The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) is planning to set up a Life Sciences and Biotechnology Education Agency that will primarily assess the human resource needs in the biotechnology sector and manage the education programmes.

The agency, which the Department wants to create during the current five year plan period itself, will do a continuous assessment of the human resources and formulalise action plans and programmes. It will also assist to a great extent in regulating the biotech education sector. The proposed agency will suggest on expanding the existing schemes in the sector run by the Government.

The Department has internally assessed and also commissioned studies on human resource requirements in future. Some areas identified from these efforts for special programmes in human resource development included Intellectual Property management, technology assessment, technology transfer, operation of GMP and GLP facilities for production and services, high-end bioinformatics, computation biology, system biology, synthetic biology, advance toxicology, biotech regulation and regulatory science etc.

The DBT has proposed the idea for the agency based on these internal assessments that brought out the gaps in the existing curriculum and education systems, and also the demand for the human resources in future.

Sources also said the DBT will be pushing the star college scheme that aims towards strengthening of life sciences, biotechnology education and training and provides experience to biotechnology students in the cutting edge-technologies needed for modern biological studies at undergraduate level in life sciences.

The Department will also extend support to students at the college level through fellowships, short term training courses, providing industrial training to B.Tech./M.Sc./M.Tech biotechnology students.