Hyderabad will bid for the VIII World Convention of Chemical Engineering to be held in the rear 2009. This was announced on Thursday at the inauguration of the four-day Indian Chemical Engineering Congress 2002 being held at Hotel Viceroy from December 19 to 22, 2002. The conference has been organized by the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers, Hyderabad Regional Centre, in association with University College of Technology, Osmania University and the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT). Dr Reddy's Laboratories, Hyderabad, is sponsoring the event.
Welcoming the guests and the delegates at the inauguration of the conference, Dr K Anji Reddy, Chairman, National Organising Committee and Chairman of Dr Reddy's Laboratories, said Hyderabad would soon become the Kohinoor of India. Though the original Kohinoor from Golconda was now in the British Museum, the way Hyderabad was growing, he said, he had no doubt the city would become the Kohinoor of India as suggested by Chandrababu Naidu recently. The City had been receiving the national award for the clean and green city for the last four consecutive years.
Dr Reddy said when the city had hosted the chemical engineering conference last time in the year 1986, very few bulk and generic drugs were manufactured in the city. Since then so much work had gone behind that the industry had been growing from strength to strength transforming it into the bulk drug capital of India.
He said in terms of volume of bulk drugs or API India stood third in the world and ranked number one in terms of capability. To the applause of the delegates, Dr Reddy announced his company's victory in the case pertaining to Amlodipine Maleate against Pfizer, the multinational pharmaceutical giant, in a US court. He said it was not the size that was important, but the innovation, the spirit, or the brain power that was important. He said the research facility of Dr Reddy's could be the envy of any pharmaceutical company in the world.
Dr Raghavan, Chairman, Local Organising Committee, and Director of IICT, said the outcome of Chemcon 2002 session would make a major impact on the Indian chemical and pharmaceutical industry in general. The annual session was being held at a time when the state government was formulating ambitious plans and projects in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and gas-based industries.
He said the four-day session would focus on technology transfer process, process modeling and simulation, chemical reaction engineering, optimization and process control, energy technologies, process engineering and management, thermodynamics and material science technology and polymers. About 380 technical papers would be presented during the session. Eminent chemical engineers and pharmaceutical experts from the US, Netherlands, Australia and South Africa were participating in the conference being attended by more than 800 delegates from across the country.
For the first time CE (chemical engineering)-Pharma networking had been chosen as the theme of the international symposium in Chemcon. He said this was very apt because of the outstanding efforts being made jointly by the Government of Andhra Pradesh and the drugs /pharma sector in planning and establishing the Pharma City in Visakhapatnam and supporting R&D in institutions like IICT, CCMB and NIN to be followed by an International Institute of Life Sciences to be set up in Hyderabad shortly.
Inaugurating the conference, Prof. R A Sheldon, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, said the key word was integration of different disciplines under a more appealing name like Life Science and Technology instead of chemical engineering. He said the industry was at the crossroads with the emergence of biotechnology. He called upon the chemical engineers to find solutions to environmental problems.
Prof. S K Sharma, president, Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers, talked about the activities of the Association. He said the Rs 1,200-crore Indian chemical industry's world share was just 1.5 per cent, it ranked 12th in the world and contributed 13 per cent of the national GDP.
He supported the suggestion of G V Sethuraman, Chairman, Hyderabad Regional Centre, IIChE, to bid for the VIII World Convention of Chemical Engineering to be held in Hyderabad in the year 2009. Ananda Murthy, Vice-Chancellor of Osmania University spoke about the need for R&D transfer and interaction between the industry and the university.