2nd UK-India Task Force on Science & Innovation

A couple of weeks back I was lucky enough to be in London to enjoy some glorious English summer weather and, more importantly, participate in the second UK-India Science & Innovation Task Force meeting. Professor T K Chandrashekar, Secretary of India’s Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), led a high level Indian delegation to London for three days of talks with their UK counterparts. The Task Force built on the earlier meeting, in February, that agreed the priorities for UK-India research and innovation activity, specifically beginning the process of agreeing the detailed plan of work with India under the UK’s Newton Fund.

Professor Chandrashekar opened the meeting by affirming India’s commitment to working with the UK to develop this joint programme.   Maddalaine Ansell, Deputy Director for International Knowledge and Innovation in BIS, then gave a presentation on the global Newton Fund. You can get an idea of the kinds of programmes being agreed with countries around the world on the Newton Fund Site. The proposals on this site also form the basis of some of our emerging plans with India.

Following this Dr Mitra, Head of Bilateral International Cooperation at DST, gave an excellent overview of the new Indian Government’s priorities for science. It was clear that the three priorities of Food-Water-Energy Nexus, Public Health and Wellbeing, Future Cities, which were agreed at the first Task Force, fit very well with the new agenda. This puts us in a strong position to agree an impactful set of initiatives.

Discussion then moved onto specific programmes, initially broken down by each global challenge. A wide range of proposed calls and joint centres was agreed between Research Councils UK and their Indian counterparts, in areas ranging from renewable energy, air pollution, to mental health, aquaculture and social sciences and the humanities. You’ll hear more about each of these as the calls are announced over the coming years, but we’re already up and running with the first two calls under the Newton Programme with India. The first is a call for three Joint Centres in Cancer Biology, Translation Regenerative Medicine and Antimicrobial Resistance to be funded by MRC and DBT. The second is a call for UK-India partnerships with low income countries for research in maternal and child health, nutrition and infectious disease to be jointly funded by MRC, DBT and DFID.

We then discussed the proposals from the British Council, Research Councils UK and the UK’s National Academies, under the People ‘strand’ of Newton, covering travel grants, PhD partnerships, and fellowships for early and mid-career researchers. In return, Professor Chandrashekar explained SERB’s new PhD Scholarships scheme, where Indian PhD candidates are funded to carry out their degrees at the world’s leading universities, and their own fellowship programmes. We hope these will form the basis of some new mobility and fellowship schemes between the UK and India, to be agreed in time for the next Ministerial Science & Innovation Council later this year.

We also briefly discussed the ‘Innovation’ strand of proposals under the Newton Fund, and we hope that the UK’s Technology Strategy Board will be able to visit India in September to develop these proposals. All in all, it was a tremendously positive few days which only served to underline to me just how well the UK and India’s interests in research and innovation are aligned. Both countries are working together to develop a joint programme to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems through research. Exciting times!