A Visionary's Words
One of the few privileged to have been the chief guest giving away the awards in an earlier IMC RBNQA function and then two years later to have been awarded the coveted IMC juran Medal is Dr. R A Mashelkar. DG. CSIR, New Delhi. Excerpts from the two speeches that he made as chief guest and later when receiving the award.

Dr. Juran taught us how to manage quality. He is the real guru of quality. I think there is general concern that the new century is the century of mind amid it is the products of mind which are going to dominate the century. The firms, the societies, the nations which create the products of mind are going to be best and therefore it becomes very crucial that the new quality movement talks about this issue of building the quality of mindset.

We need to launch the quality of mindset. Then one can come to the quality of new products of mind that we basically focus on. I also want to emphasise that when you talk about knowledge century. there are four important factors that we need to factor in. They happen to be a part of core strategy: That is first create an economic institution/region to provide

incentives for effective use of existing knowledge, the creation of new knowledge and flourishing of entrepreneurship. Second to ensure that the educated populace share skills and use knowledge well. The third is a dynamic information infrastructure which will facilitate effective communication, and processing of information and finally an efficient innovation system which will improve the firms, science centres, universities, consultants and other organizations to tap in so that they bring stock of global knowledge and adopt it to local needs and create new knowledge and technology. I do believe it is a four-pronged strategy on which we have to basically work.

When many publicly funded industrial R & D institutions in the world are either getting closed or getting privatized or are getting marginalized, CSIR is one organization which has climbed this limitless ladder of excellence. What I found is that there is nothing that any Indian cannot do. CSIR, in a silent way, has been contributing to socio-economic development of the country. I am very proud to announce today that world intellectual property organization has just brought out the list of top 50 in Patents Cooperation Treaty (PCT). In those top 50, which are ordered in terms of their ranks, whereas we existed no-where, I am very proud to say that today we are there along with Samsung, CSIR has demonstrated that we can basically do it.