India needs more PhDs per year, says science secy

COIMBATORE: China has taken a big leap over India when it comes to the number of doctorates awarded in a year, said Dr. Sanjeeva Rao, advisor to the secretary, Department of Science and Technology, Govt of India.
Speaking at a valedictory function for a two-week training programme on Concepts of Nowcasting and Meso-Scale Disturbances' jointly organised by the Airforce administrative college and Bharathiar University on Friday, he said that China and India had 5,500 doctorates in 1996."But the situation has dramatically changed and India is far behind China which produced 16,000 PhD's in 2006, while India produced only 6,000 in the same year," he said.Emphasising the need for more research, he said that training programmes such as this one, is an important step to accomplish goals. He encouraged more students to take up research which would help the country in many areas. With regard to aviation, he said that fast changing climate has made it imperative to identify advanced technologies that will predict the climate before hand. And Nowcasting plays an important role, which can predict the weather for short periods of 2-6 hours.
However there is little understanding about it and other technologies that are being developed, said Air Marshal Rajinder Singh, Senior Air Staff Officer, Training Command, IAF. "We have little understanding of Climatology and such training programmes encourage future research in the field of MED. Hence, the theme is apt and timely," he said.
Several tools like Doppler weather radars, high resolution satellite imageries of clouds and high speed computation systems have made Nowcasting more reliable to users. The Meso-Scale Models are run in 20 locations in the country.
"However in the era of science and technological development, the field of Nowcasting has not yet developed. To run complex weather forecasting, numerical models and MED models, highly skilled human resource is required," he added.
"We only had a general idea about Nowcasting but now we can go back to our institutions and implement these," said K Sravani, meteorological student, Andhra University.