‘Investing in materials innovation is investing in India’s future giving the boost to next economic growth era’ says Dr VK Saraswat, Member, NITI Aayog while addressing at the CII Advanced Materials Summit

Investing in materials innovation is investing in India's future, thereby giving the boost to the next economic growth era stated Dr VK Saraswat, while addressing at the Inaugural Session of CII Advanced Materials Summit 2022.

The time is now ripe for India to harness indigenous development of Advanced Materials thereby reducing import which will make India Aatmanirbhar. He further stated that CII’s Advanced Materials initiative is the right step in this direction and CII can offer the best platform to launch major programmes for design and development of Advanced Materials.

Advanced Materials are technology enablers, and Material 4.0 Design and Advanced Material revolution will be driven by computational materials, big data, machine learning, multiscale modelling, and other new technology paradigms.

He stressed the need for the scaling up of R&D and innovation activity in the area of Advanced Materials. CII’s Advanced Materials platform will vitalize the R&D and help nation come up with a business model, where indigenous materials are preferred over the imported materials.

He elaborated on the applications of Titanium, Graphene, Composites, Rare Earths, rare earths, advanced ceramics, biomaterials, and smart materials. He also mentioned about the energy applications of Advanced materials starting from energy generation, energy conversion, energy distribution, energy storage, energy utilization, and their applications in defence and aerospace

In his concluding remarks, Dr Saraswat stated that emerging new models for advanced materials are based upon combining and putting together the variety of subfields of materials science and many other engineering fields (chemical, mechanical, microelectronics, software etc.) to solve the challenging problems with such ‘integrated systems materials engineering’. He further mentioned that revolutionary improvements are expected in 3-D printing technology through enabling materials, smart materials, and multi-functional materials.

In his Opening Address at the Summit, Mr Vipin Sondhi, Chairman, CII National Mission on Technology, Innovation & Research stated that it is young India@75, and time is ripe to take the next steps in this evolutionary journey. Advanced Materials is one such technology frontier that will take India to the next level of technology leadership.

Dr Debashish Bhattacharjee, Lead, CII Task Force on Advanced Materials and Vice President, Technology & New Materials Business, Tata Steel Ltd stated that sustainable progress happens, when technology needs business and meets the techno-business demands. 

Entire history of humankind is woven by the ability to master the science of Advanced Materials. The need of Advanced Materials is rapidly rising due to this necessity stated Prof Indranil Manna, JC Bose Fellow, President, Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) and Vice Chancellor, Birla Institute of Technology (BIT) Ranchi.

In his address, Prof Pradeep Srivastava, Executive Director, Technology Information Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC) stated that India is striving hard to fulfil the dream of the Hon'ble Prime Minister under Atmanirbar Bharat, where science and engineering are going hand to hand to meet to future challenges by focusing on advanced materials.

The aforesaid summit was held on CII HIVE. Several organizations including NITI Aayog, DST, CSIR, TIFAC, BIS are Partners of the Summit.

CII's Thought Leadership Report on Advanced Materials was also unveiled at CII Advanced Materials Summit. The report has been prepared by the CII National Task Force on Advanced Materials comprising of an elite group of experts focussing on seven Advanced materials: Titanium, Biomaterials, Urban Mining, Composites, Rare Earths, Advanced Ceramics and Graphene. The report features the following details about each material: Background, strategic importance of the material, Indian scenario, gap areas, technology frontiers, role of the stakeholders such as, Government, Academia, Industry and Research Institutes and Short, medium and long Recommendations. The summit will also see the felicitation of CII Industrial Innovation Awards 2022.

2 December 2022

New Delhi