Jail for high tech transfer

Two American defence firms and their executives were sent to jail by an US court for violating US export law. The offence was supply to India a CONTROL PANEL used in a process to manufacture carbon- carbon, a critical component of Agni missile heat shield.
How can “control panel” export to India is a hole in US national security is a mystery baffling many observers.
( The Times of India, 23/11/2005)

Impact of technology import on R&D

Liberalisation of foreign technology import policy in the 1990s has generated a general concern on how high-technology Indian industries have performed in acquiring and strengthening their technological capabilities during the reform period 1991-2001. Read the draft paper of Authors: Pradhan, J.P.; Puttaswamaiah, S.Produced by: Gujarat Institute of Development Research (GIDR), India (2005) Available online at: http://www.eldis.org/cf/rdr/rdr.cfm?doc=DOC20027
The research reveals many interesting facts about the nature and character of technology accumulation in Indian manufacturing of which:
liberalisation of technology import policy does not have any adverse impact on in-house R&D activity in Indian manufacturing vis-a-vis foreign disembodied technology import
the large chunk of technological activity is confined to a small set of industries either in terms of R&D, import of disembodied technology or investment in foreign and domestic capital goods
the investment of Indian manufacturing in accumulating capital goods, foreign as well as domestic, has seen dramatic decline in the 1990s.
Any comments?

India- Hungary R&D partnership

Universities of Hungary , Russia were long recognized for their academic excellence. Their inability to convert research results into billions of dollars , like their counterparts in USA was also well known. A strategic partnering between these universities and Indian IT firms reputed for their global delivery systems in on the drawing boards for last few months. The first to take off is partnership between Hungary’s premier science IT institute MTA SZTAKI and Satyam Computer Services ltd of India, in areas such as grid computing , data mining.

OFFSHORE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Emerging sector in Indian IT space is called outsourcing of Offshore Product Development (OPD). The companies engaged in this space not only develop products for biggies like Microsoft, Oracles, IBM, Siemens or Sharp, they also take up the responsibility of all aspects of the software product life cycle starting from research and development, prototyping, testing, maintenance, support and sometimes give valuable suggestions to their overseas clients about what should be the next version of a product and what the market demands by becoming partners in their business discussion. Their strength is the credibility of the Indian OPD companies in delivering high-end products while at the same time maintaining the safety and security of the Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) overseas. Indian players in the OPD space are Symphony Services, Persistent Systems, Aditi Technologies, Aspire Systems, Aztec and BrickRed.
(newindpress.com, November 7, 2005)

R&D awards

The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) announced winners of the National Awards for outstanding In-house R&D achievements for the year 2005. The winners are(1)Gujsynth, Vapi for development of process for manufacture of 3,5 Dichloro Aniline, (2) IPCL, Vadodara  for development of zeolite based super selective catalyst and process for manufacture of paradiethylbenzene(3) Matrix Laboratories, Secunderabad, for dev of Citalopram & others (4) Sri Biotech, Hyderabad, for dev of new protocol and delivery system for control of diseases and pests in agriculture (5) Transasia Biomedicals Ltd, Mumbai, for dev of fully automatic random access bio-chemistry analyzer XL-600 (6) Maharashtra Stae Seeds corporation ltd, Akola, for dev of pollution free cotton seed delinting plant  (7) SAIL, Ranchi, for dev of low carbon EDD steel (8) Praj Industries ltd, Pune, fro dev of multi-feed ethanol production process (9) Relaince Industries, Surat, for absorption of NG3 technology imported from E.I.Dupont (10) BEL, Bangalore fro dev of battle field survelliellance radar and (11) Rasi seeds, Attur.for dev of transgenic Bt cotton hybrids. See:  http://www.dsir.gov.in