Inaugural Address by Prof. CNR Rao, Founder President, MRSI
(delivered at the 13^th AGM of MRSI at Hyderabad on 7.2.2002)

I am glad to give this inaugural talk.  Before that I have to say one or two things. We chemists do often forget that catalysts are some of the most important materials, and catalysts are somehow included under chemicals. Let me also say that in terms of tonnage, the largest quantity of any material made on earth is a chemical called zeolite.  There are various kinds of zeolites, and they are all chemicals.  Those of us in materials science consider zeolites as a marvel created by materials chemists.  So chemists are really partly material scientists.  In fact, chemistry is a materials science. I do not want to talk about that.

It is really a pleasure to talk today because it is one of those occasions where I am in a wonderful institute, Indian Institute of Chemical Technology devoted to chemistry, talking on materials.  Is it not wonderful because I am working on chemistry of advanced materials?  A chemistry institute having a materials meeting is a very good occasion indeed. I do not know whether you saw the people sitting on the dias and people sitting in the front rows.  I have some connection with each of them. The community of scientists has given this tremendous bondage amongst people, amongst scientists. In fact I see Ganguly with a big smile, and my old friend Valiathan who roughly has the same date of birth as myself and also a very young and dynamic person whom I have known almost from his student days and who is now Principal Scientific Adviser, Chidambaram. I remember the early days of IIT Kanpur when Dr. Chakravorty just started to enter academic career. K J Rao is one of my old students sitting in the front row who is going to give the Honor Lecture. It is unbelievable. I knew D Banerjee as a young child.  I used to lift him up once in a way. But I won’t try it today.  He comes from a family whom I have known and his father was a very great friend whom I have admired as one of the greatest organic chemists who was in our institute in Bangalore. Subramanyam is again a person with whom I have worked for years. 

It is really nice to be here on this occasion.  We often forget to remember how happy we are because we are doing the right thing, namely doing science and being in a scientific community.  A good scientific community is essential for the future of India. In particular a good materials science community is absolutely essential if India has to make headway in future in science and technology, industry and whatever futuristic thing one thinks about.

Following this Prof. Rao gave a technical lecture on ‘Phase Segregation and Phase Separation’

Materials Research Priorities

Prof. R Chidambaram
Principal Scientific Adviser, Government of India
Past President, MRSI
(delivered at the inaugural session of 13^th AGM of MRSI at Hyderabad on 7.2.2002)

Prof.  C.N.R. Rao, Founder President of MRSI and, may I say, father figure to the Society, who has retained his tremendous enthusiasm for research as we saw just now, Prof. Chakravorty, Dr. Raghavan,  Dr. Dipankar Banerjee, Prof. Subramanyam, distinguished materials scientists who have come for this meeting and friends, I thought that, in  the brief time that has been given to me, I shall say a few things about what  I consider as materials research priorities for India.  Dr. Banerjee – not Dipankar but our own brilliant Srikumar Banerjee – and myself are now editing a book on Materials Research. It has got a little delayed because the receipt of a couple of  articles got delayed.  If you look at the subjects which have been covered, it is fascinating to see the excellent quality of the work that is going on in India in a variety of fields.   We are looking both at the current scenario and the future projections.  One thing is clear.  More attention is needed to get technology pay-offs for India from the efforts that we are putting in.

Now one can divide the materials research work into areas though, of course, the boundaries are not   sharp between basic research and applied research.  In the  field of materials research, you need advanced facilities, you need advanced analytical equipment for materials characterization.  Unless you have well characterized samples, all  data and results that you get  become practically useless.   This happened, for example, in the early days of high-Tc superconductors.  Basic research is important, it is a cultural necessity.  Any  civilized country must provide an opportunity for its highest intellects to work on problems of their choice.  Applied  research is also necessary to catalyse indigenous technology growth.  Research instrumentation has to be developed and there is weakness here.  Of course, there are exceptions. A great deal of instrumentation has been developed in the Department of Atomic Energy and some other  laboratories and institutions.  You  heard just now how Prof. CNR Rao’s  group built the 15-tesla magnet for his magneto-resistance studies.  But our instrumentation efforts are inadequate.

Frontier areas of basic research are often decided by the technology imperatives of developed countries.  They have already reached a high level of technology development.  They want to carry out research to reach even higher technology levels.  Of course, we must be in these areas, pursuing them as basic research and also as an investment for future  - or, if possible even  current- technology development.     At the same time, we should look also at the problems which are of immediate relevance for our own country.

