Address of the President of India at the Indian School, Dubai

I am indeed delighted to be at the Higher Colleges of Technology and address the students and faculty. When I am in the UAE, I can see the result of the great vision of President Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahayan, who transformed the UAE into a prosperous and confident nation. My greetings to your President, Council of Ministers and the people for building this modern nation with innovative economic activity. My special prayers for the speedy recovery of President Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahayan.

When I see the result of his vision for the UAE, I am reminded of some of the visionaries who transformed India to build core competency in their respective fields using technology as a tool. A political leader Mr.C.Subramaniam and an agricultural scientist Dr M S Swaminathan in partnership with our farmers brought out the green revolution in the 60s. Otherwise, we would have continued to have ship to mouth existence when it came to food. During the same time, Dr.Varghese Kurian spearheaded the white revolution to make India the world's largest producer of milk. Dr.Homi Bhabha led research in Nuclear Energy, resulting in substantial advances in power generation, medicine, irradiation of vegetables and food and nuclear systems. Dr.Vikram Sarabhai envisioned the Space programme for national development. India today has the capability to place remote sensing, communication and meteorology satellites in different orbits using its own polar and geo-synchronous launch vehicles. Recently, a great revolution took place in India in the field of Information and Communication technology. It is inspiring to know that this entire revolution was fuelled by our younger generation of entrepreneurs and software professionals.

I am indeed delighted to share my thoughts on the development of India through the development in Science and Technology. The latter is critically helped by the higher education in the areas of Information and Communication Technology, Health Sciences and Business Administration, which are the major thrust areas of the Higher Colleges of Technology. Besides the above areas in our planning for the developed nation education in manufacturing has also played a key role.

Knowledge society components

In the 21st century, a new society is emerging where knowledge is the primary production resource instead of capital and labour. Efficient utilisation of this existing knowledge can create comprehensive wealth for the nation. Such a knowledge society has two very important components driven by societal transformation and wealth generation. The societal transformation has to be through large-scale development in education, healthcare, agriculture and governance. These in turn will lead to employment generation, high productivity and rural prosperity. IT industry throughout the world has amply demonstrated the economic advantages and wealth generation by the electronic network- this network permits knowledge to pass between isolated villages, towns, cities, countries and even the continents. The IT industry has shown that by transferring bits and bytes across geographically dispersed locations, knowledge multiplies and generates wealth.

Information & Communication Technology (ICT)

ICT has established that the data transformed into information has a business proposition which has given a competitive advantage. I am sure by the end of this decade, countries like India will have IT enabled services in the fields of human resources, customer interaction, finance and accounting, data search and integration, e-education, tele-medicine and e-governance.

Core competencies that can be exploited in addition to the above include Information Security, Scientific Software development that can spearhead a strong domestic market, Entertainment, Education, Hardware and chip design and Wireless. In India the software industry is exploring these areas to create a wealth of $80 billion by the year 2010. We strongly believe by a proper planning and the ability to move up the value chain we may even touch a target of $150 billion by 2010.

Robotics in Healthcare

By providing the use of a variety of technologies to enhance the capabilities of human surgeons, robotics will become an increasingly vital component in the medical world. The ICT will complement the capabilities in order to provide better patient care. Robotic Surgery is certainly not a fancy equipment or technology for show. It is the future. The future computers would work more and more like the human brain. According to Ray Kurzweil, the author of the famous book "the Age of the Spiritual machines", the 1000 dollar computer in 2009 will perform trillion calculations per second, in 2019, a million trillion calculations per second- equaling the power of the human brain. By 2029, it will have the power of 1000 human brains. Hence the human beings in future can offload some of their functions to the computer based robotics and make use of their brain to effectively beat the computer through human innovation and imagination capabilities. In India there is a project taken by Institutions and hospitals together to develop Robotic and Interactive surgery technologies. This will progress the role of technology in healthcare. India and UAE can work together, in these technologies.

By the end of this century there would be a strong trend towards merger of human thinking with the world of machine intelligence that the human species initially created. When there would no longer be any clear distinction between human anatomical brain and computers, how are we going to retain the supremacy of man over machines? Computers are going to give us a challenge. It is not only for the biologists and bio-technologists, the entire scientific community would have greater responsibility of keeping the mankind above the man-made computers. Fortunately, the creativity and imagination components of human mind would be always superior and would subjugate the machines. The human genome is full of software that is yet to be fully activated to unleash the ingenious potentials of human species. I believe India has a major role in this endeavour.

India with its core competencies of rich bio-diversity, ICT and skilled human power will have the competitive edge, over the industrially advanced countries in the bio-technology business.

