. An inventor at heart, an engineer by training, and an entrepreneur by design, Doshi believes medical technology innovation can be taught.

HIS INDIA LINK: He is executive director of SIB, which aims to train the next generation of medical technology innovators in India through fellowships, internships and events.

HOW HIS RESEARCH CAN BENEFIT INDIA: Sleep apnea is among the largest chronic diseases in the world, with about 20 percent of urban Indian males having it. Another new-in-class, an over-the-counter device for snoring, is under development. Doshi’s new, “expiratory positive airway pressure” nasal device, is US FDA-approved and particularly suitable for India where power supply can be erratic. Also, biodesign is important for India because so many Indians are medically under served due to the lack of cost-eff ective medical devices.

PASSIONATE ABOUT: Mentoring. “My other major ‘product’ is the 17 fellows that have completed our SIB fellowship pro-gramme,” says Doshi. He thinks many of these fellows, who get a rigorous training in identifying needs from the society and then taking them through various fi lters to the prototype stage, will be among the leaders of the fl edgling medical device industry in India.

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT HIM: “Dr Doshi’s role is pivotal for many reasons: There is a dearth of highly-experienced medtech innovators who understand all aspects of the innova-tion and commercialisation process. The last four years of this programme, under his leadership, have been very instructive,” says Anurag Mairal, director, Global Exchange Program, Stanford University.

- S.S.

PROFILE: He is director, Edwin L. Steele Laboratory for Tumor Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH); Andrew Werk Cook Professor of Tumor Biology, Harvard Medical School

HIS MAIN AREA OF WORK: He is a pioneer in tumour biology and in vivo imaging with more than 500 publications. In the late 1990s, a cure for cancer looked plausible with Harvard University’s Judah Folkman proposing a new theory of angio-genesis—starving cancer cells of their blood supply by using anti-angiogenesis agents. But clinical studies were discourag-ing. Since then, Rakesh Jain and his colleagues have shown that blood vessels can be exploited to improve Cancer therapy, but not in the way Folkman was suggesting.

HIS APPROACH: In many studies he showed that rather than destroying blood vessels that support tumours, these agents work by “normalising” the blood vessels. In other words, make the tumour blood vessels look like healthy tissue by using lower doses of anti-angiogenic drugs. He showed this approach helped the patient respond much better to chemotherapy and radiation. Since one of the biggest hallmarks of his work is translational research—taking lab research to the bedside—clinicians at MGH have validated his “vascular normalisation” therapy. Jain is currently signing up agreements with pharma-ceutical companies to run further trials in some solid tumours that grow in areas like the brain, colorectal and liver.

HIS INDIA LINK: Jain did his B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

HOW HIS RESEARCH CAN BENEFIT INDIA: Cancer is spreading at an alarming rate, especially in developing countries like India, which are expected to show steep growth in number of cases reported. Jain’s work will go a long way in giving eff ective treatment for those suff ering from the disease.

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT HIM: “The Edwin Steele Laboratory under Dr. Jain’s leadership has become one of the most produc-tive translational hubs of cancer research in the world,” says Jay S. Loeffl er, Chair, Department of Radiation Oncology, Massachusetts General Hospital

- S.S.

PROFILE: He holds the Edward R. Weidlein Chair in the Swan-son School of Engineering and the School of Dental Medicine at University of Pittsburg. He has more than 150 refereed journal publications and holds four patents.

HIS MAIN AREA OF WORK: His work spans two diff erent fi elds—energy and medicine. In energy storage, he works with nano particles and in medicine, with biodegradable nano materials that has applications in gene therapy and regenerative medicines.

HIS APPROACH: In the mid-90s, he asked a game changing question: Why not create degradable ceramic material us-ing calcium and phosphate? That led to at least two break-throughs—one in gene therapy and the other in regenerative medicine. In gene therapy, he developed a safe and effi cient way to deliver genes to cells. By combining nano materials with other materials, he has found a way to stabilise the bone wound and enhance regeneration. This patented work is slated to proceed for FDA approval. In energy, Kumta’s research could lead to a new generation of lithium-ion batteries that can store more power and last longer.

