 I'm so pleased to be able to be here with all of you tonight. It's a pleasure to welcome those of you representing the Indian Government, AAAS, the U.S. State Department former scholars and who are now current UW graduate students. How many of you are former scholars here tonight? I think just one. Well, now outside, we can welcome them later, past and current faculty mentors and most especially the new cohort of students that are beginning their programs this evening. As we've just seen, we're just discussing this, of course, is the formal launch of the SN Boas program and so it's especially exciting to meet you students who are here who are in operating this program with your participation and we've already reviewed the important contributions of both and it sets high standards for the participation of all of the students going forward. The Boas program, of course, mirrors the prestigious Karana Scholars programs for biologically-related sciences and this has been going now for six years at UW-Madison and other participating institutions. Let me remind you of the goals of this program. They are to provide encouragement to young scholars, to stimulate creativity among students, to transform research into societal benefits and to build a seamless community between India and the United States. The Karana program is growing each year and has been in existence and we are thrilled to be welcoming 37 students to participate in this program tonight. Our university has long considered Indiana partner and my college has played a significant role in that partnership with which we are very proud. The College of Agricultural and Life Sciences is the second largest college at our university. We have nearly 4,000 undergraduate students and over 1,000 graduate students. Our 19 academic departments span applied research conducted in departments like dairy science and horticulture and agronomy to basic science research in biochemistry, microbiology and genetics. Our faculty are very productive and our graduate programs are very well known and provide a great springboard for many students entering these disciplines. But it's important to us that productivity doesn't stay within the walls of the university, that it doesn't remain only in the lab and in scholarly publication but that it moves beyond campus to inform solutions to real world problems. Some of the biggest pressures we face today in the world are impossible to pin to an individual location. Such challenges as providing safe and nutritious and abundant food to people around the world in growing populations, developing sustainable energy sources hoping with a change in climate and maintaining healthy ecosystems are concerns that can only be addressed at the global level. Furthermore, the fundamental scientific advances that are underpinning these advances also builds on international collaboration. A few decades ago, universities trained people to be experts in specific areas building our collective knowledge by focusing narrowly to understand pointed research questions. And now we find that we have a different training model and that is individual scholarship is still important but working collaboratively across disciplines becomes ever more important because the solutions to these challenges require broad expertise. They will require scientists and others that can think big, work collaboratively and be creative in first recognizing and approaching these problems. So for me it's inspiring to see all of these students here today because I know that these are the types of challenges that you are looking for in your careers. As an educator, as a researcher, I hope your experiences provide you with tools that can help face those challenges. And I'm so very excited for you to unleash your creativity on finding solutions for our tough challenges and I look forward to the solution that you will identify. So once again, welcome to the United States and welcome to UW-Madison. Thank you for coming. U.S. Science and Technology Forum. And I'm going to just give you a little bit of history. It really started with President Clinton. It was in the year 2000 when he made a trip to India and he wanted to... U.S.-India relations were not so good at the time and he wanted to do something to improve the relations and one of the things which he thought was some sort of science agreement, a science cooperation agreement. Well it turns out at that time India was under sanctions by the U.S. because of the nuclear test in 1998 and so it was impossible to make a government-government agreement. However we had an ambassador in India at that time Richard Silas, who recently retired as president of Colorado College and next year he agreed that he's called me the wonderful man. And he had the idea, let's do it as a public-private partnership. Let's do it. Let's set it up as a private society and actually we are chartered. The Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum was the result of that and it is chartered under the societies of 1862 or 1864. And so the money comes that the endowment was created in rupees which the U.S. government owned that money was put in the bank the interest on that bank we get interest on that endowment and the Indian government matches the interest which we get and that has generated consistently somewhere between one and a half and two million dollars a year. Now you can't fund a whole lot of cooperative research on two million dollars a year or one and a half million dollars but you can move some people around and so one of our early forms of cooperating was to fund workshops and remember the whole purpose of this is to bring American researchers, American scientists together with Indian researchers and Indian scientists. So all of our programs are really centered around the idea of finding a common interest between groups of people and we have found that the workshop formula the workshop format is a very effective way of doing this and three times a year not twice a year I guess we go out with a call if anyone in either country would like to get together with colleagues or maybe just on a topic we can have with matchmaking would like to have a workshop on the given field we are prepared to consider that on a competitive basis we're receiving somewhere between 30 and 40 of these proposals each time we go on through a call and we fund them as we can but it's amazing over the last 12 years we've had something like 300 workshops we've had involved some 12,000 scientists in the two countries and the interesting thing is that you begin to leverage money when you find people who are interested in things in both countries money appears we think that we have leveraged maybe 200 million dollars or perhaps 250 million dollars which has been