Investment in R & D‏

10-Feb-2005
Dear Mr. Kapil Sibal

We cannot be superpower unless we build our own technology. We are sick of the word ‘foreign collaboration’. It is imperative that we spend trillions of rupees in R&D to be leader in technology to compete with US, Europe and Japan. The reason US is superpower because it controls 70% of the world ‘s technology.  I have few concrete suggestions in this regard. Objective of this suggestion is to compete with top companies like SONY, Intel, Dell and many others.

1.      We must create a pool of 2000 top grade technocrat and scientist like Mr. Vinod Dham or Mr. Shyam Pitroda or Mr. Jayant Narlikar. This pool will be created from existing talents within the country working in institutes like ISRO, DRDO, TELCO, HAL, and TIFR etc and also from overseas.

2.      They will be given average annual salary of 1.5 crore with reduced income tax of say 15%. Some of them may get 3 crore annually. With this salary we can attract successful Indians who are working in companies like Boeing, General Motors, Intel, Motorola, Oracle etc. We can even recruit Russian or American technocrats. India must be a hub of multi national technocrat like US and Europe.

3.      We will create a group of 5 people and the group will be assigned to R & D projects of commercial value. The projects may come from both government and private institutes. Projects that I can think of

· Chip design and fabrication. Nowadays chip is used in every product from TV to washing machine to camera.

· Medical equipments – 20 most useful medical instrument so that we don’t have to purchase them from MNC at a very high cost.

· Consumer electronics – TV, DVD, Audio System, Home Theatre. Though we have many Indian companies who manufacture these electronics item. But they don’t invent technology.

· Food processing.

· Photography – auto camera, SLR camera, Camcoder, Digital Camera, Telescope, film processing.

· Mobile phones

· Office equipment – Photocopier, printers, digital white boards

· Printing technology

· Robotics

· Automobile – we should design a car, which can compete with Mercedez Benz C class.

· Software – Office product like word, Excel, Powerpoint, Database like Oracle, Multimedia products like Adobe photoshop, 3D Studio, Autocad.

· Hardware – mother board design, memory chip, hard disk

· Aircraft – aircraft engine, design of interior of the aircraft, key navigational instruments.

4.      Each group will be given 10 to 100 people depending on nature of the project. Duration of the project will be between 1-5 years. Projects will be picked up in such a way that every year 20% of the projects will be ready for production.

Now million rupees question is how much will it cost and where to get the money?

Cost estimate at a very high level

Source of Finance

·         Projects will be distributed between 100 companies i.e. each company will execute 4 projects. Infrastructure cost should be borne by the company that will take one or more projects. So each company has to get on an average 4*20=80 crore for infrastructure in the first year.

·         Cost of salary will be borne by every registered company, public or private, in India. Each company must pay 0.5% of the monthly salary of their employee. I don’t have any data about how many trillion of rupees are spent in monthly salary. But I believe 0.5% cess will raise rupees 4000-5000 crore annually. Government should cover any shortfall.

As the projects are completed, a new line of business should be created with the developed technology. Each line of business may need between rupees 10-200 crore to build.