Eleventh Five-year Plan to be challenging for CSIR : Mehrotra

Jamshedpur, May 11 (UNI) After the Pokhran nuclear test in 1998 India is fast emerging as the super power in Information and Technology sector and the world has recognised the scientific prowess of the country, said National Metallurgical Labarotory (NML) director S P Mehrotra here today.

Observing ''Technology Day'' today to commemorate the the ninth anniversary of Pokhran nuclear test, Mr Mehrotra said the last decade was marked by some major scientific achievments and NML, a unit of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), played important role and the achievements of NML, particularly on Research and Development(R&D)progrommes, were impressive during the 10th five-year plan.

He said success in the previous years encouraged the NML to look for even bigger challenges during the 11th Five-year plan.

Mr Mehrotra said the NML was intending to come out with a major programme to exploit Titanium as an alternate metal to Steel.''But as the mining of Titanium is very expensive it poses hurdle before us. It's a challenge to us to provide Titanium at a lower cost'',he observed.

Delivering the Technology Day lecture, vice-president Tata Steel's Chhatisgarh project and an IT expert Varun Jha said the recent success in the field of science and tehnology, including the flawless launching of Agni missile, had underlined the country's scietific prowess and depth.

Mr Jha said while technology had provided us comfort in social life but time had come to draw future plans to cope with the negative aspects of it.

He cautioned about the serious threat ahead of us if the people used technology indiscriminately.

Mr Jha said the biggest challenge before the technology would be the exploding population world wide as it could touch nine billion by 2050 from six billion now and it would be a dangerous thing for the human race to tackle the situation unless precautions were taken, he said.

UNI