generated in programs which have been funded by governments or by companies and someone else so this has been a very interesting I've done a lot of science cooperation in the world of a lot of countries but I find this one of the most interesting imaginative and frankly one of the most successful models which has gone on for 12, 13 years interestingly I was the first US chairman and I was able to be in that position when I was in the State Department and what I ended at the State Department after it was a three year appointment as science and technology advisor to the Secretary of State then I turned to my successor or to the higher up people in the building and I said well I'm leaving but I could continue to do this and they said fine Norman you just keep on and so maybe no one I'm not sure if anyone wants maybe no one wants it back but nonetheless I'm still doing it and I've been through now two Indian co-chairmen first is Ramamurti and now is Dr. Ramasamy who is just he thought he was retiring this year but he's just been appointed to an additional year and his principal job which is running the Department of Science and Technology in India a very high position anyway we have a board on each side and we meet annually and we talk about the direction in which the forum should be going I think what's terrific is this new sort of developing focus on students and you've heard about the Bose program and you've heard about the Karana program and the Rise program and all of these programs which move students back and forth now you probably know there's something like 100,000 Indian students in American universities right now and there are about 3,000 American students in Indian universities we particularly, we on the American side are particularly interested in getting more Americans who can participate in some of these programs that we have catalyzed getting more Americans involved in that and then going and working in India so I hope that many of you keep that in mind make friends with some American colleagues invite them to come to India and see what a great and interesting place it is in Canada and then that way we will continue to build and expand these cooperation relationships now the day to day work on the Indian side is done by my colleague who is also housed in AAAS in Washington, the American Association for the Advancement of Science if you look on the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum website you can find his address and you can understand more about the program you can know when to apply for things and so on but one of his goal and we all share in that goal is for us to really become the largest organization or the largest mover of students back and forth in the science field and we probably now are already the largest mover of U.S. students and U.S. graduate students in India for a quality of science so it's wonderful to see you all here it's terrific that you haven't fallen asleep already in the city it was even tough for me to get here from Washington and I was told that there were three of you who were supposed to be on the plane that I was and I asked two Indians on the plane if they were you who they said no anyway, great to see you I'm looking forward to seeing you tomorrow This is the nodal agency of the government of the Indian Matters related to that includes formulation of policy statement and guidelines that includes providing research grants that also includes helping creating research infrastructure in various academic institutions and research apparatus and that also includes capacity building the idea of human resource A couple of years ago we created another autonomous body called Science and Engineering Research Board actually it was created nine years ago that was about two years ago and this board is now functional for the last little more than a year ago more on the lines of what we have what we have in NSF in U.S. So this board has kind of taken over all the schemes which involved complicated research grants fellowships and right now it's a situation that would be S.T. and S.E.R. be working they're not complete with each other actually they're complimenting each other capacity building and human resources have always been an important priority for the Department of Science and Technology we had schemes like Gyanik Bubsah and Yojana for the University of India then we had JNC and S.R. summer internship for graduated and post graduated students most importantly we used to support a lot of research students, doctoral students who used to work on various S.T. supported projects and in addition to all that we also had media postdoctoral universities or senior students to go abroad and work in other institutions now apart from that for the last 4-5 years we had a pretty aggressive in this area of human resource development we initiated a scheme called Inspire which had 3 broad elements the first one was concerned with young children at school level the second component was concerned with the students at 100th grade and the first grade grade level and the third component was concerned with doctoral students and also postdoctoral fellows by virtue of providing the grant of identity positions in regular institutions now in terms of scale and in terms of inclusiveness this scheme was you know I think I understand that we are going to award kind of 1 million fellowship 2 months down the line so you can imagine the kind of scale and inclusiveness so many people have got the identity from this scheme we have several other fellowships we have J.C. Goh several fellowships but I would like to touch upon few of them which probably would concern this kind of audience there are fellowships for drama which enables Indian scientists who are working abroad to come and work in India while they don't have a regular position in any of the institutions and while this scheme was launched the compensation package was equivalent to you know almost the kind of salary which a professor or senior associate professor would pay there is another very interesting fellowship we have recently launched actually this was launched in Germany this year this is called the Prime Minister's Doctoral Fellowship or Prime Minister's Fellowship for Doctoral Research this is clearly one of the popular fellowships more so the student has to be registered in a regular academic institution for a regular academic degree and the research problem which he identifies with me of interest and of elegance to industry in turn he just formally collaborates with the fellowship and the fellowship which the student gets is almost the amount which normally he gets through the government support government provides his normal support and the industry provides the matching grant and the idea is that the