Research and development must be driven by passion and purpose, T. Ramasami, former secretary, Department of Science and Technology (DST), New Delhi, said recently.

Research and development have to be linked to social outcome, attuning industry towards an outcome based approach, Mr. Ramasami said inaugurating a national workshop on “Perspectives and challenges in outcome based research” (NWPCOBR) organised by NIT Tiruchi (NIT-T).

Lauding NIT-T for its top-level ranking among engineering institutions in the country by way of producing more researchers, he emphasised on the country’s focus on public private partnership to fund, build, and operate projects based on thrust areas of research and development.

In his lecture on ‘Research and development funding in context of low resource setting’, Mr. Ramasami advocated a vibrant ecosystem for R&D through intellectual freedom, progressive planning, de-bureaucratisation of funding and freedom from feudalism. He also guided the participants on sourcing funding from different entities through submission of innovative proposals. University sector needs to explore new tools for capitalization of its intellectual assets through the acts of commercialisation of technologies, Mr. Ramasami said.

Nitin Kanwade, General Manager- Manufacturing, TATA Motors, highlighted the importance of Industry 4.0 and digitalisation, and threw light on how industries are handling numerous product variants and wider customer preferences.

Presiding over, NIT-T Director Mini Shaji Thomas said the online mode of content delivery and online platform based interactions would be the new normal in the near future. The AICTE Margdarshan Scheme under which the five-day national workshop was being conducted will motivate the faculty members to enhance teaching learning skills and students to come up with innovative ideas and projects and widen the exposure to the prototype development on enhanced educational standards and research aptitude.

The NIT-T has been organising such workshops on outcome based education to train the faculty members of mentee institutions to apply for accreditation process. The institution has plans to conduct future workshops with focus on preparing mentee institutions for submission and processing of pre-qualifier report and submission of self assessment report (SAR) for National Board of Accreditation (NBA), she said.