THE dawn of the new millennium has seen a dramatic change in the perception of the world about India and China. These two Asian nations were for centuries seen as riddled with problems of large populations with a high percentage of the people living below the poverty line. The economic growth of China over the past two decades and of India since the 1990s, after the advent of the New Industrial Policy, has led to a sea change in this perspective.
With the phenomenal development in information and communication technology (ICT), of which the medium is the English language, India has emerged as a powerhouse in information technology and related services. An extraordinary amount of work is now outsourced in India from the USA and Europe. As a result, the number employed in BPO and IT enabled services has risen to nearly 0.7 million. It is evident that India’s economic growth has been propelled by the emphasis given to higher education, science, technology and their applications. India today ranks 22 in the world’s science intensive countries (see David King, Nature, July 2004 for an insightful analysis). India’s place within the top 25 countries in science and technology should be seen as an invaluable tool for alleviating social drawbacks and raising the country’s position from below 125 in the Human Development Index world ranking.
The specific field of metals and materials technology presents an even brighter picture for India with its millennia old traditions in materials. One has only to recall the first production of iron, steel and zinc in India. Modern research has revealed that wootz steel, produced in India from 300 BC onwards, is an advanced material in terms of its microstructure. Principles followed by the European metallurgists in the 19th century to replicate this material effectively are the same as those which formed the foundations of modern materials science in terms of relating processing to structure and structure to properties and performance.
In The Coming of Materials Science (Pergamon, London, 2001) Robert Cahn discusses the genesis of the discipline of materials science over the past five decades. His analysis shows that in the past decade, the possibility of specifically engineering materials for desired properties has become a reality. The advent of powerful computers makes it possible to model materials and phenomena and literally create materials in silico.
Greg Olson of Northwestern University has pioneered the programme of using multiscale modelling for design of materials with desired properties. Particularly noteworthy is his development of strong and tough steels, where quantum mechanical principles are used to follow the segregation of elements at interfaces. This has led to the development of quantum steels. Some of these principles are now under deployment by Indian researchers. In fact this can be extended to rational design of not just alloys or composites but also to the emerging organic-inorganic hybrids.
This article explores the role of materials science and technology by looking at the present trends with some thoughts for the future. The applications of materials in a fast developing nation are numerous and must cater to different and often conflicting interests. These include security concerns addressed by the strategic sector and industry as well as the needs of the urban and the predominantly rural population. It must never be forgotten that nearly 70% of the population of India still resides in villages. For a more homogeneous development of India, it is vital to take the fruits of modern science and technology to alleviate poverty and improve the quality of life in the villages.
Materials are synonymous with civilization. In this context it is of interest to compare the developments in a few specific sectors (transport, communication, energy, health and environment) with their impact on the strategic, civilian and rural stakeholders of the nation. Just as the economy is getting globalized, research is also undergoing globalization. The implications of this development for India will be briefly touched upon. Examples are by way of illustration and are by no means comprehensive.
In transport, India was for a long time identified with the bullock cart. There has been a sea change in recent years with impressive advances in automobiles and aviation. Until recently almost all cars were imported or based on imported design. Now India has a flourishing automobile industry as it has expanded from mere manufacture of auto components. From turnkey projects it has advanced to the stage of designing cars such as the Indica by Tata Motors. This trend has received a boost from two recent initiatives: (i) The bringing together of automotive industry leaders and promising researchers of the academia in a project entitled CAR (Cooperative Automotive R&D); and (ii) The approval received by the ministry of heavy industry for an investment of Rs 1700 crore (~US$ 350 million) in three automotive R&D centres involving public and private partnership and the encouragement provided by 150% tax exemption. These initiatives are designed to advance the development of materials with high strength to weight ratio and manufacturing technologies such as laser welding of components and processing by hydroforming. Indian researchers may also be advised to pay attention to bicycles and scooters. In view of the large number of such vehicles even incremental improvements will have a significant impact.
Turning to aviation, the Light Combat Aircraft is a state of the art machine. Dhruv, the Advanced Light Helicopter, is a major achievement. In materials the development of directionally solidified and single crystal superalloys by the Defence Metallurgical Research Laboratory (DMRL), Hyderabad led to patenting DMS4 and DMD4. The indigenisation of maraging steels by the Indian Space Research Organization and the design by DMRL of low alloy high strength Ni-Si-Cr-Co-Mo steels with a yield strength of 1550 megapascals accompanied by a high level of toughness are important contributions. Yet another significant advance is the development of detonation coating technology by ARCI for use with the high speed aircraft engine blades.
The revolution in ICT is changing the social fabric as an affordable mobile phone reaches out to the lowest stratum in society. To sustain this India must build a strong base in electronic materials. While Japan, Taiwan and South Korea have made spectacular advances in the manufacture of electronic materials and devices and China is making major progress, India is still to make headway in hardware R&D and manufacture. Low cost availability of digital devices, based on indigenous R&D and production, is essential for a wider and deeper diffusion of modern IT and communication gadgets. This has been demonstrated by IIT Madras in their development of WLL technology involving indigenous chip design.
