The Finance Minister in her speech yesterday said “Intellectual property creation and protection will play an important role. A digital platform will be created which will facilitate seamless application and capture IPRs and also in an institute of excellence, a centre will be established that will work in the field of intellectual property. Knowledge translation clusters will be set up across different technology sectors including in new and emerging sectors for designing, fabrication and proof of concept and further scaling up technology clusters harbouring such testbeds and small scale manufacturing facilities would be established."

To address the need for building shared, professionally managed and strong Science and Technology infrastructure in the country which is readily accessible to academia, start-ups, manufacturing, industry and R&D labs, the Department of Science & Technology has launched a unique scheme called “Sophisticated Analytical & Technical Help Institutes (SATHI)”.

These Centres are expected to house major analytical instruments to provide common services of high-end analytical testing, thus avoiding duplication and reduced dependency on foreign sources. These would be operated with a transparent, open access policy.

DST has already set up three such centres in the country, one each at IIT Kharagpur, IIT Delhi and BHU at a total cost of Rs 375 Cores. It is planned to set up five SATHI Centres every year for the next four years. SATHI will address the problems of accessibility, maintenance, redundancy and duplication of expensive equipment in our Institutions, while reaching out to the less endowed organizations in need, e.g., industry, MSMEs, startups and State Universities. This will also foster a strong culture of collaboration between institutions and across disciplines to take advantage of developments, innovations and expertise in diverse areas.

Besides SATHI initiative, support to 100 top-performing departments in universities and IITs etc will be provided this year with an investment of Rs. 500 crores for augmentation of their research facilities to global benchmarks. The research profile of the supported Departments will align with the national priorities of excellence in manufacturing, waste processing, clean energy and water, and Start-up India, etc. This will empower our Scientific Community to gain global leadership in select frontier areas of Science.

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