CHIDAMBARAM, JANUARY 3: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today urged developed nations to ensure that the measures they took to protect the environment and deal with climate change “be equitable in their impact on the development prospects of the developing world’’.
Kicking off the 94th Indian Science Congress, being held for the first time in a rural setting at Chidambaram, Annamalai University, about 230 km from Chennai, he said: “The new environmentally-friendly technologies being developed must be shared and made available to all of us so that the planet is saved.’’
The growth in human population, the growing demand for nature’s resources and the spread of environmentally-damaging technologies were contributing to the “growing threat’’ to Planet Earth, he said. “As incomes and consumption levels of the poor rise, we must find ways to meet the growing demand for goods and services in an environmentally sustainable manner.’’
While the developing world could not afford “to ape’’ the West in terms of its “environmentally wasteful” lifestyle, developed industrial economies must realise that they too should alter their consumption patterns so that “so few do not draw upon so much of the Earth’s resources’’.
“The developing world cannot accept a freeze in global inequity,’’ the PM said.
Though “inventiveness and ingenuity’’ of knowledge should be used to find new pathways of growth, “this must be a shared effort,’’ he said, pointing out that it should be “an effort that enabled the poor to improve their quality of life, their wellbeing, and their consumption levels without being forced to pay the price for the profligacy and excessive consumption of the rich’’.
Pointing to “widespread concern’’ about the decline in standards of research work in universities and even in advanced research institutes, he said the university systems needed upgrading and universities should once again become the hub of quality science.
Standards should be improved so that science research is an attractive option to students. And the only way to attract better students at the school and college level and make science research an attractive career option was to groom young scientists to take over top positions, he said. “Only when students see prospects of early reward and recognition will they be induced to tread the often lonely and toilsome trail of advanced research.’’
jaya.menon@expressindia.com
