Friday, July 7 2006 18:27 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

New Delhi: India and Britain have agreed to set up a 16-million pound joint corpus for strengthening cooperation in the area of science and technology.

Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal said India has proposed to provide a matching grant to UK's proposal to earmark up to eight million pounds for research from its 12 million United Kingdom Education and Research Initiative (UKERI) fund corpus.

Sibal said that during his four-day visit to the UK as part of his three-nation tour including the US and Mexico in June, he and his British counterpart Lord Saintsbury jointly chaired the first UK-India Science and Innovation Council meeting.

Under the initiative, it was proposed to strengthen networking of stem cell, animal biotechnology and next generation communication technologies through setting up of 'virtual centres' for the purpose.

"Cooperation would also be forged in areas of advanced materials and nano-technologies, weather science and climate change," he said.

The areas would also include new energies with emphasis on hydrogen energy.

Sibal said the visit to the three countries were aimed at strengthening the ongoing science and technology cooperation with these 'three established partners'.

His visit to the US included a meeting with the Science Advisor to the US president Jack Marburger.

He said the meeting focused on promotion of innovation through policy support mechanism.