US commerce secretary Gary Locke and his dozen-strong delegation was at the country’s premier science school, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), on Wednesday morning, to market American innovation and its R&D ecosystem to the students.
The 102-year-old IISc, undoubtedly India’s biggest repository of pure sciences talent, has 2,400 students pursuing Masters and doctoral programmes in a variety of cutting edge engineering and science frontiers. The institute has 1,500 Ph.D. students alone, the largest such pool of all institutions in India.
“Skills are only one half of the equation,” Locke said in a town hall meeting held outdoors in the institute’s lush campus where students, faculty and US officials mingled freely. A Vinod Dham (inventor of the Pentium chip) or a Vinod Khosla (founder of Sun Microsystems) could not have been successful but for America’s intellectual property rights, its ecosystem supporting innovation and the market for the products, Locke said.
