 I am extremely delighted to talk to you about the materials research in India and with specific reference to projections and possibilities that are before us on material synthesis in India per se and we have been looking at various modules especially on the synthesis and all the characterization tools that are available today to study range of materials. And as we see that the devices applications of these materials are going nano and we probe more into nano world the landscape for materials research is not going small rather it is becoming big and we have larger audience for this research. We have many groups working on a spectrum of issues related to material synthesis and not only it is a field for chemistry to explore for those involved in chemistry, but also physicists are equally contributing to materials research and equally from the technology side engineering departments are contributing. And in today's talk I want to introduce professor E.C. Subarao who is with us and it is a rare opportunity to have him visiting IIT Kanpur. He is one of the person who really pioneered the research in materials science. In fact he was instrumental to start many programs on materials research and also few departments which are now existing it is because of his vision and here of the untiring efforts that he left behind. So he has been with us on and off and today it is a rare privilege to have him here in the studio and I request professor E.C. Subarao to come and share few milestones that IIT Kanpur has travelled through and also he since he has a global understanding of how the materials research is going on both in India as well as in world at large. I request him to give some projection about the importance of materials research both in India as well as abroad. I now give time for professor E.C. Subarao to share his thoughts. Very kind of professor Sundaram Anoharan to give me a chance to say a little bit about material science sort of one coming for me and what I would like to do is as indicated a little bit about the road that material science has taken at IIT Kanpur over a period of time put it in the framework of the world scene and then conclude by saying a little bit about various material science had it in the years to come and its importance. When the Russians put up Sputnik the Amartens became very jittery they were doing a lot on metals they said that but they did not put science into that very much and so they woke up and suddenly they thought that there is without science we cannot understand materials to make something a little bit harder and so on is by processing is not that all that is enough. So it became kind of a pressing issue and places like MIT and some other places got into material science to understand materials from a scientific standpoint not only from engineering and technology standpoint. When IIT was set up there was an agreement between the US and IIT Kanpur that we too work together there were 9 universities in the US that formed a consortium and worked with us and these included some of the best in the US very interestingly right from the beginning even for undergraduate students for everybody in the institute we had a course on material science and this is taught by people from various departments for example, professor Siena Rao was one of them and a professor Parashanis and people from other departments also participated either as teachers or as tutors and so on and about the time because that we were having already a course we wanted to know whether we are doing the right things. So in 1966 we held the first conference on material science education in India very interestingly out of the 100 parts points or so about 50 came from educational institutions all IITs institute of science BHU and so regional engineering college and so on but the more interesting part is the other 50 came from industry they also wanted to know what is going on in material science and we were lucky to have 3 major stalwarts in material science in the US professor Maris Kohan from MIT who is sort of a father of material science and John Don from University of California Berkeley and Adhura from University of Connecticut they together with the local people we conducted a week long conference and in a way that lead the foundation for material science education and research in this country all these people that came went back and started something in their own institutions on our own part we started the graduate program in the masters and PhD level in material science and managed to set up an advanced center for material science and in these courses as well as in the material advanced center for material science it is an interdisciplinary activity which is kind of a life blood of IIT Kanpur as it grew interdisciplinary activity is a magic code for Kanpur so we had people from various departments chemistry physics electrical engineering mechanical engineering of course metallurgy participating in it the interdisciplinary program was so much that my first PhD student in IIT Kanpur got his degree in physics and others too later now starting from there we wanted to educate the rest of the we wanted to educate the rest of the education seen in India about this so very religiously for a number of years we ran a one month course for engineering college teachers for me on material science and these people went back and started to teach in their respective universities institutions the second thing that we did was it is not enough to read from a book the relationship between materials their properties their processing and their behavior unless students really dirty their hands doing some experiments and so the first undergraduate lab for material science was set up in Kanpur and after we refined the experiments we decided to put it in the form of a book and true to the tradition of IIT Kanpur though I was in a way the instigator for that effort I made sure that there were four other co-authors to the book all of them under 30 and they came with degrees from Oxford Sheffield and various places and luckily and everybody in India wanted to publish it and I did not want to give it to somebody locally because then he would send it to some local university and they would not even understand what we are talking about and the comments I get from them are not going to be useful so I wanted to give it abroad so I took two copies with me into the US and I sent it to two publishers one publisher returned it in one week saying that we did not look at the technical content we looked at the commercial how many copies we sell we make our usual amount of money and we thought that we may not make so much money the second one I did not hear for quite a while and that was McGraw Hill and after something like three months I get a three page letter saying