HIS INDIA LINK: Kumta has a B. Tech in metallurgy from IIT Bombay. He is in discussion with Prof. Rudra Pratap at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, to initiate some collaborative work in biotechnology.

HOW HIS RESEARCH CAN BENEFIT INDIA: India is set to become one of the biggest consumers of electronic goods like mobile phones, cameras and laptops even before power infra-structure catches up. His work in energy storage will help.

PASSIONATE ABOUT: Doing excellent scientifi c work. “I remain hopeful that the scientifi c work will lead to novel technologies for improving the quality of life all over the world,” he says.

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT HIM: “I have known Prof. Kumta for nearly 20 years... No challenge was too great for Prashant: Intellectual or personal,” says Aloysius F. Hepp, Editor-in-Chief, Materials Science in Semiconductor Processing.

- N. S. Ramnath

PROFILE: He is an Intel Fellow and Chief Client Platform Architect for the Intel Architecture Group at Intel Corp.

HIS MAIN AREA OF WORK: There’s a reason why Intel chose to make Bhatt the ‘rock star’ in their 2009 ad campaign (although he was portrayed by a professional actor)—he was the lead architect responsible for one of the most ubiquitous technolo-gies in the computing world: Universal Serial Bus or USB. Every year, billions of new devices like PCs, smartphones, webcams and printers are able to communicate with each other at high speeds due to Bhatt’s pioneering work in devising a one-size-fi ts-all cable format that could transport both data and power. Bhatt was also the lead architect behind two other blockbuster technologies at Intel—the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) and its successor, PCI Express.

HIS APPROACH: As computing devices get smaller, cheaper and ubiquitous, Bhatt is now shifting his priorities to “think more outside in”. This includes work to make PCs boot instantly, last on batteries all day, become almost as thin as today’s mobile phones and tablets and work seamlessly with a host of other non-PC devices. “My primary focus these days is on improving and completely reengineering the PCs as we know it,” says Bhatt.

HIS INDIA LINK: He did his B.E. in electronics from Maharaja Sayajirao University, in Baroda, Gujarat.

PASSIONATE ABOUT: Photography, travel and meeting people from diff erent countries and cultures. He’s been learning photography from some of the world-renowned photographers for about 10 years now. His camera always goes with him.

WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT HIM: “USB has today become a foundational technology. Considering that the standard was defi ned over 10 years ago but is widely used (albeit with speed upgrades) today—for instance most new smartphones use it to exchange data as well as draw power—is testament to the fact that it was very well thought out and turned out to be future-proof,” says Prof. Huzur Saran, Head, Departments of Computer Sciences and Engineering, IIT-Delhi

- Rohin Dharmakumar

RAJIV DOSHI

RAKESH K. JAIN

PRASHANT KUMTA

AJAY V. BHATT

He developed a new class of therapy for sleep apnea, a disorder that affects about 20 percent of urban Indian males

He works in the fields of energy and medicine. In gene therapy, he developed a safe and efficient way to deliver genes to cells

A pioneer in tumour biology and in vivo imaging, he has shown that blood vessels can be exploited to improve cancer therapy

He was the lead architect responsible for one of the most ubiquitous technologies in the computing world: The USB


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As they say, looks can often be misleading. At fi rst glance, the Engineering and Research Centre (ERC) inside the Tata

Motors’ factory in Pimpri doesn’t seem to be the kind of place where great ideas are born. The paint on the walls is a dull shade of blue and white, the same colour as the uniform that employees sport, there are helmets strewn all over the place, the window panes in the visitors’ toilets are broken and the chairs in the long boardroom are anything but comfortable. To the untrained eye, everything about the place seems practical and mundane.

