India soon to get its first DNA park

The country is all set to get its first DNA/Bioinformatics park soon. While
Mumbai and Chennai have been identified as ‘pos-sible’ destinations, Pune
rema-ins a strong contender with its ‘unique configuration of skill sets and
collaborative strengths’.

"An initiative of the Depart-ment of Information Techno-logy (DIT) and
Ministry of Communication and Informa-tion Technology (MCIT), the project
includes one or more parks under the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI)
scheme to cater to the health related needs of the health sciences
industry," said Kamal-kant Jaiswal, IT secretary, Government of India.

Jaiswal was in Pune to deliver the keynote address at the conference
organized by TiE on the topic–‘Pune’s potential to be the knowledge
capital of India’. Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the conference,
Jaiswal said that the park would be set up to facilitate the export of bio-IT
solutions and attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the field of IT and
health sciences.

Although he did not specify the name, Jaiswal said that the government had
engaged a team of global consultants to identify the nature of scope of
infrastructure and services that such a park could offer its users. A report is
expected within the next six months. The park would provide facilities for
high-end super computing, software development, wet lab studies, educational and
train-ing facility and a national reso-urce centre, he added.

According to Jaiswal, "The park would also address requi-rements such as
sharing and pooling of data across global resources, while maintaining security,
retrieving and integra-ting diverse data across a vari-ety of scientific
domains, add-ing new data sources without new software development and enabling
real-time access to data without building and managing database warehouse.

It would also offer services such as computational model-ing and deep
computing for genetic and cellular research, deep computing for clinical tri-als,
grid computing for resou-rce and data sharing and pro-tein folding simulations.
The potential tenant groups in this parks would include pharma-ceutical
companies, drug discovery companies, healthc-are companies, contract resea-rch
companies and IT hardware and software companies and government R & D labs
among others.

According to Jaiswal, the Indian market size for bio-IT solutions has been
pegged at $ 15 million, which is poised to grow to $ 120 million by 2006. He
believed that the Indian bio-IT industry was still in the nascent stage and
therefore the government should take the lead in providing the necessary impetus
for growth in this sector.

The center is also keenly loo-king at cyber security. Jaiswal pointed out the
government has chalked out a broad natio-nal plan to focus on cyber security. As
part of this effort, the first step was to set up the Computer Emergency
Respo-nse Team (CERT). He underlined the need for improving courses in
universities and said that there was a shortfall of 77,000 professionals.
"We hope to fill these over the next three years," he said. On the
outsour-cing backlash, he said that American IT Association and NASSCOM are
collaborating to highlight the benefits of outsourcing.

CyberMedia News Service

Pune