that normally we hire three reviewers and pay them money and they have to review and give at least a two page report on the book and the other has to take those things into account and make the revisions and all that in this case because the book came from India we were skeptical and we wanted to be W show so we took six reviewers all the reviews have come and we had a shock of our life. Not one had anything negative to say not a work to be changed it is such a unbelievable experience for us that we are going to break our publishing tradition and normally when you submit a paper to a journal the reviewers comments are sent anonymously to you you do not know who the reviewer is and that is more so in the case of box in this case because they were so uniformly complementary we are sending here with all the six letters with the letter head and the signature of the man and the next shock for us is this came from India and the language would be atrocious and therefore the tutorial staff would have to work very hard at it so we went sent it to the tutorial office and within a week they returned it to us saying we could not touch even a word we could not cross a t or dot n i and this was the second shock for us so with this we sent it to the printer it is under print here is your contract and it has since been translated into other languages it is used in Amati, Berkeley and everywhere abroad also translated into Spanish and various other languages so that is the spirit of material science in Kanpur and then there are other things that have been written but the fact that it is the made an effort and that it went so well and actually when the royalties started coming they wrote to me you are the senior or other how do you distribute the royalties said everybody is an equal partner give it 20 percent to everybody and then now I would come to a little bit about where material science is going understandably in the very early years it is to try to understand materials that are already in use whether it is metals, ceramics, a bit of polymers and so on but as time went by it turned out there is a feeling that there are more dimensions to the problem 1 plus 1 can be 3 so if you are able to make composites of more than one material then the properties may be far better than either of them have so composites became a pretty fashionable area and it has added a lot to our understanding and use of materials and the other major change that has taken place is in processing there were conventional ways of making materials if you begin to use some normal synthesis methods you may end up with materials with a different set of properties a very good example of that is when you take two materials and mix them together and heat them you form some new phases and there is a phase diagram for it composition temperature diagrams at Caltech Paul Duvet found that some of these materials when they are cooled rapidly from high temperatures instead of crystallizing with a regular crystal structure they become what they called metallic glasses with properties that were unbelievable nobody dreamt of them there is a metal inside it is a glass and it opened up a vast area in two traditions of IIT Kanpur as soon as Paul Duvet came up with glass here we started to work on that for example I had a beta student we wanted to study some of his properties and he studied and he came up with something very interesting it got published in applied physics letters and this fellow wrote to Paul Duvet with a copy of this paper and straight from his beta he got into Caltech and got his PhD there so that is another dimension more recently the trend has been to go to fibers small dimensions and also not only dimensions in diameter but dimensions in all directions so that we end up with materials that are nano particles the properties that these exhibit are very different from what one could predict from the properties of bulk materials the other important direction it is taking is there is a marriage that is taking place between material science and a variety of other fields some of them are unbelievably remote from material science here I am referring to biological sciences and human body and people are beginning to find out that our muscles the way they behave the way they age and the way they give trouble and all that we never understood now by extending our knowledge about the mechanical properties of other relative species we are beginning to understand how the muscles behave under various conditions this has become a pretty big area another very big area is since connected with heart for example whether it is a heart valve or whether it is a stent people were putting in whatever was available. In India we never made valves so we need to import and it is out of the reach of most people so luckily we were there is a man from Hopkins that came to India and he wanted to set up a cardiology center but that would have a lab and a manufacturing facility it is called Chitrathidnal center in Trivandrum and he set it up they join hands with DMR and Idlebond and they started to make titanium based valves and they are available for a fraction of the cost that an imported one would do so like this there are it has become even more interdisciplinary than it started out with the applications have become rather widespread and the dimensions have changed completely the synthetic methods of making these materials in the shape size and composition that we need them have completely drastically changed and this has opened up a vast new area and I would say that high strength materials and bio-medical applications are two areas where material science is going to grow in a very big way thank you very much. I am so happy that you are here to spare your precious time for this video interview on the team of materials chemistry which will be viewed by NPTEL subscribers in India you have had the longest journey with the area of solid state chemistry and materialistic chemistry you have laid a strong foundation for this field and put India in the map of materialistic history as we know you have taught a wonderful physical chemistry courses at IIT Kanpur in the early 70s and solid state chemistry so I want to know when exactly you started this research. For me solid state chemistry is part of my life in fact it slowly emerged to become materialistic chemistry when I started working in it maybe 53-54 years ago the subject was not known in fact wherever I mentioned the subject name called solid state chemistry people would laugh and would make jokes about it they all knew solid state physics but very few knew solid state chemistry in fact in their entire world at that time they were not even 20-30 known chemists at that time and I got to know some of them very closely like J. Sanderson in Oxford some of them in