But then a casual visitor to the plant may not quite know this: The ERC is the nerve-centre of the biggest research and development eff ort that any Indian corporation has mounted in recent times. Today, the company has about 5,500 people working in R&D spread across India and the rest of the world. At any given point in time, there are several R&D projects going on both at the company and inside many global universities, diff erent start-up companies, and diff erent vendor partners that Tata has collaborated with across the US, Europe and India.

The plethora of work is astounding: From electric vehicles, fuel cells,

engine development, hybrid technology to battery research or even simple things like a remote-controlled door opening device or boot lid or a smart starter motor or just a glass winding mechanism that’s more effi cient. So there’s an electric car undergoing fi eld trials on the streets in the UK. An electric version of the Ace commercial vehicle is also on trial. A parallel hybrid bus trial is now on in Mumbai, plus a fuel cell bus that was debuted as a concept at the Auto Expo in January. Work is also on to meet new Indian emission norms like BS IV and BS V.

The acquisition of Jaguar Land Rover was a game-changer in this technology game. In early 2011, Ratan Tata spoke about Tata Motors and Jaguar and Land Rover cooperating for an engine development programme in the company’s annual report. The goal is “to optimise the synergetic strengths between JLR and Tata Motors in India” he had said. These would be smaller displacement engines that could be used both by Tata Motors and JLR. Take the case of the 5-litre engine developed by Jaguar engineers, considered to be one of the best of its kind. Yet, a 5-litre engine is not exactly the future. JLR needs smaller displacement engines

To Reinvent the WHEELSWith its big R&D push, Tata Motors has begun the serious work of transforming itself into a global auto companyBy ASHISH K. MISHRA

THE INNOVATOR’S DNA (Clockwise)

1. Dr. Tim Leverton, the chief of Tata Motors’

R&D. 2.Tata Nano and 3. Jaguar Land Rover

(JLR) Freelander. Though the Nano earned

Tata Motors recognition for frugal engineering,

it was the acquisition of JLR that proved to be

a game-changer in the technology game

which comply with tighter emission norms. So does Tata Motors. For the past one year, engineers from both JLR and Tata Motors have been working on these new engines.

No other Indian car maker has gone this distance to develop research and development capabilities. Mahindra and Mahindra has made a start with its 1,200-man R&D centre in Chennai. But it focussed only on utility vehicles, whereas Tata aspires to be a full-line auto fi rm with global footprint. Market leader Maruti-Suzuki is looking to open its own

research centre in India in two years’ time, after depending on parent Suzuki for nearly three decades. So why is Tata Motors pushing so hard? Lord Bhattacharyya, chairman of the Warwick Manufacturing Group based in Birmingham, and who is partnering Tata Motors to produce an electric car on the Indica platform for the European market, says the lens to be used when looking at Tata Motors’ R&D eff ort is that it is an attempt by an Indian company to build a product that can thrive in an open marketplace. “Your product has to be globally competitive, be it in technology, pricing, quality… everything. It has to compete with the best in the world. The Japanese have it, the Koreans have it and even the Chinese have been able to do it… in India, it is only fi tting that Tata Motors does that. If they didn’t do R&D, they would never survive,” he says.

In the last decade, despite the success of the Tata Ace, and the global recognition it earned for its frugal engineering skills in creating the Nano, R&D remains its Achilles heel. And perhaps the only real reason—apart from quality—that could stop it from going beyond its tag as the world’s tenth largest automobile fi rm.

In the past, the easy way was to do it through licences—that’s how many companies in India have gone about their product development. But now, global competition is at Tata’s door step.

“In some ways Tata Motors is ahead of the rest but it is also because the company is under threat,” says a senior executive of a rival car company who did not want to be quoted. All the major auto fi rms—including Daimler, VW, Volvo and Toyota—have already arrived in India.

The man tasked with the responsibility of upping the ante

knows a thing or two about setting new standards in technology. Dr. Tim Leverton, its chief of R&D, has a phenomenal track-record in the automotive industry. He was the chief engineer at BMW and helped build the new generation Rolls Royce Phantom. In 2006, he was also the engineering director at JCB, one of the world’s largest industrial and agricultural equipment manufacturing companies and in charge of building the Dieselmax, the fastest diesel engine in the world. So what made him pick Tata Motors? “I was attracted by the ambition of Tata Motors and their strong commitment to backing that ambition with investment and a readiness to disruptively innovate. I feel that India is one of the most exciting business environments in the world for the next era and wanted to be a part of that,” he says.

