Tuesday, January 3 2006 16:59 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Hyderabad: Government today (Jan 3, 2006) announced that the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) would be given greater autonomy to enable it to take 'bolder initiatives'.

"The transformation would allow it (CSIR) greater autonomy for bolder initiatives for public-private partnerships and investing knowledge as equity," Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal said here at the inauguration of the 93rd Indian Science Congress.

"This transformation will be completed in 2006 and will make CSIR a nimble, accountable and performance-oriented organisation, serving the nation better," he said.

Sibal said the Government would also install two desalination plants along the coast this year to provide drinking water to people.

"For our part in our drive to serve the common man, we commit to install a one million litre plant for conversion of sea water into drinking water off the coast of Tamil Nadu by mid 2006 and install another 10 million litre per day plant to help provide clean drinking water along the Indian coast by the end of this year," he said.

"It was envisaged that the cost of drinking water would be lower than that provided by any other technology in the world," Sibal said.

Sibal said the Government would also set up an Earth Commission and Earth System Science Organisation this year to integrate efforts in land, ocean and atmosphere programmes to help provide people in rural areas inputs of global quality on issues relating to climate, environment, land use and ocean resources.

Talking about other initiatives planned for the year, he said a national biotechnology development strategy would be put in place under which 50 centres of excellence and a national pool of 500 research positions would be created in next five years, exclusively for life sciences and biotechnology.

A legislation to make Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) central in the functioning of country's research establishments to assure inventors and organisations where research is carried out a return for their innovative efforts was also in the pipeline, he said.

Government would set up an autonomous board of science and engineering research with enhanced level of funding and create an initial pool of over 1000 scientific positions for young researchers in India and abroad at different laboratories, he said adding regional clusters for developing linkages between industry and research would also be set up.

Warning on the trend of big transnationationals trying to cultivate their hegemonic interests, he said it was affecting those in the rural areas.