Germany slowly and then I decided around 1956-57 that this will be one of my major areas of research and I started working in it as soon as I joined Indian Institute of Science as a faculty member in 1959 and slowly I developed the subject in various ways particularly in the area of oxides because at that time I decided oxides constitute the best of the most important family of materials with the widest range of properties any property electrical property any property you take oxides suffer the maximum range as well as maximum varieties and structures. So I have worked on synthesis, structures, phenomena, properties a number of things slowly I expanded my area to various other things carbon materials, hybrid materials and I do more synthesis and much more chemistry today than in the early days it was all dry chemistry now much more wet chemistry I do and I have always used lots of spectroscopy diffraction and number of techniques that is the beauty of the subject it is highly interdisciplinary in fact you have to know enough physics to do good chemistry and if you are doing physics aspect in fact they have to know good chemistry materials itself have become an area where the interdisciplinary need for knowledge of sister disciplines it has been a pleasure to work here and train a lot of other students I have had I don't know how many now please hundred people who have got PhDs with me and more and a large number of others and it has been a wonderful thing to grow with the subject in fact I still remember John Goodenup and Paul Lagernude though they are much older than me they are almost a contemporary since I because their first papers are also in 50s when I was very young I was also starting at the same time so it has been a wonderful thing to see a lot of work coming not only a lot kind of wonderful young people not only in India but abroad who have worked with me and collaborated with me some of them have become famous now in the subject so it has been a pleasure I think the area has become much more interesting in the last few years because of the tremendous interfaces it has developed with biology, physics, chemistry, materials, various branches of chemistry so I think it is a good area and I in fact believe in entire area of chemical science materials form one direction biological direction is the other one so I think in India they are not enough people working in it but fortunately I think seem to be improving and I hope there will be more in people working in this area and contribute to the world of science whatever I am working today is because much of the work I have done here I have had large number of books I have brought out papers and people have read some of them they have signed a lot of my papers so even from India we have been able to do this in the good work and which is noticed all over the world that would be the pleasure. Sir, actually you mentioned about oxides in particular, can you please give some one or two examples of? Well oxides for example I start working a simple binary oxides for like T I R E O 3 like that but later of course the complexity of oxides and at the same time the excitement of oxides is because the wonderful structures they can make another reason is the metal oxide bond it is not like metal oxide bond to covalent it is not like the metal oxide bond to ionic it is just the right thing the metal also has D electrons so give it interesting mactic properties and metal oxide bonds have the right amount of ionicity and covalence increased also metallicity metallicity is possible in metal oxide at the same time you can have properties due to localized electrons all kinds of the anti-properties entire gamut of properties that is one and particularly some of the structural motives like the perovskites most many years today you look at whether it is ferroelectric or superconductors many of them are most of them are having a perovskite like that so perovskites are being one of my favourites but I work on other things too but in recent times I have worked on charged-ordered materials all of them are not perovskites or similarly multi-feroids multi-feroids will get a very exciting very interesting problem that I have worked on in the last few years so I think oxides gives you a very nice way of even today there are surprises I will give you one example for example aluminium oxide the most usually aluminium oxide it has a corundum structure you have something related iron oxide F2O3 is also alpha F2O3 is corundum you mix it to AL F2O3 is most stable not in the corundum structure but in the non-centro-symmetric carrier crystal non-centro-symmetric placement so these surprises always have surprises and that is why many new phenomena properties keep coming because of these things and I think there will be tremendous problems Sir, since you mentioned about this aluminium F2O3 case I just want to know whether there is anything that we need to bear in mind to master making these materials To be honest there are two things you have to train your mind the way to think in materials that is where India I don't see enough people don't know how to think in this subject every subject if you are really dedicated to that subject after 10, 20, 30 years depending on one's ability and one's luck you develop a feeling for a subject which is intuitive that intuition in materials especially is very complex it is better to know the periodic table first other than that how to use the periodic table that is not easy to learn you teach something to young kids but to use it in a very clever use of periodic table you have to do other than that the structures how to deal with the structure, manipulating the structures once you get that intuitive feeling you know then you can design new things how to design a new material for example that is why you know the designing new structures, new compounds but it can even hybrid materials inorganic, organic elements I think it is a fantastic area to work in unfortunately I have done some of it but after getting old I would have done much more but for young people there is a very good area to work on like that, like for inorganic nanotubes people all made carbon, carbon, carbon why carbon? why carbon? because it is inorganic but inorganic oxide nanotubes, sulphide nanotubes lot of work to be done in that like that graphene, inorganic graphene everywhere you know that is what I have done as soon as graphene came I started working on graphene like structures of boronite and monodonium sulphide same with nanotubes so right away it gives a newer area I am getting to but just because the varieties that chemistry offers and variety not only in some compositions but also in those structures sir you also mentioned about the interfaces that has emerged because of working on solid state chemistry