Sweden sets up office of Science and Technology

Bangalore, Oct 1 (UNI) The Embassy of Sweden today announced a series of initiatives to further strengthen the scientific and technological cooperation between Sweden and India by establishing a Swedish Office of Science and Technology in New Delhi.

Only the fifth such office worldwide, the office would serve as a catalyst for research cooperation between the two countries.

Speaking to news persons here today, the newly appointed S and T Counsellor Stefan Jonsson said the main task of the office was to work on the MoU signed between the two Governments in 2005.

"The S and T office will facilitate cooperation on joint Research and Development between major institutions belonging to the two countries mainly in the areas of information and communication technology, bio technology and environmental technologies. A number of activities are already underway in areas such as biosciences and ICT matters," he said.

The S and T office would be part of ITPS (Swedish Institute for Growth Policy Studies) and serves as a liaison office for Swedish governmental agencies such as VINNOVA (Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems), NUTEK (Swedish Business Development Agency) and STEM (Swedish Energy Agency). The US, Japan, China and Belgaum were the other countries where the Swedish Office of Science and Technology had its offices, Dr Jonsson said.

The Swedish embassy also announced two annual prizes for space science students from India, instituted in association with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

"We have instituted two prizes at the recently set up Indian Institute of Space Science (IIST) at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Tiruvananthapuram. The prizes to be given to two top ranking of MSc in Space Sciences and it included a week's familiarisation tour and exposure to global space research programmes in Sweden," he said.

The students would get to visit the top space institutes like Uppsala University where they would get to see the manufacture of Space Micro-Satellites and Esrange (European Space and Sounding Rocket Range), a rocket range and research centre located outside the town of Kiruna, he Dr Jonsson added.

UNI