Burla (Orissa): ''Aim great missions, work for it and you will achieve''. The advice came from the President, Dr A P J Abdul Kalam who addressed the 21st convocation of the Sambalpur University at its Jyoti Vihar campus today (Jun 4, 2004).

Narrating as to how a tiny island on the Orissa coast had been transformed into a world-class missile range complex, Kalam, who is regarded as the brain behind India's missile development programme, said the mission of two scientists had helped achieve it.

Kalam, who was involved in the missile programme between 1982 and 1999, said though his place of work was Hyderabad, his theatre of action was always Chandipur and Wheeler Group of Islands on the Orissa coast.

In October 1993, he said, the development of Prithvi missile was almost over but the Army desired to have a confirmatory test on a land range to validate the Circular Error Probability (CEP) of the missile.

''Our efforts to conduct the tests in our desert range could not take off due to range safety problems. To overcome this, we were looking for an uninhabited island in the Eastern coast,'' he said.

''On the hydro graphic map supplied by the Navy, we saw a few islands in the Bay of Bengal off Dhamra (Orissa) coast indicating that there was some landmass, the President said.