Institute for Plasma Research and Indian Institute of Chemical Technology pulled up
Institute for Plasma Research is an autonomous research and development organisation primarily studying plasma physics and its applications. It is under the Department of Atomic Energy. A Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) report has pulled up key scientific institutions for lapses in functioning. The supreme audit institution of India highlighted that the Institute for Plasma Research (IPR) in Gujarat’s Gandhinagar has not undergone any external or internal peer review in the last 15 years.
IPR is an autonomous research and development organisation primarily studying plasma physics and its applications. It is under the Department of Atomic Energy.
Autonomous organisations have to undergo an external or internal peer review every three or five years, depending on the General Financial Rules 2017 — a compilation of rules and orders of the Government of India dealing with matters involving public finances.
Such a review should be carried out by the administrative division concerned with the ministry or department.
The Institute, according to the report, had its last peer review in January 2007. In November 2022, IPR completed a peer review of two areas and assured the CAG that it would cover three more areas soon.
“Peer review, particularly for research organisations, is a very critical process in strengthening efficiency and benchmarking systems and process flow with the standards of peer scientific community,” read the report.
CAG also highlighted delays by IPR in completing planned projects. Of the 13 planned projects audited, five were completed between 2017-18 to 2021-22. Eight projects were still ongoing as of March 2022, the report noted.
Even the five completed projects saw delays that ran up to months. For example, the project “Tokamak Research & Fundamental Plasma Studies” took 95 months to reach completion, against the planned timeline of 74 months.
“All five projects exceeded their planned completion period by 21 months to 54 months. Out of five, in two projects, the delay in completion was more than double the scheduled completion period,” the report read.
Also highlighted are lapses in the transfer of technologies developed at the Institute to the industry. This is one of its mandates.
One of its divisions, Facilitation Centre for Industrial Plasma Technologies, is responsible for taking the development of plasma processing technologies from concept to commercialisation.
From 2005 to 2022, IPR transferred only 13 technologies and there was not much demand for other technologies from industries, barring plasma pyrolysis, which is a waste management technology for safe disposal of all kinds of organic waste streams.
Further, 16 technologies developed by IPR are yet to be transferred, even after one to eight years of development.
In its response to the CAG in September 2022, IPR said that technologies are commercialised effectively when the industry is provided with sufficient performance data of the technology and that the technology transfers being done by IPR are non-exclusive licences.
CAG commented that IPR could not provide sufficient performance data on the technology to the industry even after one to eight years of development.
Similarly, the report also found issues with how the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT), Hyderabad dealt with a project to develop a cost-effective, durable, and more efficient dye-sensitised solar cell (DSSC). DSSC provides a technically and economically credible alternative concept to present-day junction photovoltaic devices.
The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) sanctioned the project — a collaboration of seven Council of Scientific & Industrial Research labs with IICT acting as a nodal agency — in 2011. MNRE released Rs 6 crore as its first installment in April 2012 and the second installment of Rs 7 crore in August 2014. However, IICT was forced to pull the plug on the project in 2017.
CAG noted that IICT’s non-adherence to the terms and conditions of the sanction order and deviation from the envisaged target led to the termination of the project after incurring an expenditure of Rs 13 crore.
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