Earlier this month I wrote a short review of 2013 and promised a preview of the coming year. Although at this stage, it’s impossible to know everything the next 12 months will bring, it’s already shaping up to be a busy time!
This year’s EU Research roadshow kicked off in Delhi in January and the team will be presenting at events around the country. Please come and say hello! February starts with the annual Indian Science Congress, this year in Jammu. Around the same time, we’ll have a group of UK researchers visiting Bangalore to discuss research in social media and data with academics and industrial researchers.
While we’re discussing social media in India’s IT capital, we have a delegation visiting Ahmedabad and Chennai for a series of meetings about innovation in offshore wind – an area the UK leads the world in and one of great potential in India.
Later in the month, we’re organising workshop on bioenergy, between lead researchers of joint collaborative projects funded under the Sustainable Bioenergy and Biofuels initiative and potential industry partners. At the same time, the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew will sign an MoU with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research to promote collaboration in research projects in areas like seed biology and cryopreservation.
Finishing off a busy February, Bangalore will play host to our workshop on mental health research, organised with ICMR and the MRC, and we’ll have a big workshop in Delhi to discuss UK-India collaboration in future cities. The latter was a major focus to come out the round table discussions held last November.
In March, the winners of the Bangalore-Cambridge Innovation Contest will visit Cambridge to see what’s on offer there and find potential innovation partners. They’ll travel at the same time as some researchers from the International Institute for Information Technology, Bangalore, to meet some of the UK’s electronic system design community.
By April, we’re hoping to see the results of the first call of the UK-India Programme of support for Industrial R&D (the call closes on 19th February so there’s still time to get a bid in). It’ll also be election time in India, the world’s largest democracy – it’s sure to be a fascinating time to be in the country.
Throughout the year, we’ll be working to make the most of the new funding announced in the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement to support international research and innovation (page 56). It’s too early to say quite what this will mean in India, but readers of this blog will be amongst the first to hear! Come the Autumn, we’re hoping to see the announcement of projects to be funded under BBSRC – DBT funded Crop Genomics and Technologies initiative, launched last year. And in December, researchers from around the world will descend on Bangalore for the Commonwealth Science Conference.
Hopefully that’s given you an idea of how some of this year is going to shape out. Of course, if 2013 is anything to go by, not all our plans will happen exactly when and how we expect, and there’ll be plenty of additional opportunities and events that are just a twinkle in someone’s eye at this stage. Keep checking back in and we’ll let you know about it all as it happens. Have a happy 2014!