To bind all the diff erent research projects together, Leverton has taken a leaf out of Apple’s model of innovation. Tata Motors will now act as an integrator for innovations that have come from Korea, the UK or elsewhere.

Leverton regularly shuttles between the hubs—one in Pune and the other at the European Technical Centre at Warwick. And he keeps a constant eye open for innovative ideas from the larger eco-system. It is a pretty serious attempt at collaboration. So much so that Dr. Leverton says he vets every email that he receives from anybody in the world who claims to have made a technology breakthrough. “There is a team which follows up each and every claim,” he adds. The hunt for the higher ground has begun.


The automobile company has a clear agenda for its R&D. For better understanding and improved efficiency, Tata Motors has broken down its R&D into three approaches, which operate simultaneously but with different objectives.

FIRST HORIZONThis is very important in the near term as it deals with products, which bring in the money

IT FOCUSSES ON: � New product development� Understanding the requirements of a product, listening to the customer’s voice, creating an engineering concept followed by detailed engineering, test-ing and validation process to prove that the concept can be executed and then releasing the production tooling, fi nding the parts and fi nalising the manufacturing process to build the product.

SECOND HORIZONMust go hand-in-hand with the fi rst. Risk is low but the benefi ts are assured

IT FOCUSSES ON:� Acquiring new technologies � Those that Tata Motors does not have but is available in the rest of the world. For instance, a new genera-tion suspension for cars. This horizon is about acquiring new technologies and working with universities and vendors. But it’s not about developing breakthrough technology. The second horizon always feeds into the fi rst, so taking big technology risk is a strict no.

THIRD HORIZONThis is important for competitive advantage. What’s the next big thing? Play in the third horizon to fi nd that out.

IT FOCUSSES ON: � Developing new technologies� This is true R&D and the one which carries maximum risk. This horizon involves research in anything from ma-terials to electronics and alternative fu-els. Ideas in this stage may not always come to fruition. The way to go about it is to create small groups and give them a focussed project. This could be done by way of linkages and over time a group may emerge as a centre of excellence in a particular fi eld.

To read interview with Dr. Leverton and stories on BHEL and L&T, visit forbesindia.com

TATA MOTORS’ INNOVATION PHILOSOPHY

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A few GOOD MENGet in the best scientists, give them creative freedom, and innovation will happen. A scientifi c institute in Bangalore is showing the way

Nobody quite knows what Homi Jahangir Bhabha had in mind when he hired biologist Obaid Siddiqi in 1962 at the Tata

Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), the hub of India’s nuclear programme. Perhaps he wanted to create a more well-rounded ethos by bringing in biology in an environment of physics and math—a routine practice in good institutions

today, but a rarity in India then.Whatever it was, Siddiqi capitalised

on that culture to spin off a new biology centre, the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore—it was a conscious decision to keep it outside the TIFR campus in Mumbai. In 1988, he brought in K. Vijayraghavan, a neuro-geneticist from the California Institute of Technology, to lead NCBS.

In the following 20 years, NCBS has become the most distinctive place for biological sciences in the country. A lot of ‘impactful’ science has come out of here, particularly in developmental biology and protein chemistry.

“I think one view can be that these are accident upon accident upon accident, or these are designs which embed a culture that made this more likely to happen. I think it’s

By SEEMA SINGH

THE A-TEAM K. Vijayraghavan (Right), director, NCBS, with inStem dean S. Ramaswamy who was brought in to help NCBS bridge the gap between research and application


a mix of both,” says Vijayraghavan. “People grasped the opportunity when the accident happened and designed interesting things.”

