Deputy Prime Minister announces new UK-India partnerships to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems

During a trade mission to India this week, the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, announced a series of new partnerships between British and Indian scientists which will look to tackle some of the biggest issues facing the two countries. From vital health research to predicting the weather, the new partnerships will cement the position of both countries in the vanguard of scientific research. You can see more photos from the visit on Flickr.

He announced four projects that have won a share of over £1.7 million funding from the UK’s innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board and the Indian Department of Science and Technology to create new commercial technology in the health and energy sectors. The four projects successfully bid for funding from the UK-India Joint Industrial Research and Development Programme.

The successful partnerships are:

• GBIT in India and Oxitec Ltd in the UK: Research on sustainable prevention of dengue fever, a mosquito-born disease which threatens 40% of the world’s population.
• Lifecare Innovations in India and Wockhardt Ltd/University of Central Lancashire in the UK: improving the treatment for the life-threatening tropical disease Leishmaniasis.
• Chogen Powers Ltd in India and GeoCapita Ltd/University of Glasgow in the UK: research into improving the process for generating power from biofuels.
• Bharat Petroleum Corporation/Gyan Data in India and Process Systems Enterprise Ltd in the UK: to improve efficiency and yields in oil refineries.

We, the UK Science and Innovation Network-India are very pleased to be involved in facilitating this partnership. This is a very important and exciting opportunity. Combining the best of Indian and UK expertise and capabilities has the potential to lead to some truly innovative developments, to the benefit of both countries. Over the course of last two years, we facilitated the initial scoping work and the final stages of partnership between both TSB and DST that led to the announcement of the UK-India Collaborative Industrial R&D Programme. We have been working closely with the TSB to establish opportunities for UK-India Innovation collaboration and this call is the first step in that direction.

The regular readers of our blog will remember the signing of the Programme of Cooperation between TSB and DST that took place at the evening reception of the Innovate UK conference, in the presence of Rt Hon Minister David Willetts, then UK Minister for Universities and Science. As it was TSB’s first international programme outside Europe, we were very pleased to be able to help them develop their relationship with Indian partners.

The final ‘Seal the Deal’ took place at the GITA Platform event in Nov 2013 where Sir Mark Walport, Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK government and Dr Arabinda Mitra, Head – International, DST launched the call for proposals under the TSB-DST joint Industrial R&D programme. But, our job is not finished yet; we have already started working on the details and focus areas for the next call! Watch this space for more on that!