In spite of sanctions, Indo-US science Forum takes off

Indeed, Principal Secretary Brajesh Mishra acknowledged that India had decided to take a pragmatic view of the sanctions hurdle and go ahead with cooperation on a range of science and technology fronts.

Mishra remarked “this is an unusual situation. Let’s live with it”, when questioned about the seeming dichotomy of the U S continuing to place 149 Indian institutions and enterprises under sanctions even as it went ahead with setting up a Forum to promote scientific cooperation.

Two hundred Indian entities were placed under US sanctions soon after India conducted five nuclear tests in Pokharan in May 1998. On Friday, in the run-up to the Clinton visit, Washington formally announced its decision to remove 51 entities from the sanctions listing.

For the remaining 149 entities, the Clinton Adminstration is understood to have indicated that there would be a shift from a presumption of denial to a case-by-case approval.

The agreement to establish the science and technology Forum was initialled by Union Science and Technology Minister Murli Manohar Joshi and U S Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on the sidelines of U S President Bill Clinton’s official visit to India.

The Forum would allow exchanges between scientists from both countries, transfer of technology, organisation of workshops and promote joint R and D projects in cutting-edge technologies drawing on the strengths of the scientific communities of both countries.

In another first, the Forum would facilitate the creation of an electronic reference source, which could be accessed by scientists in both countries, for interactive exchanges of ideas and information.

The Forum will have an initial corpus of Rs 30 crore, money left over from the US-India Fund (USIF), created in 1987 for the utilisation of US-held rupee funds. India and the US are likely to make a contribution to the corpus fund to help kickstart the Forum.

India and the U S have had a long tradition of scientific cooperation, with the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and the Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, as highly-successful testimonials of this collaboration.

An Indo-US science and technology agreement was first mooted in 1993, but it ran into trouble over differences relating to intellectual property rights provisions. Then in 1997, the Indo-US S&T Forum was proposed, but even as the terms of the mechanism were being negotiated, the efforts were overtaken by the Pokharan nuclear tests, pushing all talk of Indo-US scientific cooperation into cold storage.

Indian officials said the forum would act as an umbrella platform for different kinds of scientific research. One of its principal tasks would be to identify sources of funding from non-governmental sources like multilateral agencies and the private sector.

The Forum would be registered as a non-profit society, enabling it to receive funds from public and private sources. The governing body of the Forum would comprise seven leading scientists each from the two countries.