Clearly it is not for lack of innovative and entrepreneurial skills that India lags behind. Two disparate examples will be cited. Moser Baer, an Indian company is the third largest producer of optical storage devices. Every sixth DVD is made in India. Engineers from this company have crafted futuristic high density BluRay DVD that will store 27 gigabytes of information on a disk. Another example is that of Vyomesh Joshi at Hewlett-Packard, USA. He made major changes to the humble inkjet printer to cram 300 tiny jets onto the print head. Its performance has followed the famous Moore’s Law of doubling in performance every 18 months for the past 17 years.
The continuing rise in the price of oil is alarming for India given its increasing need for energy. In post-independent India considerable emphasis was given to the nuclear energy option, and the Indian metallurgy and materials programme did extraordinarily well in the fabrication of atomic fuels including uranium metal, mixed oxides of uranium and plutonium and novel ones based on carbides. Similarly nuclear fuel cladding by zircaloys and zirconium-niobium alloys has been mastered by using sophisticated concepts of physical and mechanical metallurgy. India has also embarked on building fast breeder reactors as the second phase in nuclear energy development and is poised to use thorium in the third phase. In all these, materials research has been deployed to solve the technological hurdles especially in the light of denial of some technologies from elsewhere.
In the energy sector the zeolite catalyst developed by the National Chemical Laboratory is sold both in India and abroad. Encilites are used in the manufacture of paraxylene, intermediate for polyester films and fibres and also in dewaxing of diesel fractions in manufacturing plants. As the climate is blessed with ample sunshine, there is a case for accelerating research on materials to utilize the abundant solar energy. A programme on hydrogen economy is futuristic, and India has taken some initial steps in this direction.
Materials play an increasing role in providing health care. With a large population the need for prosthetic devices is enormous. One can cite three successful implementations. As a spin-off from defence research, carbon-fibre composites have been used for providing lightweight replacements for metallic calipers for polio patients. A sturdy prosthetic foot was developed from rubberized material and has the special quality of water resistance. This costs Rs 1200, one-tenth the cost of similar devices abroad. It is labour intensive to make and is now made from polyeurethane, a lightweight material developed by the Indian Space Research Organization. Due to geopolitical compulsions, India has made enormous investments in the strategic sector. If the fruits of the developments in this arena can be translated into ordinary day-to-day use, it is a winning proposition.
Another example is an inexpensive cataract surgery offered by Aravind Eye Care Centre in Madurai at one-tenth the cost of operations in the West. This centre has also developed an intraocular lens. A programme for development of advanced coatings on plastic lenses is underway at IIT Madras with the participation of Shankar Netralaya. A collaboration linking Hydro-Norsk (a Norwegian company), Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore has led to lightweight extruded aluminum for the fabrication of canes, stretchers, mobile chairs and lifts, offering hope to the physically handicapped patients. There is ample scope for many such Indian innovations involving materials.
There is an imperative need for harnessing science and technology for rural India. A special section of Current Science (10 October 2004) explores many technologies which have been tuned to serve the villages. It is evident that materials technology has played a key role in building materials, biomass gasification and domestic cook stoves. The problems may appear less glamorous than those in the high technology area but are nevertheless equally challenging. There is an urgent need for the provision of safe drinking water. 68 per cent Indians do not have access to this commodity and suffer from several common water borne diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, filariasis and fungal and bacterial skin infections. An example of material development in this context will be a low cost filter for water to provide safe drinking water in villages. Tata Research Development and Design Centre, Pune has produced a rice husk ash based water filter. It uses locally available raw materials such as rice husk, pebbles and a small quantity of cement. It is simple and inexpensive.
As the pace of technological development accelerates and the human population grows to make intensive use of materials, environmental damage becomes a major issue. India is just entering this phase in its exploitation of natural resources and the large scale use of materials. It is important to develop a strategy for moving towards a sustainable economy. This will entail the minimization of pollution, the conservation of resources and the maximization of clean energy supply. Energy audit, use of lightweight materials, reduce, reuse and recycle options will emphasize the need for sustainable development. Life cycle analysis will have to be performed to make the most judicious choice of materials. It also involves educating society about the nature of industrial ecology.
The transformation of materials science into a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional and multinational endeavour has led to an interesting development. Many multinational companies are establishing R&D centres in India, mainly to leverage the availability of English speaking scientists who can add intellectual value. While this change was led by companies in ICT, one can see increasing evidence that firms with involvement in materials and manufacturing too are following this path. Two prominent examples are John F. Welch Technology Centre of General Electric and the Technology Centre of General Motors. Both are located in Bangalore and have strong interactions with the Indian Institute of Science. It may also be pointed out that Daimler Chrysler Centre is already operational and Toyota-Kirloskar R&D Centre is on the anvil. The emphasis on automotive applications is remarkable.
