'SYNCHRONISER' Charts EU-India ICT Collaboration Roadmap

SYNCHRONISER, a project sponsored by the European Commission (EC) under Framework Programme 7 (FP7), will submit its report titled “Future R&D ICT Priorities for India” to the Department of Electronics and IT, Government of India and the European Commission providing an actionable roadmap for policy coordination and alignment to promote joint ICT research and innovation.

The current report on identified Indian future priority topics for ICT research aims to augment the EU-India political dialogue in the ICT domain. The study has identified Indian focus areas in the next two, five and ten years with regard to technology priorities in ICT R&D using the Delphi method. It is envisioned that the data from this study, amongst others, will serve as a planning input for European Commission, in order to identify technology priority calls for India. The study was conducted by Prof Mary Mathew of the Indian Institute of Science.

30 Indian ICT technology experts from both academia and industry provided insights into the technology priority areas India must focus on, shared their views on European Commission’s Framework Programme and provided valuable suggestions to enhance EU-India collaboration.

The foresight study brought out some very interesting and important societal and economic trends that will govern technology priorities for India. Low value high volume products and services, consciousness of green computing, green devices and low energy consuming, predominance of software over hardware solutions, conscious integration of rural consumers and language diversity will be the trends in the years to come.

India will show R&D trends both in core technology developments and sectorial applications of ICT as emerged through the content analysis of the interviews. While core technology development areas include like internet access, networking technologies, monitoring systems, cloud computing applications and security algorithms, ICT will be integrated and applied predominantly in sectors like healthcare, energy, governance and education.

With regard to ICT R&D collaboration between Europe and India, the study brought to light that the Indian research and industry stakeholders are very positive to collaborate with EU ICT industry both at the academic and industry levels. However, Indian experience with EU is inadequate and insufficient yet to galvanise into an active one, which calls for more exposure of Indians to EU technologies. The visionaries opinion is that the Indians engage with EU ICT industry more in the arena of “out sourcing” or “client-vendor” transactional relationship rather than collaborative R&D relationship. Methods to bring out an active interest amongst Indian ICT organisations to seek information on EU ICT R&D must be pursued either at the industry level or the government levels to enhance this collaboration.

Katja Legisa, Project Coordinator of SYNCHRONISER said, “To predict what a country will do in the near future is a big challenge. Nevertheless, given the growing importance of the ICT in India and world across, internalisation of the ICT activity and collaboration between countries in this domain is becoming essential. For reaching this objective, identification and agreement of ICT priorities, first within each country and then between cooperating countries, is the first stepping stone.”

Prof Mary Mathew said, “Two areas of focus emerged from our dialogues with the visionary sample. First, were Core Information and Communciation Technologies, including Internet access, embedded systems, sensors, cloud computing, for example, and second were technologies related to sectors, the first sector of focus being ICT for health care followed by ICT for energy.”