India seeks to be global R&D center

India seeks to be global R&D center
BANGALORE, India — India's Department of Information Technology is conducting an international study in its quest to promote the country as a global research and development destination for information technology.

The study will explore how the country, which today is widely recognized as a source for low-cost software development, can reposition itself as a locus for innovative engineering.

The promotion of R&D is not a new focus area for technology agency, which has already funded a number of projects. Global giants such as Cisco Systems Inc., IBM Corp., Intel Corp., Motorola Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc. already have R&D centers here, and some local companies, such as Wipro Ltd., have positioned themselves as R&D labs for hire.

The new study plans to draw on the experiences and opinions of Indian companies like Wipro, global consulting firms, overseas companies that already have R&D centers within the country and India's major IT industry associations for hardware and software.

Among those groups are the Manufacturers' Association for Information Technology (Mait) and the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom).

The effort will seek to determine industry concerns and encourages overseas-based companies when they consider investing in R&D in India. It will identify areas of short- and long-term focus for R&D here, examine strategies to get more funding into the country and look for ways to enhance the country's image as an R&D center.

"The government and the industry need to position India as a nation of technological excellence, or the perception will forever remain that we are only providers of inexpensive services," said Mait president S. Devarajan.

If India is to cement a role as a global competitor, "then we will have to design, develop and produce our own hardware," said R. Chidambaram, scientific adviser to the nation's prime minister. There is also a security imperative, Chidambaram said, in that "strategic sectors such as defense can ill afford to risk the national security by relying on imports.

"The Indian IT industry now must enter the hardware arena. It is time that Indian industry looked at the existence of local capabilities and capacities to significantly contribute to the hardware sector through the value-addition route."

Wipro, which has had a background in hardware engineering, believes key segments for drawing research funds into the country are automotive electronics, consumer electronics, chip design, mobile services, digital television and digital cable.

Gartner Group consultants here see a potential for India to pursue a broader role in fields where it has already established a modest base of local capability, such as chip design, embedded software design and development, intellectual property, interoperability, gaming, software development and hardware and software co-design.

Meanwhile, the Indian government must assume a primary role in promoting the country's IT capabilities, said Vinay Deshpande, computer developer and a former chief of Mait. "The single most important government initiative would be to market Indian R&D capability as aggressively as the government has marketed India's software services capability," he said.

"VLSI design and DSP-based software are the leading contenders, as a lot of activity in these areas has already started," Deshpande said. "Embedded-systems design-hardware, firmware and software-is another area with great potential. That area includes Internet appliances, handheld devices, set-top boxes, automotive electronics and process control."

One overseas company that has already made extensive use of India's R&D capabilities is Analog Devices Inc. A decade ago, ADI launched a series of initiatives with local companies that included development of DSPs for electronic meters and work on a low-cost wireless local loop using ADI's chips.

"Attracting R&D investments in itself will not be adequate," said Ashok Kamath, managing director for Analog Devices India. "My view is that we should promote the manufacturing industry in parallel, so that India becomes a one-stop destination, from design to finished goods.