BHUBANESWAR: The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) will strengthen its ties with the IIT Bhubaneswar (IIT-BBS) further to develop it as a centre of excellence for promoting defence research.
"The DRDO Technology and Extramural Research and Intellectual Property Rights (ER&IPR) wings will be encouraged to work with IIT Bhubaneswar in different areas to see that the institute becomes part of our centres of excellence and works in specific fields of defence research," said DRDO Chairman G Satheesh Reddy in his virtual address on the 13th foundation day of IIT-BBS on Friday.
The DRDO has partnered with IIT-BBS in running research projects worth Rs 1.3 crore in several fields which include stress-corrosion cracking-related studies, online corrosion monitoring in naval structures, improving the damping capacity of materials like nickel, aluminium and bronze, and development of formal verification tools for proactive assessment and prevention of security threats in enterprise networks.
"We will have many more projects for IIT-BBS in the coming days. There are around 295 academic institutions where the DRDO is having investment of more than Rs 1,000 crore. The DRDO is also ready to fund start-ups in a big way," Reddy said.
The DRDO’s centres of excellence have been established in different institutes of national repute which include IIT Delhi, IIT Mumbai, IIT Chennai, Hyderabad Central University and Jammu University.
"The trend of students going to the field of information technology has changed in the last five years. Many youngsters are now coming up with start-ups especially in the defence sector. The government is also encouraging them. DRDO with its Technology Development Fund scheme promises funding of up to Rs 10 crore to start-ups," Reddy said.
Reddy added that they also have schemes to fund up to Rs 1 crore to newly passed out students for start-ups in the field of defence. "It is the technology that helps a country prosper. We have to be a technologically-advanced nation. We should be coming out with many first-of-its-kind technological products and innovations," he said.
Reddy also praised IIT-BBS Director Prof RV Raja Kumar for his contribution to the field of defence and thanked him for his role he played in DRDO projects in the field of Sonar, Signal processing as well as risk processor related applications, CDMA communication for Prithvi missile.