student is trained to work on industry relevant problems normally we find that there is quite a bit of disconnect it means what research is done at what industry requires in reality so through this kind of fellowship we want to create an ecosystem there is the research which is done in academic institution not only it meets the academic requirements for qualifying for a degree but at the same time it has proper industry relevance and industry eventually gets a kind of a person who is trained to work on industry other fellowship which is already in place is being implemented through the inter-U.S. S&P forum which is I mean the kind of a post-proper fellowship for Indian students to come and work in Indian universities where we are training from 3 to 4 hours I think they will develop more on it and we are soon actually the purpose of our visit was also partly to go and talk to NSF we will soon be signing an agreement on their grow initiative so that will also be provided opportunities for U.S. students and other students to go and work in Indian institutions of their choice for the specified year of time the last probably significant initiative which is again I think it will practically very soon is that under this scheme this will again be a kind of a national fellowship under which outstanding scientists anywhere in the world would be able to come and work in Indian institutions of their choice for a period of one year and the Indian government will provide to take care of the entire process associated with this including the rate level and a decent fellowship of the order of say 100,000 dollars per year but these are some of the kind of initiatives which we are contemplating in order to give a major thrust to this area of human resource development through bilateral arrangements there is again a very significant aspect of SN4's fellowship which was not earlier earlier people used to apply they used to establish that IEF they used to write a proposal now you simply apply and we facilitate to connect people to the right institutions to the right groups and then that's how I think SN4's fellowship is being implemented I'm sure it's a very very positive and a very very supportive step so with this kind of information I think I would also extend a very warm welcome to all of you on behalf of Department of Science and Technology Science and Engineering so I'm sure that the next 60 weeks or so which you are going to extend will be very very useful to you hopefully it will be I'm surprised about the the briefing session about the first round of IEF and I would look forward to see you then thank you Thank you Thanks for a warm welcome we got some warm comments here to make the a big announcement so they follow when they come together it forms San Nama and it really changes everything in IEF so that's what I believe when you are coming here you are mainly with the Americans you are talking now first thing is that why we are investing this money why this government departments are getting money for a second capacity development is one thing what I actually do is one important what we are doing we look but also in the cultural value what we are having we should learn culture you should impart what we are having and then when we come together certainly things will be doing a lot and then continue with the U.S. the students here so in the next 10 years now with this program this year we have supported 100 students from the U.S. from if we take the program the S.M.R.S program and the program we call it engineering looking forward to at least get 100 students that is our target from U.S. to India this year I believe I am really glad to tell you that we are going to get 30 students 15 and the guys from now and 15 and the guys from most from now and we can easily go at here for 100 and I would really request the mentors directly the partner in universities to send the students to India and that way we will have this bilateral action more meaningful and more true way now what you are getting here you may be thinking that coming from a very warm hot and hot sea basically but certainly you will get much more when you are interacting here you will see a totally different type of environment a different type of economic environment you will get the way the students interact with the event I think India wish to learn about that and that will really change your life you will really know at least the true spirit of research the true spirit of curiosity and not surprise directly you ask questions and you can be answers that is the thing most valuable thing you will learn from here and once you go back as I agree I was saying we are looking forward to receive you directly and have an interaction with you to know at least how to improve one of the programs in the end India will see the key in particular this year when we launched the SNP actually we don't at first time we have only about one and half month to select the students and then to find them and that way it is really our at least we are waiting to take those students and within this one and half month we have been able to place 46 students various faculty members in the part of the university so it is very close to you all and also I will say the response in university the way we have created the broad value of Purana program that is active in India as a predecessor and also help us to maintain the quality of SNP so same way here I would like to also support the U.S. student again SNP thank you very much and I look forward to working with you knowledge is failing I think so I would like to say that probably you already know that the campus has our campus but it is obvious that it is important that all the colleagues that are performing are part of the CIC this is a consortium with us here on my right side so we are extremely happy that we are not alone in this but we are with them really happy to be in a position to develop this partnership not only with our colleagues in India with institutions in India several times with a seat in particular we are talking people would see that this is an opportunity for you to to develop relationships that are not going to be on the academy but also relationships between India and the U.A. we ask you this actually responsible for many things we do we will find this as a way to find out for instance that we have one of the largest collections of campus and I don't want to bother you with more information of this sort the main point I want to make is we have a long history of the study of people, students, faculty visiting and you will see many possibilities of interaction actually this summer with the students where I can to be part of the language institute that is usually organized every year for the South Asian students