Cool ties between India and the UK

I was privileged to attend an event at IISER Pune, late October last year, focused on the importance of academia-industry partnerships, the barriers that come in the way of such partnerships and possible solutions. I gave an overview of the existing UK-India innovation partnerships and the different funding schemes in place to help augment such relationships. I also met Professor Kai Bongs from the University of Birmingham, who is the Chair of the “Quantum Matter Group” at the Physics and Astronomy department. I was impressed to hear about the joint activities the UoB and IISER are involved in and thought others developing UK-India links might get some ideas from hearing about their plans. So I asked to share some of those with us, over to him…

In the last three years, I have been to India thrice and every time I visit I am surprised and completely taken by the dynamics of the developments waiting for me. My very first visit came about when together with NISER, Bhubaneswar, we organized a Indo-UK seminar funded by the DST (India) and Royal Society (UK), in March 2011. This paved the way to establishing many inter-personal links in the field of Ultra Cold Atoms.

An important aspect of our India collaboration is the direct engagement with students. In December 2012 and 2013, together with IISER, Pune, Midlands ultracold atom research centre (MUARC)- University of Birmingham (UoB) and the University of Nottingham (UNott) organized winter schools on “Ultra cold atoms for fundamental science and enabling technologies”.

We added another strand under the flagship programme from British Council under the framework of Knowledge Economy Partnerships in which we are currently transmitting lectures via access grid technology across three institutions namely UoB, UNott and IISER-Pune. With a national grid facility available across all the key institutes in India, it would be straight forward to connect different institutes of India to different institutes of the UK via e-learning. This also provides an option for long distance learning which could prove very significant in the context of India such that the education at the highest level can be imparted to the remotest of places given India’s demography and size.

In this era driven by science, technology and innovation, it is vital that the academia and industry work together. In order to bring the two sides together for building new as well as strengthening the existing collaborations between the two, fully supported by the British Council, we organised the symposium Sheryl mentioned in her intro.
My impression from the symposium is that there is a real sense of urgency in India to bridge the gap between industry and academia as soon as possible. Also the need to generate a PhD level highly skilled workforce in sync with the economy moving towards the higher value sector was obvious, making the case for a strong increase in PhD numbers and advertising industry as a workplace for PhDs. The industry-academia collaboration has three dimensions: domestic level, international level and individual level.
As part of the short term goals, we have followed up the symposium with a round table conference with more focused and intense dialogue. Joint PhD and master level projects have already been identified as an effective means to strengthen links, complemented by joint honorary appointments and specialist lectures from industry in the institutes. On the longer term mechanisms and infrastructure has to be put in place to sort out IP and other administrative issues needed for collaboration for each institute.
On the international level an exchange of students at internship, project and PhD level would be highly desirable and reflecting the global operation of industry. However, despite some positive experiences with Indian students, we need to work out issues related to imbalances in fees and visa regulations, in order to work more effectively. This is an area, where dedicated funding for international student exchange will be highly beneficial.

In summary, in the field of ultra-cold atoms, we have succeeded to make strong links with India and convert them into collaborations.  With our initiative, the MUARC collaboration has emerged as a front running leader and tied it to the Indian centres of excellence. The immediate impact it has had is that we get many applications for internships, PhDs and post-docs from the best of candidates from India. It would also be great to engage in real collaborative research and knowledge transfer projects between the UK and India and maybe a vision to build joint centres of excellence involving industries between the two countries. There are many steps to go, but each of them so far has been proven rewarding and fun, so we are happy to move on.