Mumbai: Former President APJ Abdul Kalam urged the scientific community assembled at the city’s Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) for the inaugural ceremony of the institute’s golden jubilee celebrations to play an active role in ensuring that the nation attains self-sufficiency in energy resources by 2020.

Kalam advocated that organisations and institutions like IIT contribute to the country’s energy building exercise. Kalam said, “Energy production should be thorium-based, thereby increasing the challenge to build thorium-based nuclear reactors.” Inaugurating the ceremony, Kalam said that India needed to become self-reliant in the field of nuclear energy. Kalam also presented IIT-Bombay with a vision statement to be implemented in the next two decades for its development.

“There is an urgent need to facilitate innovations through direct research. The research carried out at IIT should be comparable to the genesis of the Internet and gene computing. The institute’s faculty should conduct collaborative research programmes with leading universities across the world.” He also suggested that the institute collaborate with the country’s medical colleges.