Cement, steel, aluminum and conventional engineering materials have attained a stage of maturity allowing restricted scope for R&D. Nevertheless their production and per capita consumption define the wealth of the nation. To take just one example from among them, steel is extremely crucial. India has abundant resources of high quality iron ores. Yet the industry has gone through vicissitudes. In its current state the steel industry is witnessing an extraordinary growth, partly fuelled by China’s enormous appetite. Indian companies are now acquiring assets abroad. The potential can be gauged by the fact that the largest steel producer of the world is Mittal Steel Ltd with an annual production of 70 million tons – twice the size of the Indian steel output! It is to be hoped that India will grow its industries in this vital sector and consider large scale production of two light metals with considerable promise, titanium and magnesium, for which India’s resources are substantial.
In many ways basic research underpins developments in technology. India has built a formidable base in scientific institutions. In recent years the number of publications has gone up to 90,000 per annum. The number of citations as well as the average impact has registered an increase. Nevertheless, there is a widely held perception that China and South Korea have overtaken India in this realm. In the specific field of materials research, however, India holds its own.
Economists have shown that three factors contributing to economic growth are labour, capital and technological progress. Of these technological progress contributes nearly 50% to economic growth. As the Indian economy prospers, scientists and engineers – especially academics, who train the next generation of students – will largely be responsible for skilled labour and technological progress. In this context the number of engineers trained is an important indicator. The following table lists the number of engineers trained at various levels. It shows that the disciplines of metallurgy and materials science are playing an important role in India.
Higher Education in Materials and Engineering (~ 2000)
Annual intake Engineering Metallurgy Materials Science
Undergraduate level 3,20,000 1000
(4 times US intake) (0.03% Engg)
Masters level 5000 500
(rising rapidly) (10% Engg)
Doctorate level 500 125
(increasing) (~25%Engg)
In condensed matter physics, solid-state chemistry and physical metallurgy notable advances have been made in new materials synthesis, in understanding phenomena such as self-organization. One may cite as illustrative examples novel high temperature superconductors, aluminium matrix composites, new titanium ternary intermetallic, decagonal quasi-crystals, discotic liquid crystals, crystal engineering and density functional theory of freezing. In carbon nanotubes, synthesizing Y-junction tubes and a new effect of electric field generation due to fluid flow are seen as major breakthroughs.
Professor C.N.R. Rao founded the Materials Research Society of India (MRSI) in 1989. This professional society has successfully brought together, on a single platform, metallurgists, ceramists and polymer scientists with condensed matter physicists, materials chemists and materials biologists resulting in notable research contributions to the field. MRSI, a member of the International Union of Materials Research Societies, has grown over the last 15 years and promises to project a broader Indian vision for the discipline in tune with the international trends. It is a measure of the stature attained by MRSI that, based on this society’s bid, India has been elected to host the International Conference on Advanced Materials 2007 (ICAM 2007).
These achievements ought to trigger more massive investment in academic research, in particular for promoting university research on a much larger scale than what is being done at the present time.
At first scientists were led into thinking of nanomaterials as just another class of materials with the singular defining feature of a small size. It is now apparent that nanomaterials are a completely new development and need to be considered in their own right. India is capable of being in line with the advanced world in research in this most exciting field.
The Department of Science and Technology has rightly launched a major initiative in this area under the leadership of C.N.R. Rao. Infrastructural facilities involving surface probe microscopes, high-resolution transmission electron microscopes and nanoindenters have been created in several institutions across the country. It is expected that this coordinated approach will soon yield rich dividends.
It is evident that India is moving up the ladder in world ranking in research output. It is important to devise a strategy to widen the base of high calibre institutions and accelerate the pace of progress. The support provided to the strategic programmes in space, atomic energy and defence must be kept up with attention turned to the new frontiers such as contained in nano materials and smart materials. It was possible to contend with the boom in IT industry because the country, public as well as private, could give a boost to IT education. Similarly it is now imperative to give a fresh fillip to education in microelectronics and electronic materials. An example in this regard is the Tata Consultancy Services – IIT Bombay joint effort in setting up a new micro-electronics laboratory in conjunction with an M.Tech course.
India has met nearly every type of challenge in the materials field. The examples cover conventional as well as frontier materials research, materials development per se as well as their deployment as a product in service. The changed economic environment and the pressure of international trade regulation must drive the country to achieve significantly more on two fronts: (a) enhanced scale of production and deeper penetration of modern products by bringing down costs via indigenous research and development, and (b) a paradigm shift from being a force in the local market to becoming a competitive player in the global market. Materials area is admirably placed in taking India forward along both these fronts.
India is at a turning point. Its demographic contour was often seen as a liability. But with the world turning increasingly to a knowledge economy, this very factor can become an asset provided the population becomes fully literate and is imbued with a scientific spirit. Modern technology in the form of Edusat, a unique satellite launched by India dedicated to education, promises to serve as an instrument in transforming the society. Once again prosperity beckons India. Materials development, which had a glorious past, can look forward to a renaissance in India.