Having laid the foundation for cellular and molecular biology in India, NCBS is now moving to the next level. It’s at the heart of a bio-cluster that the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) has been setting up in Bangalore and has begun to bring in clinicians and the industry together.

As a fi rst step, an Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, called inStem, was set up in 2009. Besides basic research in stem cells, the institute has taken up applied work in critical areas like cancer and cardiac hypertrophy (stiff ening of cardiac muscles and a big problem in India). It promotes team-driven research and chooses problems that cannot be solved by an individual.

“They have found a mechanism to maintain the quality over these years and have been very careful in choosing areas to expand into,” says Chetan Chitnis, research scientist at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Delhi. *****So, what is NCBS’ approach? Assemble top quality people and allow them creative freedom, and the rest becomes easy.

To lead inStem, for instance, NCBS and DBT (which funded inStem with Rs. 203 crore), wanted someone who could bridge the gap between research and application, a gaping hole in Indian research. They identifi ed S. Ramaswamy, associate dean of research at Iowa medical school.

A Ph.D in biophysics from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Ramaswamy had vowed never to come back to India. In 1994, he had applied for jobs at 40 places in India, but “there were few jobs then and

they were reserved for those whose mentors were powerful,” he says.

Ramaswamy was all set to join New York University as associate dean of research when he received an email from Vijayraghavan.

“Vijay wrote saying we made a mistake in 1994 in not off ering you a job; can we do something now to

rectify that,” says Ramaswamy. That seeded a thought in his mind that this place is indeed diff erent and that India is changing. “I thought, ‘He’s head of an institution, he doesn’t need to apologise’.” As they began discussing inStem, the possibilities looked immense. But what clinched the Bangalore position of inStem dean for Ramasawamy was the “positive energy” here.

In his fi nal visit to NYU, he found that everybody was asking how they would be able to retain their faculty

and grants given the impending economic hardships. “Whereas the feeling here was exactly the opposite. People said we need to grow, expand, experiment, and do things that no one else has done…. People here were thinking ahead,” says Ramaswamy.

inStem has established collaboration with some of the best researchers around the world. “We are not doing it in the Singapore model—pour in big money to get big names. Our intellectual environment and teams get the global collaborators, from Milan to Kyoto, Montana to Los Angeles. That way our turnaround time gets shortened,” says Vijayaraghavan. For instance, the cardiomyopathy programme here is led by Jim Spudich of Stanford. Similarly, some of the leading Japanese scientists from Kyoto University, including the famous stem cell technologist Kouichi Hasegawa, are now running labs at inStem.

Another signifi cant collaboration is with Ashok Venkitaraman, director of the MRC Cancer Cell Unit at the University of Cambridge, and one of the world’s leading experts in chemical biology and therapeutics. India doesn’t have this expertise. His lab at NCBS will develop a pipeline of therapeutics—look at molecules, from screening to synthesising, and then test out the possibilities in breast cancer in collaboration with the industry. Companies like Biocon, Aurigene and Jubilant Life Sciences are already hooked up. *****Rockstar researchers everywhere get market-based salaries, but NCBS, bound by Indian pay scales, can’t pay such salaries. So, it has found ways to get around this sticky issue. In some cases, the parent universities pay the salaries, and NCBS provides research grant and infrastructure—for which there is enough money

M.K. Bhan, secretary, DBT. But sceptics question its mixed

mandate. What is the business model? Is it a service provider or is it an enabler? Is it willing to lose on monetary terms and gain on impact?

Bhan says C-CAMP’s mandate is “not to become a business place but remain an empowerment place”. It will soon have an incubator where real science-based innovators with risky ideas will be funded, he says. Ramaswamy, who has two potential

new molecules from the campus, has already submitted a proposal for an innovation fund of Rs. 10 crore to a new non-profi t company approved by the Cabinet in November 2011—Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC).

Those like Suri Venkatachalam, founder-CEO of a drug discovery company Connexios Life Sciences, remain unconvinced. “After all, its

DNA is an academic organisation. Does it have the ability to fi re people or give performance-based remuneration? We have seen many CSIR labs, which were set up to assist the industry, but turned out to be sunken investments by the government,” he argues.

