Dr R A Mashelker, Director-General of CSIR, said India must seize upon the opportunities for conversion of knowledge into wealth, which held the key to faster economic growth. Coining the slogan 'To Lakshmi through Saraswathi,' he said India was better placed than the developed countries in that it had priceless traditional knowledge and expertise apart from well-established modern science and technology capabilities.

Delivering the A V Rama Rao Research Foundation Award Lecture in Hyderabad on 'IPR - A strategic tool to build a winning Indian knowledge economy,' organised by the Foundation, the CSIR Director-General said India, which had the largest pool of scientific community, both in academic institutions and the industrial sector, among 46 nations as per a World Science Report, was slowly reversing the trend and changing its risk-averse mindset by staking claims to patents in several fields. He said CSIR was spearheading the movement for patenting various patterns that accrue as part of scientific research.

Recognising the need for a combination of innovation and entrepreneurship, CSIR was currently collaborating with six major private partners to acquire patents. Ruing that " we create but fail to protect," he drew attention to the fact that global industrial majors were making a beeline to India to carry out their R&D. CSIR, for its part, was pooling together the research institutions under its fold to work on various common platforms. Drawing upon the largest pool of traditional knowledge had succeeded in achieving international recognition for the same in the field of drugs and medicine. New drug discovery with traditional Indian knowledge would soon earn rich laurels for the country, he predicted.

"However, it is extremely important to be smart about IPR," he cautioned, but struck an optimistic note that even the current negligible tapping of Indian talent was paying rich dividends.

A V Rama Rao, the Chairman and Managing Director of Avra Laboratories, welcomed the guests. The meeting, chaired by Prof. M M Sharma, felicitated the Padmabhushan awardees for 2003, Prof. S K Joshi, a former DG of CSIR and Prof. R Kumar, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.