Let me come now to the Synchrotron Radiation Sources (SRSs) which we are building for the first  time in India at the Centre for Advanced Technology, Indore.  Building an  SRS is like building a nuclear reactor.   It requires not one technology but a variety of scientific and engineering disciplines.  For building a  reactor you need reactor physics, water chemistry, reactor engineering, control instrumentation and a range of other engineering disciplines.  In a similar way, for building an electron accelerator, an electron storage ring, it requires knowledge of high vacuum, RF  systems, high voltage, beam dynamics and other disciplines.  The first electron storage ring INDUS-I, which gives vacuum ultra-violet and soft x-ray radiation is already functioning and INDUS-2, which is a 2.5-GeV  ring with insertion devices and  will give hard x-ray radiation,  will be completed next year.  INDUS-2 will have a couple of dozen beam lines.  Here we have a lacuna.  Eight of the beam line instruments are being built by BARC and CAT and a couple by IUC-DAEF.  But not enough people are coming forward from the University system to build beam-line instruments, though there are excellent scientists in the country who would want to do basic research with the instruments once they have been built.  We should examine what difficulties are holding them back from participating in instrumentation development  and remove those impediments.  Of course, it is  time-consuming to build a  beam-line equipment  or any other advanced experimental equipment.  But, unless we do that in a big way, we will not be able to catch up, as Prof. CNR Rao said, with the countries abroad.

If I come to applied research, a very successful example is the nuclear materials development programme.  Dr. Ganguly is here, one of the few  persons who has worked with all kinds of nuclear fuel – plutonium, uranium-233, natural uranium, enriched uranium.  In applied materials research also, you need advanced facilities, advanced analytical equipment.  In addition, you must  also have production facilities and all this leads to indigenous technology development.  The nuclear materials development programme is not an isolated piece of development.  You have to develop fuel,  you have to develop cladding material, you have to develop fuel assemblies and test them for quality.  You have to make the whole programme  consistent with the reactor’s objectives.  Dr. Rodrigues is here, who did a great deal for the development of fast breeder reactor at Kalpakkam, which is the second stage of  our nuclear power programme.  Here we need mixed plutonium-uranium fuels,  thorium-based fuels, breeding ratios have to be estimated.  In applied materials research, we have been successful in specific advanced mission-oriented areas.

There has been some debate in recent literature between conventional science vs. strategic science.  Personally I do not see a sharp border between the two.  Take my own area of high pressure physics.  High pressure as a parameter is fascinating.  If you heat a material,  by the time it expands by 10%, it has melted.  But you can squeeze a material to half its volume and more, and still do experiments at room temperature or at other temperatures.  You can do under  isothermal conditions or you can send shock waves inside. Shock waves inevitably heat the material,  along with compressing it.  We started working on transition metals because Shri C.V. Sundaram brought a paper from Cambridge by Pettifor, who  said that here the phase stability is decided by d-band occupancy.  As you know, if you squeeze a material, the bands expand and there could be an s-d electron transfer  and a phase transition can take place. We have played around with phase  transition pressures; you  can add  vanadium to titanium, for instance, and bring down the transition pressure.  Now, one could call this phase transition study as conventional science.

We have worked on rare earths and on actinides.  Thorium is a 5f metal and if you want to get a good Equation of State (EOS) for thorium and the right  pressure for its  transition, you must study the broadening of the  5f-band.  This can be very exact  using the density  functional method and a powerful computational resource.  My colleagues have published papers on this in Physical Review.  You could call  this conventional science.  But when we work on plutonium, which is a few atomic numbers up the periodic table and do the same thing, you could  call it strategic science.  If you want to predict exactly the yield of a fission weapon, you must know exactly the EOS of plutonium and uranium.  So, where does conventional science  end and strategic science begin? So my feeling is that when we are doing materials research – or, for that matter, any kind of research – we should  not get  too worked up about such semantic boundaries between basic research vs applied research, small science vs big science, etc.

We should also forget about what the institutional attachment of a scientist is  and concern  ourselves only about the  quality of his research.  I remember the days many years back when I and  Milan Sanyal  were  trying to get our group into the collaborative access team for  building a beam-line instrument for the Advanced Light  Source at Argonne.  The potential members of the team were the Brookhaven National Lab, Argonne National Lab, a U.S. University and  BARC.  While the design discussions were going on,  institutional affiliation did not concern anybody.  We were willing to build a part of the instrument at our cost.  Incidentally,  the reason we got out of the project was that the question of paying for the maintenance of the beamline came up.  Imagine having to continuously pay a fraction of the salaries of two American  technicians for maintaining the beamline!

Why do we do materials research?  If someone tries to  understand and find out the  behavior of materials  just from the  point of view of acquiring knowledge we don’t have to ask why the study is being done – only  about the quality of the work. .  But if the work is  articulated as being related to technology development, the  linkage to Indian industry has to be established early.  What is the purpose of  technology development, in general?  Creating national wealth; improving quality  of life, particularly in rural areas; and enhancing national security! And  here comes the question  of technology foresight.  This is different from technology forecasting.  If you ask if human cloning will work or will DNA computing become practical and look at it purely from a scientific and technological angle, that is forecasting.  But add to it assessment from an economic, social, environmental and (in the case of human cloning) ethical points of view, it becomes technology foresight.  Technology foresight analysis helps to decide  what are the critical technologies  for a country at any point of time.  You would get different answers, depending on   whether you are from USA or from India.  We can do this for all materials – related  technologies.    So  when you   talk of technology , you have to consider how it feeds into the Indian system.  Are there Indian  industries which are ready to take over the development of these technologies, or how they should be helped to do so?  This was what was done for the nuclear materials – related technologies.

