Kapil Sibal calls for Greater Participation between Asean Countries for S&T Solutions to Benefit half of the World’s Population

Union Minister of Science & Technology and Earth Sciences, Shri Kapil Sibal has said that more than half of the population of the world resides in Asia which has the market and the capacity to match the western economy. Addressing the 12 Technology Summit and Technology Platform in New Delhi today he said that though there is a great national diversity in capacity and development of political, economic and technological institutions across the ASEAN countries, the wave of globalization has given rise to several common fundamental policy issues. The Minister called upon the delegates to get together a create a innovation fund in the ASEAN Region for R&D to solve the problems of the people of the region.

The two event organized by the Department of Science & Technology in partnership with Confederation of Indian Industry and ASEAN was inaugurated by Shri Kapil Sibal. An MoU between the Department of S&T and CII on Global Innovation &Technology Alliance (GITA) was also signed on the occasion.

Speaking on the occasion Mr. Ong Keng Yong, Secretary General of ASEAN termed the event as a good initiative by India. He said for ASEAN S&T is an enabling agent for better life. In his keynote address Dato’ Sri Dr. Jamaluddin Mohd. Jarjis, Minister of Science ,Technology and Innovation, Malaysia and Leader of ASEAN delegation thanked the Indian initiative for bringing together the ASEAN countries, industries and scientists together on one platform. Earlier, the CII President, Shri R. Seshasayee welcomed the delegates.

Following is the full text of Shri Kapil Sibal’s inaugural speech:

“We are living in an era of unprecedented change, risks as well huge opportunities. On one hand the world stands on the precipice of polarization along racial, religious and economic fault lines. On the other, there are sanguine signs of crafting a future in which partnering is the dominant paradigm. The interconnectedness of the nations in the world has never been as evident as it is today – all nations and people existing in a symbiotic economic ecosystem.

This is the result of the world economy undergoing a process of profound restructuring in recent times. Four basic developments have set the stage for the process. The first is a technological revolution, centering on IT, telecommunications and computing giving rise to myriads of new industries and services, changing the methods that many established companies hitherto employed for production and distribution and delivering value to the customers. The second has been a managerial revolution, initially associated with the diffusion of Japanese techniques for quality control, team production, supplier and customer relations, but now extending to many innovative forms of production, delivery and services employed around the world including increasing individualization and diversification of working relationships. The third development is the considerable and unhindered movement of capital flows across national boundaries accompanied by a decline in the influence of labour unions. The fourth is the formation of WTO leading to harmonization of trade related policies across nations and giving impetus to globalization. These conditions have increasingly put nation-states under pressure to sustain competitiveness and thus uplift the economic welfare of their people. For a country of the size of India, with its myriads of religions and ethnicities, the key policy challenge is to boost productivity and growth through increased knowledge-intensive economic activities while maintaining the social structure and cohesion. This I believe will be the objective of most of the ASEAN member countries as well. The unfolding scenario thus calls for instruments and policies that are responsive to the new global environment but get rooted in our rich local ethos.

In this scenario, mastery over management of knowledge is now recognized worldwide as the driver of economic growth and social well-being. Nations are now categorized on the basis of and the extent to which they produce, distribute and apply knowledge and information in their economy and society. Management of knowledge has thus become the heartbeat and determinant of a nation’s economic capacity and performance.

We do recognise that there is great national diversity in capacity and development of political, economic and technological institutions across the ASEAN countries. Thus each country has its own unique profile of the national innovation system depending on the organization of the educational sector, the level and orientation of publicly funded knowledge generators, the competition between and governing regime for corporates, the core competencies of firms, the interaction among firms, and between firms, other players and the government and so on.

In spite of these differences, the wave of globalization has given rise to several common fundamental policy issues. First, as national governments, we seek to provide assistance to our own ‘national’ firms, but the ‘national’ identities of firms are increasingly getting blurred. This prompts a policy shift, transferring from the macro-to the micro- level, where we, as governments, need to influence and enhance the overall performance of firms and local industries.

Secondly, there is an increased globalization of R&D resources as exemplified in case of India by (i) global exploitation of technology which is directly related to export flows in products and services; (ii) global technological collaboration which has become highly prevalent in almost all knowledge sectors e.g. IT, pharmaceuticals, biotech, etc.; and (iii) global generation of technology, as exemplified by R&D/technical units, of great significance to the mother companies, being located in well-recognized R&D/technical environment in our countreis. I believe that today there are over 300 such R&D and technical centres of leading global firms operating in India, which is rivaling the national innovation system in size and outlay, bringing in its wake diverse challenges and great opportunities for the nation.

Thirdly, changes have taken place in the decision making processes within the corporate sector itself regarding access, deployment and use of technology which has far-reaching consequences for the national innovation system. The moot question then is what’s the ‘public role of knowledge’ in the knowledge economy? What should be the public accompaniment to the globalisation of private flows of R&D? The issue thus requires an increasingly close national awareness of the global system of innovation.

While it is undoubtedly the individual firms that capture and realize the benefits of innovation for the nation, it is the national innovation system that nurtures and disseminates technological change, as reflected by the complex and interactive web of knowledge flows and relationships among industry, government, public organizations and institutions and academia for sustained innovation that is crucial for the nation’s innovation performance and capacity. In today’s globally competitive environment, no firm - large or small - can survive without innovating. However, the paradox of innovation is that while it is driven by competition it cannot flourish without co-operation. Sometimes, even between competing firms, innovation no longer depends only on how firms, universities, research institutes and other regulators perform, but on how do they work together and on cross-border cooperation and partnerships as well.

