Boost for research

India's apex industry chamber, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI)), is set to sign three MoUs for cooperation with three leading US institutions. The MOUs will be signed by the Prime Minister during his visit to US.

The first MoU with IC² Institute at the University of Texas at Austin calls for the implementation of new, distinctive programmes in India with the aim of helping Indian innovators bring their ideas to the world. The interdisciplinary research unit of The University of Texas at Austin, the IC² Institute has advanced the Theory and Practice of Entrepreneurial Wealth Creation.

With sponsorship from the Lockheed Martin Corporation, FICCI and IC² Institute teamed together in March 2007 to launch a first of its kind initiative ­ "The India Innovation Growth Programme" with the prime objective of assisting Indian innovators across the country and across a diversified range of sectors to take their R&D work to global markets.

The programme has successfully completed three years and has signed 73 business deals in India and around the world. Major deals have been signed under the programme in the sectors of waste management, rural technology, life sciences, avionics and green technology. The FICCI and IC² Institute have also jointly assessed 200 technologies from 26 DRDO labs across India and 7 licensing agreements have been finalised in India

The second MoU with the Polytechnic Institute of New York University commits the organizations to a culture of innovation in India. Under this pact, NYU-Poly and FICCI will design and host activities to promote an understanding of how partnerships between government, industry, and educational institutions can spur advances in research and bolster economic activity in India.

The two organisations have agreed to bring their respective strengths to meet India's growing demand for world-class research and development facilities that attract global talent. NYU-Poly, New York City's most comprehensive engineering and technology institutions of higher education, will showcase the successes of American models of private-public partnerships at events in India.

FICCI in turn will engage academic, research, government, and business entities in the cultivation of public-private partnerships.

The third MoU with the Institute of International Education, Inc. (IIE) outlines an agreement to partner to promote and facilitate educational and training exchanges between the United States and India. The IIE, a leading not-for-profit educational and cultural exchange organization in the United States, will collaborate with FICCI to facilitate more student exchanges and build academic partnerships between the two countries.

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Teachers must research

Teachers’ Participation in Research Programs Improves Their Students’ achievements in studies

The Program advocates assert that program participation enhances teachers’ skills in communicating science to students. They measured the impact of New York City public high-school science teachers’ participation in Columbia University’s Summer Research Program on their students’ academic performance in science. In the year before program entry, students of participating and nonparticipating teachers passed a New York State Regents science examination at the same rate. In years three and four after program entry, participating teachers’ students passed Regents science exams at a rate that was 10.1% higher than that of the non-participating teachers’ students. Other program benefits include decreased teacher attrition from classroom teaching and school cost savings.

The above results apply better in case of higher education. That is what experience shows.

Ref: “Teachers’ Participation in Research Programs Improves Their Students’ Achievement in Science”,

Samuel C. Silverstein, Jay Dubner, Jon Miller, Sherry Glied, John D. Loike, Science, 16 October 2009, Vol. 326. No. 5951, pp. 440 – 442,

DOI: 10.1126/science.1177344

Indian ancestry

The outcome of an extensive genetic research suggests that the population of India was founded on two ancient groups that are as genetically distinct from each other as they are from other Asians, according to the largest DNA survey of Indian heritage to date. Nowadays, however, most Indians are a genetic hotchpotch of both ancestries, despite the populous nation's highly stratified social structure.

A team led by David Reich of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Lalji Singh of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India probed more than 560,000 DNA-letter differences, called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) across the genomes of 132 Indian individuals from 25 diverse ethnic and tribal groups dotted all over India.

The researchers showed that most Indian populations are genetic admixtures of two ancient, genetically divergent groups, which each contributed around 40-60% of the DNA to most present-day populations. One ancestral lineage — which is genetically similar to Middle Eastern, Central Asian and European populations — was higher in upper-caste individuals and speakers of Indo-European languages such as Hindi, the researchers found. The other lineage was not close to any group outside the subcontinent and was most common in people indigenous to the Andaman Islands a remote archipelago in the Bay of Bengal.

Indian populations, although currently huge in number, were also founded by relatively small bands of individuals, the study suggests. Overall, the picture that emerges is of ancient genetic mixture, followed by fragmentation into small, isolated ethnic groups, which were then kept distinct for thousands of years because of limited intermarriage — a practice also known as endogamy.

Ref: Elie Dolgin, "Indian ancestry revealed", Nature, 23 September 2009, doi:10.1038/news.2009.935