IIT Madras establishes centre for technology and policy

CHENNAI, INDIA: Indian Institute of Technology, Madras today announced the establishment of the Centre for Technology and Policy (CTaP) at its campus.

CTaP has been established to explore the interaction between technology and public policy to better address India's pressing development problems.

CTaP will play a significant role in the design, promotion/advocacy and assessment of public policies impinged by technological and scientific innovations, and identification of key technology gaps in meeting development goals in the identified areas.

CTaP, established as an action-oriented centre, will support research to improve our understanding of the way that policy affects technology innovation and scale. The research here will focus on building this understanding in order to identify key policy initiatives that can encourage innovations and technology interventions to meet public goals.

CTaP's objective is also to provide feedback to technology innovators on how their work could be made more effective in a given policy setting. CTaP will draw on IIT Madras faculty expertise as well as Centre's research staff. In addition, it will enable extensive consultation and networking with policy makers, industry, investors and other stakeholders.

"The Centre will strive to provide hitherto unavailable analyses and strategy options to the national policy making bodies, by leveraging IIT-M's cutting edge research activities in the areas of water, decentralized solar energy systems, telecom and IT, online education and human healthcare technologies. The proposed Centre will aim to cast new light by taking a strongly inter-disciplinary approach involving the engineering and social science faculties as well as the incubation centres of the Institute", said Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi, director, IIT Madras, during the launch of the Centre in Chennai today.

"CTaP is uniquely positioned at IIT-Madras to carry out research on alternative strategies to meet developmental challenges in a manner that is fully informed by both the technological and socio-economic imperatives and constraints", said Professor V R Muraleedharan, professor In-charge of CTaP, IIT Madras.