Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) is organizing holding an Indo-German Symposium on “Catalysis – A Cross Disciplinary Vision,” on Thursday, February 6. The symposium, to be inaugurated by Governor Surjeet Singh Barnala, will be attended by experts from USA, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, France, besides scientists from well-known institutions in India.

Briefing press persons on the symposium, Dr K V Raghavan, Director of IICT, said catalysis had a dominant role in petroleum refining, petro-chemicals, bulk organics and a range of speciality chemicals, pharmaceuticals and now biotechnology. Globally, the non-renewable feedstocks and energy were rapidly getting depleted as the demands of the mankind were growing exponentially. Developing countries like India were facing tremendous challenges to meet their energy demands since their non-renewable resource base was rather weak.

There was need for the scientific community to develop new feedstocks based on agri-products and other renewable resources. Catalysts would play a big role in these new developments. Realising this, national laboratories like IICT, National Chemical Laboratory (NCL), Pune, and Indian Institute of Petroleum, Dehra Dun, were focusing their attention on the development of new feedstocks and chemical building blocks from carbohydrates, biomass, carbon dioxide and natural gas employing modern tools of catalysis.

This international conference would provide an opportunity for the experts in various disciplines to evolve new methodologies for multi-disciplinary approach for developing novel catalyst systems Indo-German collaboration in science and technology was very strong. Eminent German scientists like Dr Bernhard Lucke, Dr Erhard Kemnitz, Dr Ralf Jackestell, Dr Gerhard Mestle, Dr F Scholz, Dr B Ondruschka are attending the symposium.

The German government will be represented by Dr H Bossmann, Director, DAAD (New Delhi), which is the nodal agency for implementing the Indo-German scientific exchange programmes.