Now, let us look at the corporate sector, a little more closely. In the global knowledge economy, corporate organizations operate in various networked economies. Corporates use innovation as an integral element of their strategies to target competition, higher-quality products, enhanced market positions and increased profits. We thus need to recognize the areas of innovation at the corporate level, these are not limited to technology alone but also get extended to management, marketing, finance and supply chain as well.

The corporate sector in India is presently growing at quite a rapid rate especially in the knowledge sectors. Take the case of pharma industry. The strategy of leading Indian pharma firms is to close the ‘technology gap’ by buying up small technology firms abroad while concurrently enhancing their R&D resource base. Thus, while there is outsourcing to India of R&D and production in pharma by MNCs at the same time, Indian firms are outsourcing technology from abroad by acquisitions even from UK, Europe and USA. This is not unique to pharma industry alone. The phenomenon of global technology acquisition is also being witnessed in brick and mortar industries in India, such as steel, automotives and even for agricultural commodities like tea and coffee as well. This is inevitable, for Indian ‘firms’ to be globally competitive, they must source technology and other strategic resources from wherever it is cost-effectively available.

At the same time, we are also witnessing another aspect of globalisation in the technology front. That is, a greater global exploitation of technology as exemplified by export flows of high tech products across nations and technological collaboration for generic technologies. Thus all of us have to align our national technology development strategy accordingly. No longer can we afford to go ahead on our own – we have to invariably develop technology in partnership with entities, nationally or internationally. We, in India, have made a beginning in public-private partnership. The just concluded Global Innovation and Technology Alliance (GITA) between the CII and my Department of Science & Technology is one such example. But much still remains to be done for us in India for the Public-Private Partnership to reach our further and the impact felt at an appreciable level. We thus have to devise many more new instrumentalities and processes of public-private partnerships that are still more market responsive.

That brings me to the next point. We now live in a world characterized by what the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has termed ‘emerging systemic risks’ that arise through the interactions between complex, social, technological, environmental and economic systems. Consider for instance the exponential growth in computing power that is propelling the IT revolution. Moore’s Law, which postulates that the performance of integrated circuits doubles every 18 to 24 months, has defined for the past forty years this growth pattern. We have had nearly thirty doublings in computational performance since 1965, a rate of change that has no precedence in the history of technology. We can add to Moore’s Law the Law of Network Effects developed by Bob Metcalf, the inventor of the Ethernet and Monsanto’s Law that the amount of useful genetic information is doubling every 18 to 24 months. We thus become witnesses to change that is mind-boggling. I believe that Government policymaking and manning processes are not geared to handle such a rapidly changing scientific, technological and business infrastructure.

As an instance, until recently, say fifteen to twenty years ago, there was a near parity between the government processes and the management practices of corporates that it was interacting with. Today, that parity has disappeared and many corporates especially in the IT, communications, Pharma, Biotech, etc., are devising newer business processes and models faster than government can comprehend, making it far more difficult to anticipate policy issues, build public-private partnerships or avoid unintended social and ethical consequences of such technological and business actions.

Historically, the fortune of countries has turned around different points in time due o differing factors. For USA, it was roads and railway which contributed the initial impetus for economic development, for Britain, it was Textiles, for Denmark, it was milk and milk products, for Sweden, it was timber, for Middle East, it was oil. What is the factor that will transform our future? I believe it will be the brain power of our people – for collectively we represent half of humanity. The theme of the Summit as ‘Converting Knowledge to Wealth : Building Partnerships for Leveraging Human Ability’ is thus quite appropriate.

I therefore believe that the factors for economic success of in our group of countries lies in having -

Effective market and non-market mechanisms for interaction between science base and business sector & between public and private sectors;

Competitive markets that are stable and devoid of barriers to trade;

A culture of networking and collaboration among firms and other actors at regional, national and global levels;

Facile technology and business practices, diffusion policies, mechanisms and instruments that encourage valorization and delivering value to the customers ; and

Mobility of personnel across organizations and borders.

The way to realizing these objectives is through leveraging the human abilities of our people.

It is my privilege to welcome in our midst the most honoured guests from ASEAN member countries and Dialogue Countries to the 12th Technology Summit and Platform. Together, we represent rich ‘civilizational culture’ that has its own unique ethos and approach to growth and development. As our revered Father of the Nation Mahatma Gandhiji has very aptly said,

“I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.”

So, let us heed to his wise counsel. The economic progress achieved by the more recent societies is a good learning experience but we need to carve out our own future with the wisdom derived from our endogenous culture.

Although science may be universal and location neutral, technology and innovation are not so. The social context of our part of the world are very different from those in the Western countries. Thus solutions for many of our problems lie within our own boundaries as our scientific, technological and entrepreneurial potential are huge. To realize these, I believe we need to spearhead amongst ourselves a movement of sharing and partnering that will create a new value for our own people much beyond what we could do individually. Thus, the need for collaboration in the area of human ability development, especially in the emerging knowledge intensive sectors is imminent. This is our collective factor advantage, which can propel us as valued participants in the knowledge society and be the turning point in our achieving our fortunes.”

Source : Press Information Bureau
Date : November 06, 2006