The year ahead

As regular readers of this blog will know, each year we run a number of events throughout the year to promote research and innovation collaboration between the UK and India. We fund these through the UK’s Global Partnership Fund – a pot of money administered by the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to build the UK’s international research links.

We’re often asked what opportunities will be coming up, so thought it would be useful to share what we plan to deliver this year. If you’d like to know more, or even get involved in one of our projects, please get in touch with the team.

Each year we identify areas where we know India has research strengths, which also fit with UK priorities and capability and the strategic priorities we’ve agreed for UK-India collaboration.  We then work these up into a number of projects for the year.   This year we are particularly focussed on exploring collaboration opportunities that could be relevant to the Newton Fund that we described here.

The projects we will be delivering are:

• Advanced manufacturing: a series of events throughout the year in the UK and India to explore collaboration in areas like distributed manufacturing, additive layer manufacturing and 3D printing.
• Innovation and infectious diseases: public health is a big priority for us and infectious diseases are a big issue within that. We’re planning a series of events throughout the year on antimicrobial resistance, infectious diseases, drug discovery and hospital acquired infection.
• Global Agritech Strategy: the UK published a series of industrial strategies, with one in agritechnology. We’re part of a project to connect the UK’s Agritech community with leaders around the world and develop new connections.
• Food Processing: building on last years’s delegation to Food Pro a visit to India, potentially in December, by some of the UK’s leading food processing experts to see centres of excellence here and explore potentiasl colaboration. Of course, food is a key element of future work through the Newton fund.
• Indian involvement in ISIS: we’re hoping to arrange a workshop to explore if India can be more involved in ISIS, one of the UK world-leading big science facilities.
• Enhancing engagement in Space: building in the ratio ship between ISRO and UKSA we’d like to bring a wider selection of the UK’s space community, including the Satellite Applications Catapult Centre, over to meet India partners.
• Refrigerated Vehicle Manufacturing: preventing food waste is a huge issue if we’re going to feed a growing global population. We’re going to look at if the UK and India can share ideas on refrigerated transport.
• Promoting the UK’s expertise in wave and tidal energy: likely to be an important part of a future energy mix, and an area the UK has a great research base in, we’re going to bring over some UK experts to meet Indian partners and see what’s going on here.
• Ageing collaborations: building on last year’s workshop we’re hoping to bring a larger delegation over to India this year to explore research and policy issues in things like assisted living and telemedicine.
• Low cost innovative medical technologies: bringing the cost down of devices and treatments saves public budgets and expands access, so has been a priority of ours for a while. Following the earlier call for R&D proposals on this topic, we’ll be looking to bring more UK experts to India again this year.
• Green Chemistry: an important topic relevant to biofuels or replacing oil-based starting materials. Working with the Royal Society of Chemistry, we’ll be trying out a new kind of project for us, building connections with India, the UK and countries in Africa.

We may yet add a few more projects to our plans, so watch this space for updates