India Needs Technological Innovations : IITs may be the Torch bearers

During my last visit to US, I came across a Chinese born American Na, who come to the country to join a top Pharma research company. After first meeting only Na become a very close friend of mine. He was a part of team in his company doing some path breaking research, his work earned name and fame. After staying there for 15 years, from last three years, he run his own research company, working on some out of box idea to create a medicine that may of linger effect of any drug consumed for a treatment. His fame also reached to his native land. The Chinese Government has started inviting Na every year for shortlisting boys and girl, who may do some path breaking innovation. China has already understood two basic factors, one - encourage Chinese to do some innovations which may help the country to be technology leader , second - encourage its younger generation to learn and master English, lack of which is giving edge to indians in global technology market.

India is little behind in this quest for innovation in technology. The Government has taken a serious initiative in 2012 when it launched a Innovation Growth Programme in collaboration with Lockheed Martin Corporation; Indo-US Science and Technology Forum, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry; Stanford Graduate School of Business and the IC² Institute at the University of Texas. The aim of this programme is to accelerate innovative Indian technologies into the global markets. The India Innovation Growth Program is the only program of its kind, because of its focus on teaching using world-class commercialization strategies and the business development assistance provided.

During the first phase of the programme, the project team comprising of subject matter experts from FICCI will select 100 innovative technologies from a wide range of sectors such as aeronautics, agriculture, biotechnology, chemistry, communications, computing, defense, electronics, environment, healthcare, information technology, manufacturing, materials, life sciences, nanotechnology, petrochemical, semiconductors and transportation.

Before this programme bring results, a silent revolution is taking place in IITs where Professors are triggering students to innovate technology which should be scalable and replicable. This is definitely going to become a game changer, a first step in the right direction, more than teaching and learning bookish knowledge. I give below some of the innovations recently taken place either in the IITs or by IITian in their parent companies.

IIT-B students recently unveiled EVo1 at the Powai Institute campus. Thisis the first electric racing car which the students unveiled on Thursday. Ateam of 60 students have designed this car which has a top speed of 115 km perhour and weighs about 320 kgs. The battery operated EVo1 is India's firstelectric race car. It has acceleration from 1 to 100 kmph in 5 seconds and from0 to 60 kmph in 3.5 seconds. It possesses high efficiency DC motors and Lithiumpolymer batteries.

Pyromate: A firecracker making machine.It is designed by three IITians might be theanswer to eradicating child labour in the cracker-making business. AvinashTumkur, Sudhamsu Krishna and Jinesh Shah have made a unit that claims toeliminate any contact between the machine operator and gunpowder.

Portable house for construction workers. The living conditionsof the construction workers on IIT campus moved three youths to do somethingfor them. That is how Deep Karpe, Nihar Kotak and Sumit Deshmukh came up withthe portable and durable home. Deep said, "We also have made provision forventilation and light. It can also be used in disaster relief camps and armycantonment areas”.

The dual-pin stapler is the brain child of Suyash Patkar,Saurabh Garg and Spandan Das. Suyash said, “In the market, we find separatestaplers for both large pins and smaller pins. So, we thought of combiningboth."

Manual sweeping machine. three IITians –Pradeep Nikhade, Tushar Kodap and Poonamchand Meena came up with the idea of amanual cycle that would help clean the platforms and such places effectively atlow cost and without much effort.

Facebook buys app created by ex-IITians:IIT Delhi graduateAbheek Anand and IIT Kanpur graduate Soham Majumdar recently sold self-createdapp, Tagtile, to Facebook.

Krishna Bharat, an alumni of IIT Madras, India is the creator ofGoogle News, the Google service which automatically indexes thousands of newswebsites and provides instant news search in multiple languages. Krishna Bharatcreated Google News after 9/11 attacks to keep himself updated of the newsdevelopments. Google later rolled it out as a new service for its users. Infact, Google News was one of the first Google services which went beyond theplain text search.

An engineer from #IIT #Madras, Ajit Narayanan, 31, had workedwith American Megatrends before returning to India where he founded InventionLabs and returned to a passion he had encountered while at his alma mater:developing communication devices for the disabled.

Organization of the course contents in the Virtual ProteomicsLaboratory at IIT Bombay. Sakshat Labs: India’s Virtual Proteomics Initiative.Thanks to the radical progress of information technology (IT), e-learning andopen-learning resources are accessible to anyone, anywhere through theInternet. True open-learning resources can be freely accessed, reused,modified, and shared without restriction.

Yes, there is a need to grow the tribe of such innovaters beyond the boundaries of IITs, taking this in other Technology Institutes also.