Ramaswamy says he has “enshrined” all HR innovation, linked to performance and collaboration, in the society document of inStem and memorandum of article of C-Camp.

As these new places come into their own, researchers have begun selecting problems they’d have not touched before. For instance, a joint stab at dementia and depression among the Indian population: Sanjeev Jain of NIMHANS, a clinician who studies depression and has access to a large patient pool, and Sumantra

Chattarji, a neuroscientist at NCBS who studies brain disorders, are converging at C-CAMP to use its next-generation sequencing tools and analytical expertise to understand the genetics of depression.

The positive energy is palpable in the 40-acre campus. “Good things happen because of the culture of the place, not because of the head of the institution,” says Vijayraghavan.

CONNECTING THE DOTS

“I chose to come here because NCBS has an integrated approach to biology. Here I can sit next to an ecologist, a cell biologist, a development biologist or a geneticist… This is particularly important for my kind of work. I think NCBS is the only such place in India today, way ahead of others.”

- Krushnamegh Kunte, Ramanujan Fellow and Reader, who joined NCBS in January 2012

To read the full version, visit forbesindia.com

in India now, whereas the West is facing a crunch. Researchers here are raising handsome grants from various national and international bodies. Being part of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), a well-funded agency, allows NCBS to be ambitious.

In other cases, inStem will use endowment money to top-up salaries, provide overseas travel grants, and address other such needs.

In January, it received its fi rst endowment of $1.5 million from The Wadhwani Foundation. Ramaswamy says he is talking to more business houses in India. “My target is to raise Rs. 1,000 crore in endowment in 10 years. I know the fi rst Rs. 100 crore is the hardest.” He believes if in fi ve years, breakthrough research comes out of inStem-style-of-collaboration, he can convince the Indian funding agencies to allow market-based salaries. *****To accelerate the process from discovery to innovation, Ramaswamy, with Rs. 48 crore in support from DBT, set up another centre in 2009—the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP)—to develop tools that could be used by researchers from the industry and from public institutions.

To begin with, it will use the existing facilities on the campus—such as high-end microscopy, gene sequencing, imaging, etc—and make them accessible to others, for a fee. The centre has generated Rs. 1.5 crore in the fi rst year and is on course to gross Rs. 4 crore this fi scal as the number of users reaches 40, including companies like Biocon, Abexome Biosciences, and Chromous Biotech.

C-CAMP will be fully funded by DBT for seven years and after that the support would be partial. “It is evolving; in future it could go in diff erent directions,” says

R E S E A R C H E R S A T N C B S A R E R A I S I N G H A N D S O M E G R A N T S F R O M N A T I O N A L A N D I N T E R N A T I O N A L B O D I E S W H E R E A S T H E W E S T I S F A C I N G A C R U N C H

THE NCBS WAY

GET IN ROCKSTAR SCIENTISTS� It got in leading names like S. Ramaswamy (as head of the stem cell institute, inStem), Jim Spudich of Stanford who leads its cardio-myopathy programme, and famous Japanese stem cell technologist Kouichi Hasegawa, among others.

FREE UP FUNDS� To compensate for its inability to match market-based salaries, it gives research grant and infrastructure, and will use endowment money from business houses to top-up salaries, overseas travel grants, etc.

CONNECT WITH INDUSTRY

� NCBS is at the heart of a biocluster that will bring clinicians and industry together.� To speed up application of its research, NCBS is developing a pipeline of therapeutics—from screening molecules to synthesising drugs—in collaboration with the industry. Companies like Biocon, Aurigene, Abexome Biosciences, Chromous Biotech and Jubilant Life Sciences are already hooked up.

