Event Update: National Technology Day at CDRI

The Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI), Lucknow celebrated the National Technology Day on May 11. Chief executive officer, National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), and principal consultant, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Jayant Krishna delivered the special oration on ‘Information technology in the service of mankind’.

Krishna said that the IT played a very important role in drug discovery, new drug development, clinical trials, clinical data management, drug safety issues, pharma co-vigilance, advanced analytics and disease management. He added that IT interventions reduced the time and ‘cost of ownership’ and enhanced the productivity in the drug and pharmaceutical industry by leaps and bounds.

Krishna said that the Prime Minister’s Digital India was an umbrella programme which could potentially transform India into a digitally-empowered society and a big-time knowledge economy. He also explained that the three key promises of Digital India were digital infrastructure as a utility to citizens, governance and services on demand to the people, business and industry and the digital empowerment of citizens of the country. Krishna said that Digital India would hinge on broadband highways, universal access to phones, public internet access programme, reformation of government through technology, electronic delivery of services, information for all, scaledup electronics manufacturing and large scale job creation.

While summing up, Jayant Krishna said that Digital India was one fine idea whose time had come and its roll-out would transform the country by way of a better quality of life, improved ease of doing business and an overall economic upsurge. The talk was presided over by CDRI director Madhu Dikshit and attended by several hundred scientists, including veteran scientist Nityanand.

Source: Rahul Pandey, City Journalist - Lucknow, CollegeDekho