with the advent of nano science and nano technology coming is there any reason why we need to stay focused on materials chemistry or how much we can as traditional solid state chemistry but nano chemistry is part of solid state chemistry I do not like the word solid state chemistry anymore unfortunately you can see what has happened to that old wonderful general part of solid state chemistry I mean on the editorial board ever since the general started in 1968 but unfortunately that has all become dry materials and of course the real materials today make it by different methods they are much more complex much more chemical than some of the structures that you see in old solid state chemistry so it is better to say materials chemistry and chemistry materials rather than solid state chemistry so very few people call them as solid state chemistry anymore they call them as materials chemistry or something but even solid state chemistry or materials chemistry whatever you call it has taken over the entire nano 90% of nano is not a chemistry material as solid state chemistry making it, studying properties, phenomena, making there is a lot of material chemistry I do not think nano chemistry is a separate subject it is part of material chemistry there is also a slight shift from working on bulk materials to go into thin films thin films I go there I am no longer interested in that well nano materials are also partly like thin films but the thing is you know there is only a form I mean it is not a new materials concept thin films will have new properties because in the film you will have all kinds of things but solid state chemistry study forms, study materials in various forms so thin films is not even some of it is a bulk some of it is purely polycrystalline some of it may be film form some may be some other form so some may be nano form nano materials so I do not think everything is important solid state chemistry deals with materials comprising of organic, inorganic and all possible ways of making them it includes all forms amorphous crystalline, nano films every kind of form it also includes all properties surface properties, catalytic properties electrical property, magnetic properties every type of property that is why this subject is exciting and all pervasive because it includes all phenomena all possible properties, all possible forms all possible components you need that with this line it can be a master so if it is a glass you do not say it is not unsuitable we do not mind you can study that too so I think that is why that is how I view this sir one of the problems we have when visiting your website is which paper to read because so many papers have come but I just want to know in the last 3 decades what are your problems some 3 or 4 classic papers that you have I can read 20 papers actually recently the Indians of science press along with the world scientific brought out a collection of my 60 papers I do not know if you have seen that it is called lens in materials chemistry and earlier they had brought them when they became 70 volume cord advances in chemistry or something like that or 70 papers of mine but anyway they will show somebody but actually as a growing older I am producing better and better papers in the last 3 years I have published my best papers in my life after my 17th year my best research in my subject has been in the last 6 to 7 years after I became 70 and also my citations are increasing like in the last 5 years it is now 3000 to 3000 per year so I just know across 40,000 citations total citations of paper so there is no end the thing about this subject is an old agent now does not matter it can work for a very long time so in fact it can improve even when you become old so I do not want 0.1 for example I have done some very interesting things in graphene this now some other things in half size not an interesting thing so we can look at this trends in chemistry I will give you a copy of that and also we can give this as a reading material for the books last question I will also touch upon the things that we need to bear in mind especially when we work on solids you are advised to those who are going to work future generations I hope young people will take up this subject because of this interdisciplinary nature and also possible applications technology that may come out also is there more than anything this subject has a number of phenomena number of properties which require if you are an experimenter number of techniques in other words you are not a technique man in fact some people you know they do some spectroscopy they go on doing spectroscopy all kinds of materials using that technique we are not going to do Raman's spectroscopy infinite and tomorrow you will do Marsba they are going to do neutron diffraction you will do electrical property you will do magnetism so that is why I like this subject you try to solve problems rather than be a servant of a technique so material chemistry offers tremendous opportunity in fact as I am two fresh students I have taken just one they have just come here they are here and I don't know whether they are there for example I have trained them already within one year to make all kinds of measurements and using all kinds of spectroscopy diffraction so it is very wonderful to see them do these kind of things actually there is a great amount of hash and we are certainly comfortable especially the laboratories are also working equally in this field any advice that we need to have on the ethical issues I don't have any in all science there should be a need for ethics people cheat in all fields people also are honest in all the fields very good honest people so I can't say much about ethics I have trained them as ethical as they can be I have never cheated anybody I have never tried to lie or copy or whatever I have nothing to say but this much I can say that the subject requires very hard work that is why people don't like it people want easy life this is the wrong subject to be if you want to make a good contribution to this field even a senior subject to keep on learning even the last few weeks I am learning something which I didn't know before but I have learned some new theory to understand something all that so people who don't want to keep changing and learning new things probably find this area too difficult or too demanding but however if you help people like challenges I think it is a better subject to work on than standard inorganic chemistry coordination chemistry organic synthesis all up around all reactions and all any synthesis you make use to all those reactions what is so brilliant about that I don't say anything here we have much more possibility of using intelligent design and novel approaches to the subject Thank you professor Thank you Thank you Thank you