'There Are Two Kinds Of Academia'

Ashok Jhunjhunwala of IIT-Madras says that most academia, happy so far to not go beyond lab demos, are slowly warming up to industry tie-ups

- Sayan Chakraborty

Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a 35-year veteran at the electrical engineering department of the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, has been at the forefront of fostering a culture of innovation at the institute. A harbinger of large scale industry academia partnership, Jhunjhunwala, 64, a Padma Shri awardee, has led and encouraged initiatives such as the Telecommunications and Computer Networks group, the IIT-Madras Incubation Cell and the IIT-Madras Research Park. In an interview to Forbes India, he talks about the benefits of industry-academia collaboration, innovation and the evolution of deep tech startups in India. Edited excerpts:

Q What was the thought behind setting up the IIT-Madras Research Park in 2010?

We wanted to see how the academia works with the industry and create products that can make a difference to India. If we put three sets of people together—high quality faculty with a tremendous width of knowledge, industry that knows how to convert an innovation into a commercial product and youngsters— they can come up with innovative solutions to all kinds of problems.

Q India hasn’t fared well on innovation indices of late. What is going wrong?

Many of the startups and industry academia partnerships are less than 10 years old. They are starting to scale up now and their impact will be seen in five to 10 years from today. The indices won’t reflect the changes until such endeavours are 100 percent commercially milked and that takes time.