Root out terrorism completely for development: President

Mumbai, July 17 (UNI) President A P J Abdul Kalam today stressed the need to root out terrorism completely saying it was affecting the country's development.

''Society needs to have peace for the sake of development, but the development process is affected by cross border terrorism,'' Dr Kalam said replying to a query during the programme 'interaction with young scientists' organised at Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) here this evening.

Dr Kalam, who arrived from Indore, visited the victims of the 7/11 serial blasts at Sion and KEM hospitals before visiting BARC.

He had last visited BARC in 1993.

Earlier, in his speech, Dr Kalam advocated for an increase in nuclear power generation capacity from 21,000 MW to 50,000 MW by 2020. He further said, efforts should be made to increase the power generation capacity to 400,000 MW by 2050 by combining hydel, thermal, nuclear and non conventional energies.

He stressed for the use of solar energy as an alternative and cited Sunderbans in West Bengal where the experiment to use solar energy was successful.

While repsonding to another query, Dr Kalam said, in order to attract more young scientists, he was marketing the idea of forming a new science cadre. Under this scheme annually between 300 to 400 young graduates and P.hds would be assured of jobs in Department of Atomic Energy, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Defence.

''This would attract youngsters towards science faculty,'' he observed.

Stressing on the development of rural India, Dr Kalam said electrification, environment protection and road construction should be on a mission mode by 2020 for rural India.

UNI JM KU MIR HT2257