Let me close with one last thought.  In my new assignment as Principal Scientific Adviser to Government of India, it has become very clear to me that rural development-related technologies must be given the highest priority.  Two thirds of Indians live in villages .  Increase in agricultural  productivity through use of known science and technology in the poorest rural parts of the country can take the people  living there above the poverty line.   Beyond that agriculture productivity can have limits, unless simultaneously we can  create  jobs outside the primary farm and related sectors. And this is being done in the Tenth Plan.  Value addition by food processing, for instance!  The other kind of technologies which can be developed with rural areas in mind  can also become important, for adding value and for creating  new job opportunities.  In fact, sometime I am going to suggest to Prof. Subramanyam and Prof. Chakravorty  that MRSI should have a new subject group on rural development-related materials. I feel  many of us can improve the materials which rural artisans and agriculturists  use.  TIFAC, which is a part of the Department of Science & Technology has done some interesting work on use of coir,  bamboo  etc. and Prof.  Ramachandra Rao  showed me recently in NML a simple device to remove drudgery from the work of a blacksmith.  So we can contribute to materials and materials processing   technologies related to rural development.  MRSI  over the years has  grown from strength  to strength in a way even I did not    expect when Prof. CNR Rao started it and we should also now see how much we can contribute to rural development.
 

Minutes of the 13^th Annual General Meeting of MRSI

 The Thirteenth Annual General Meeting of Materials Research Society of India was held on Thursday the 7^th February 2002 at 6 PM at Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT), Hyderabad.  285 members attended the meeting. Prof. D Chakravorty, President, MRSI extended a hearty welcome to all the members and the invitees. He thanked Dr. D Banerjee, Director, DMRL and Treasurer, MRSI for the excellent arrangements for the Council Meeting and AGM.  

 The Vice President-General Secretary presented the Annual report of MRSI for the year 2001.  A brief summary of the Secretary’s report has already been printed in the MRSI Newsletter, issue B 02, Number 1, January 2002.  Other aspects of the report are given below.

§    The APAM India Chapter held its meeting at Hyderabad on 7^th February 2002. Prof. CNR Rao stated in his address that APAM-India Chapter and MRSI should jointly hold a meeting, preferably at the next AGM on strategies for giving impetus to R & D in the area of Materials Science. Dr. G Sundararajan and Prof. S B Krupanidhi delivered talks on ‘Dynamic indentation behaviour of Metallic Materials’ and ‘Nanoscale Ferroelectric Structures’ respectively.

§    The Paper titled ‘Non-equilibrium Solidification of Undercooled Droplets during Atomization Process’ by Prashanth Shukla, R K Mandal and S N Ojha, Dept. of Metallurgical Engineering, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi 221 005 has been adjudged the best paper published in Bulletin of Materials Science during the year 2001, [BMS, Vol 24 (5), p.547].

§    The Statement of Accounts for the year 2000-2001 and the Provisional Statement for 2001-2002 upto December 2001 were presented at the AGM.

§    The DSIR SIRO recognition has been received for the year 2000-2001.  Application has been made for the year 2001-2002.

§    MRSI will partially support upto 10 projects of students (B.Tech, M.Tech, ME, Ph.D) in the area of Materials Science & Technology under the supervision of MRSI members.  Proposals are invited before 30^th September 2002.

§    The MRSI has received a grant of Rs. 1 lakh from DAE under the Grant-in-Aid Scheme for the year 2001-2002.  Our sincere thanks to the DAE for this.

§    The MRSI has received a contribution of Rs. 50,000/- from the organizers of ACCMS-1.  The MRSI is grateful to them for this contribution.

§    The Council of MRSI has decided to set up a Travel Fund for the purpose of participation of MRSI members in International Conferences such as IUMRS, MRS, APAM, ACCMS.

§     The following scientists have been elected as Honorary Members to MRSI for the year 2002.

Prof. Yoshiuki Kawazoe (Japan)
Dr. A L Greer (U K)
Prof. Martin Jensen (Germany)
Dr. M A Subramanian (USA)

§     The 14^th Annual General Meeting of MRSI to be held at Mumbai during February 11-13, 2003 would be organized by Dr. S Banerjee and Prof. Ashok Misra.  The 15^th Annual General Meeting of MRSI is scheduled to be held at Varanasi during 2004.

§     There is a proposal for the formation of a Chapter at Nagpur and this proposal has been accepted

§    The Chapter of MRSI at Pune is under formation.  The entire procedure is expected to be completed shortly.

§    A Subject Group on ‘Materials under High Pressure’ is under formation.  Dr. S K Sikka would be the Chairman of this Group.

New Members
Enrolled between January 1 and March 31, 2002

Life Members

Annual Members

CALENDAR OF EVENTS, APRIL 2002-OCT 2003

Members are requested to give information about the Conference / symposia / workshops they are organizing well in advance so that the same can be inserted in the “calendar of events”