Materials Research Priorities
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MATERIAL MATTERS
Materials Research Priorities R. Chidambaram The following article is a speech by R. Chidambaram, principal scientific advisor to the government of India, delivered at the inaugural session of the 13th Annual General Meeting of the Materials Research Society-India (MRS-I) at Hyderabad on February 7, 2002. Slight modifications and an update were provided by the author. This article is reprinted with permission from the MRS-I Newsletter, Volume B 02, Number 2, April 2002. Prof. C.N.R. Rao, Founder President of MRS-I—and, may I say, father figure to the Society, who has retained his tremendous enthusiasm for research as we saw just now—Prof. Chakravorty, Dr. Raghavan, Dr. Dipankar Banerjee, Prof. Subramanyam, distinguished materials scientists who have come for this meeting and friends: I thought that, in the brief time that has been given to me, I shall say a few things about what I consider as materials research priorities for India. Dr. Banerjee—not Dipankar, but our own brilliant Srikumar—and myself are now editing a book on materials research. It has gotten a little delayed because the receipt of a couple of articles got delayed. If you look at the subjects which have been covered, it is fascinating to see the excellent quality of the work that is going on in India in a variety of fields. We are looking both at the current scenario and the future projections. One thing is clear. More attention is needed to get technology pay-offs for India from the efforts that we are putting in. Now, one can divide the materials research work into areas, though, of course, the boundaries are not sharp between basic research and applied research. For basic research, you need advanced facilities, you need advanced analytical equipment for materials characterization. Unless you have well-characterized samples, all data and results that you get become practically useless. This happened, for example, in the early days of high-Tc superconductors. Basic research is important; it is a cultural necessity. Any civilized country must provide an opportunity for its highest intellects to work on problems of their choice. Applied research is also necessary to catalyze indigenous technology growth. Research instrumentation has to be developed and there is weakness here. Of course, there are exceptions. A great deal of instrumentation has been developed in the Department of Atomic Energy and 660
some other laboratories and institutions. You heard just now how Prof. C.N.R. Rao’s group built the 15-tesla magnet for his magnetoresistance studies. But our instrumentation efforts are inadequate. Frontier areas of basic research are often decided by the technology imperatives of developed countries. They have already reached a high level of technology development. They want to carry out research to reach even higher technology levels. Of course, we must be in these areas, pursuing them as basic research and also as an investment for future—or, if possible, even current—technology development. At the same time, we should look also a
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