Comcom: Good morning Dr. Thiagarajan.

Dr Thiagarajan: Dr. G.Thiagarajan: It is a pleasure to talk to COMCOM on this particular occasion and opportunity. I work for the committee on Science and technology in developing countries COSTED which is a committee of the international council for science which is based in Paris. COSTED is also co sponsored by UNESCO, and is basically a non governmental organisation mandated to promote international cooperation in science and technology. Its origin goes back to 1966 when international council of scientific union held a meeting in Mumbai and at that time it was felt there is a need for a special initiative that would address the issues of developing countries. It has grown and today the Govt. of India is hosting the secretariat in Chennai which I look after. There is an executive committe and there is a wider plenary which meets every three years. Coming to what COSTED does; COSTED today has 30 member countries. 24 of them are south countries and 6 of them are north countries that includes the big players US,UK,Germany,Sweden,Switzerland and Japan.That puts across of being able to promote not only south-south cooperation but also south-north cooperation. There are three broad classification of our activities. The first is promoting mobility of scientists. For a long time, for several decades, scientists of the south have been constrained by inability to move to other countries to present papers in international conferences and opportunity of exposure was very limited. COSTED is addressing that particular thing in a fairly significant way and we provide travel fellowship and provide assistance to people from South countries to go to other countries South or North. In India, for example, in addition to what we provide there is a joint fellowship programme which is funded by Indian National science academy, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Dept.of Atomic Energy,Indian Space research organisation and COSTED. We send every year hundred people to international conferences. This is Indian scientists going to other places. Similarly, we promote the efforts of scientists of other countries to travel to India. Another initiative we have in this is promoting excellence in Science and by bringing people from other countries to India. COSTED has an arrangement with Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research headed by Dr.C.N.R.Rao and currently Dr. Krishnan is acting President. Now this is to bring people for a short periods of time, 3 months or so to work in centres of excellence in India and learn research methodology. Very often you know initially, how the young people start their reseach, research culture, research methodology they are very important and once that is taken care of they are on the right path. We fund completely from their travel to subsistence. Every year 10 people from various countries of the world come to India. This is not open to Indian citizen. Only for people from other countries. So this is one example of promoting mobility of scientists and ending the isolation, an effort to end the isolation of scientists from the south. The second programme is capacity building. The capacity building is both institutional and individual. Here we try to do this by organising seminars workshops and bringing new subjects to countries which have diasdvantages of not being able to access modern science. We have for example a special concern for small countries of the world. There are over 50 countries in the world which are small states with a population of less than one million which don't have the right infrastructure, science infrastructure. Even there is no science paper. Not even a paper that carries science information. So we are trying to promote science media development, science writing ability,promoting science communication in countries of the south pacific, countries of the west indies, isolated islands. It is an effort which is the first step in promoting and assisting these countries to come into mainstream science. Our concern if you look at large international conferences, it is difficult to find even one percent of south countries, south pacific countries or isolated islands. These isolations should also be ended. It happens in big countries also. So seminars, conferences help capacity building. Intellectual property rights for examples, we are now assisting, telling countries how to take benefits and opportunities rather than become victims because of lack of time reaction. The third major thematic activity is promoting research network.Scientific networks. One example now is that the COSTED has put together a programme involving twenty countries. Four north countries and sixteen south countries about the bio-active substances,knowledge partnership in bioactive substances. Countries of the south has a lot of plant resources but they do not have the money to do complete research , the analysis, the structural determination, testing and taking into the market .These are expensive and time consuming processes. But the countries in the north have the money, technology and the technique to take to the market but they don't have the raw material. This project brings the two together, marrying the two countires with resources , with equity, with advance understanding of benefits of sharing and so on. COSTED is now trying to raise funds for this project and should be for a period of three years. This will be one effort towards scientific network promotion. We have seven regions in south america, three in Africa, one in the Arab region, Asia and so on. Every region has priorities. South America has a priority. Arab region has a priority. Asia region, one of the current priorities is the scientific studies on forest fires. Fires are devastating many south asian countries. COSTED is looking at the scientific damage. This is the way we try to promote. Our contributions have been well recognised. We operate through top scientific bodies of many countries, like the nodal point in India is the Indian National Science Academy. It is going well in other countries also. Government of India's support to COSTED secretariat is exemplary.

ComCom: Dr Thiagarajan, you are talking about media and COSTED's role in developing media in South Pacific. Is it only on the print media or the electronic media as well?

Dr Thiagarajan: In the beginning it is the conventional writing media. The idea is that these small countries first take people ,who are librarians or teachers in small schools; train them in science writing.Actually train the trainers. We hope that we next go to the electronic people. Computers and other modern media is reaching every country. But that comes in the second phase. First one is how to communicate science.