The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) has started a scheme called DBT Interdisciplinary Programme of Life Sciences for Advanced Research and Education (DBT-IPLS) to strengthen universities for globally competitive emerging bio-economy. The overall aim of this progamme is to promote coming together of existing life sciences departments of universities and invigorating interdisciplinary modern bioscience research through creation of new research agenda aiming to develop world-class School of Life Sciences in universities.

Speaking about the programme and its scope, Dr S R Rao, advisor, Division of planning, coordination and infrastructure, DBT, informed that the Indian universities have been facing challenging times in the past with respect to poor recruitment, obsolence of infrastructure and equipment and inadequate funding opportunities for advanced research. Research reports published by various sources such as World Economic Forum etc. also pointed out that Indian universities are falling behind with their counterparts in US, Australia and also China in terms of number of publications, patents, innovation, technology development and transfer.

"These observations required an urgent need to modernise the universities to catch-up with the international competitiveness in terms of research agenda, building innovative capacity and utilise emerging opportunities." Dr Rao opined.

With the implementation of this scheme the DBT is focusing on changing the research agenda of life science departments in the Central and State universities from that of traditional areas to emerging areas in the global research agenda involving whole range of interdisciplinary research in advanced basic research, application of genomics and proteomics, nanotechnology, RNAi technology, building capacity for early translational research across life science departments, promoting academia-industry collaborations, facilitating international partnerships, establishing state-of-art laboratory equipment, centralised facilities and research resources. The support to new research agenda is supplemented with reasonable financial autonomy, flexible policy of recruitment, student selections course curriculum and accountability through fare evaluation mechanisms. Such an experiment through the DBT scheme is planned in about 20 universities during the 11th Five Year Plan (2007-2012) would create required core expertise and centres with excellence for knowledge generation and diffusion that can contribute to social and economic welfare on a long run in the emerging knowledge economy.

The schemes implemented currently by DBT is to promote interdisciplinary research, training of more Ph.D students, initiating preliminary research activity, providing expensive essential equipment for sharing by faculty and bearing expenditure for additional faculty positions for five to 10 years period. Such an effort according to Dr Rao will have impact in three to four years of funding in terms of increase in research activity, quality teaching, collaboration with industries and coming together of scientific disciplines for addressing interdisciplinary problem of society.

Every year two to three universities are funded on competitive basis depending upon their track record of performance in terms of publications, patents and technology developed and transferred. DBT has funded a Science Observatory at Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore for measuring the scientific performance of universities/ institutions/individual scientists. The observatory provides data as required from time to time on comparative analysis of universities and institutions. Accordingly, the universities are grouped as category one, two and three for funding upto Rs 20 crore, Rs 10 crore and Rs 5 crore respectively. An elaborate MoU is signed after the sanction of budget describing terms and conditions of utilisation of funds, expected reforms and time schedule of activities, governance structure etc. A budget of Rs 200 crore has been set aside during the 11th Plan for this purpose.

The first programme UoH-DBT Centre for research and education in biology and biotechnology was funded at University of Hyderabad in the financial year 2008-09 and is showing positive results. In 2009-10, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi and Osmania University, Hyderabad were supported for establishing an interdisciplinary life science programme for advanced research and education. The support is expected to result in an increase in the number of publications the number of Ph D students by five folds and enhance capacity for innovation in life science and biotechnology.