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How to ‘UPGRADE’

a country’s technologyYigal Erlich, the founding father of Israel’s R&D ecosystem,

talks about his country’s experience in fast-tracking innovation


I have been to India recently and I know that the government is thinking of developing technology

to ‘upgrade’ the country. Once you’ve decided to do this, then it becomes a matter of implementation [of policies]. What we have done in Israel can be copied, but there are certain principles to be adopted—encourage entrepreneurs and leverage R&D, educate more young people to do science and then give fi nancial assistance and freedom to take their work to practical use.

Sometimes a technology roadmap from the government helps. For instance, some years ago, President Shimon Peres [a technology enthusiast] decided to encourage nanotechnology by a one time $250 million fund to the universities, as that’s the place you go to for developing new technologies. Today, we have three new centres. Now, we hear that he is interested in neuroscience.

If you ask me, is it good that such a fi llip comes from the top? I’d say, yes in some cases, but in many cases the government policy should be neutral and let the merit of the idea prevail. You need to try many [schemes and programmes], some will fail, and some will succeed.

It’s true that in countries like Israel and the US, defence has played a big role in technology development. The advantage of the military involvement is that they are big and become assured customers if companies choose to work with them. That’s crucial for new product development as entrepreneurs know who their potential customers are and remain focussed on technology development.

In Israel, government procurement has also played a big role in encouraging local companies to develop new technologies. In fact, many technology institutions exist

because of government procurement. [One institute alone, Technion, has led to some 4,000 start-ups.]

One way, and I know India is trying to get trained scientists and engineers from developed countries, is to get people from countries which have advanced skills. Israel has tried this in the past and is currently trying again to woo researchers. It works better in the economic uncertainties of today. The key is to make room for their work and assure them that they can hold on to their jobs. Still, we know that only some will come back.

One of the reasons why Israel develops a lot of new technologies is the steady performance of the Offi ce of the Chief Scientist (OCS) in the Ministry of Industry. It started in the 1970s and continues till date. The idea is very simple: To encourage companies to do R&D. It started with an annual budget of a few millions which now exceeds $400 million.

In the early ’90s, we started the technology incubator programme that eventually led to 24 incubators across

the country. It was started because we were getting many immigrants from Russia, most of whom were scientists and engineers. So, there was a need to fi nd work for them as well as to exploit their know-how.

The programme caught on very fast. Then we saw the need for another type of fi nancing, one that could fi ll the gap in government funding. From the OCS emerged the Yozma programme, the fi rst venture capital fund in Israel where the government not only invested, but invited private investors, who only shared the profi ts; the risks were borne by the government.

Yozma really helped small companies grow, in size and geography. Initially, it was started as an experiment, not to run for more than seven years, but it became so successful that it was privatised after four years and has raised many more rounds of funds since then. Other countries have tried to emulate OCS, such as France, Singapore, Finland, and some other Scandinavian countries, and Yozma, such as South Korea and New Zealand in varying degrees, but most of them have not been successful.

These things take time even though I’d agree that Israelis have probably less patience, maybe because of the [geo-political] situation. They want to achieve. All this has led to the growth of the ecosystem. Today, bigger companies are coming out from Israel, and they are raising bigger funds. You can even see better technologies. But we still have some defi ciencies; we are not there yet in life sciences.

It’s a challenging time today for all countries and technology development is already suff ering, as private sector is not putting in more money into R&D. The governments need to invest more. I see a lot of them have at least begun talking about it.

(As told to Seema Singh)

YIGAL ERLICHAGE: 71 CAREER: Was chief scientist of Israel in the Ministry of Industry from 1984-1992; served as chairman of the executive committee of the US-Israel Bi-National Industrial Re-search and Development Foundation; was a member of the National R&D Council of Israel until 2010CURRENT POSITIONS: Chairman of MATIMOP, a non-profi t government entity for the promotion of industrial R&D; is a board member of the Rus-sian Venture Capital Company, a $1 billion government fund-of-fundsHIS ACHIEVEMENT: Started the fi rst venture capital fund in Israel called Yozma and also founded Israel Venture Association; has been a consultant to several governments including New Zealand, Korea, Canada, Latvia, Slovakia and Estonia

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