Some of the big-ticket national missions — $1billion project for design and manufacture of next-generation supercomputers, another $1billion plan to design and roll out regional transport jets, and the country’s second shot at the Moon — all intended to catapult India into the super-league, are set to be tossed to the back-burner as the Union government has shrunk the budget for research and development (R&D).
The government had committed `5,000 crores ($1billion) for the supercomputer project after realising that the country had slipped to the 48th position, down from a comfortable position of number four in computing power in 2007. About 25 per cent of the country’s scientific manpower was tasked with the job of pooling expertise to make up the lost ground and assemble the next-generation supercomputers. The department of science & technology (DST) even announced early this year that Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, would co-ordinate the mission scheduled for fruition by 2017.
Ditto with the 90-seater regional transport jet project, which was given a thumbs-up signal by Union minister of state for Science and Technology, Ashwani Kumar, in June 2011. These aircraft were meant to connect Tier-II and Tier-III cities with major metropolitan cities, with one variant to be designed for the armed forces.
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) envisaged the first flight in five years, and production in seven or eight years.
The bad news about a cut in allocation of resources was conveyed to the top brass of these organisations when they were looking forward to the first tranche of funds.
Official sources, who confirmed the cut-back in R&D budget to this newspaper, indicated that Chandrayaan-II, the country’s second shot at the Moon, too, could join this list of projects with truncated budgets.