Bio-diversity & Value Addition

India is rich in herbs, germ-plasm and micro-organisms. Industrially developed countries are importing these bio-resources in the raw forms and add value to them for export to developing countries including India as special seeds, medicines and bio-materials, fully protecting patents of such products. Instead of allowing export of such resources and importing value added products at high cost, India must add its own technology for conversion of such resources to value added products for use in domestic requirement and also for export. High technology institutions and bio-diversity nations have to work together in realizing the herbal drugs for mutual benefits in short period in a cost effective way. Herbal molecule to drug conversion also takes about 8-10 years since it involves various types of tests from lab to clinical. Efforts need to be made to minimize large time durations for realizing the economic benefits particularly in herbal areas.

Stem Cell Research

Stem cells are one of the most fascinating areas of biology today. Stem cells have two important characteristics that distinguish them from other types of cells. First, they are unspecialised cells that renew themselves for long periods through cell division. The second is that under certain physiologic or experimental conditions, they can be induced to become cells with special functions such as the beating cells of the heart muscle or the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas.

Research on stem cells is advancing knowledge about how an organism develops from a single cell and how healthy cells replace damaged cells in adult organisms. This promising area of science is also leading scientists to investigate the possibility of cell-based therapies to treat certain diseases. As scientists learn more about stem cells, it may become possible to use the cells not just in cell-based therapies, but also for screening new drugs and toxins and understanding birth defects. It has been hypothesized by scientists that stem cells may, at some point in the future, become the basis for treating diseases such as Parkinson's disease, diabetes, and heart disease and brain disorder.

Manufacturing Technology

Humanity has seen rapid transformation in the last 150 years because of the mass manufacturing techniques. Mass production and production for the masses became the basis of new business strategies. Large-scale consumption by all will strengthen the economy and can add new strategy with its strength on software and design. Innovations in microelectronics, computers and various forms of sensors, all of which irreversibly altered the manufacturing scene. It is now no longer necessary to make prototypes in a factory or a laboratory to study a new product. Many new products can be designed on computers and their behaviour simulated on them. By choosing an optimum design through such simulations, computer programs can directly drive the manufacturing processes. These processes are generally called Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Assisted Manufacturing (CAM). These capabilities are leading to newer forms of demands by customers. Each customer can be offered several special options. Customized product design or flexible manufacturing is other popular technique currently in vogue in many developed countries.

The tools used in manufacturing today have multiplied greatly: lasers and water jets are in increasing use. It is no longer specialized steels or even ceramics, which monopolize the cutting tool industry. It is hard to believe that lasers can be used to cut heavy steel plates as also for delicate eye surgery. Can you imagine that the plain water you use at home can be used to cut steel? Water pumped at high pressures and focused as a jet cuts cleanly. This technology holds a promise for use underwater, for example for offshore installations. To digress, anything focused, and focused sharply, becomes a good cutting edge or a welding source. A laser is a focused and coherent source of light. A water jet is a sharply directed high pressure jet. If we also, as a country and as a people, focus our efforts to eradicate poverty and to develop in a sustained manner, we don't think any obstacle could withstand the force of that collective, coherent, and focused will!

Virtual University

There are certain initiatives on ICT, Biotechnology and nano technological convergence. We realize that the future of Science and technology will lie in the areas that border between major disciplines in science and engineering- Like the new converging area of bio, nano and ICT. The communication has also become a common place, defeating the hurdles that are posed by distance. Automatic machine translation and over lay techniques also make the language independent courseware creation and delivery. It is time that we should start looking at the possibility of creating a Virtual University between India and UAE in Cyberspace for imparting Universal Tele-Education. This will be a first of its kind experiment across the world and would provide a common platform for teaching Schools, Colleges and Universities and even vocational courses. This will lay equal emphasis on theory and experiments in spite of the fact that it will be done in the cyberspace. Such is the power of the technology and our understanding of it. Experts from both countries in highly advanced and specialized fields would directly contribute towards the teaching and the learning experiences. This facility would also help in expansion of telecommunication and IT services. All this would lead to greater perfection in your system of education and its direct involvement in the very survival of your social and economic system. India and UAE should join hands in developing knowledge based products to compete in the international market. This would also meet your goals for considering expanded manufacturing capabilities.

Conclusion

The awesome power of ICT, bio-technology and Nano-technology would combine to give birth to the development of integrated intelligent systems. By the year 2029 the micro-processor will have almost the same power as the human brain. Already silicon has started to replace or augment the functions of carbon, particularly in the humans. The convergence of technologies will ultimately create devices and structures, that will make life of the human beings more prosperous with better longevity and more efficiency. I suggest that both India and UAE collaborate to exploit the developments in integrated intelligent systems.

It is time that we start to look at the possibilities of creating an Indo-UAE cyber university at Abu Dhabi which will help not only the UAE and Indian students, but also the students of the Gulf coordination council countries and regional prosperity. Future is full of technological challenges. I wish all of you success in your career.

God bless you.