India, US sign agreement on data exchange
By Sanjay Garg | Tue, 10/18/2005 - 17:04
New Delhi-- India and United States are increasing their cooperation in various fields. In this collaborative cooperation India has signed an agreement with the State of Maryland and the Johns Hopkins University, for exchange of data and collaborative projects in nanotechnology and biotechnology.
This was made possible under the just signed umbrella agreement which targets collaboration among government agencies, the private sector and academia in the basic sciences, space exploration, nanotechnology and information technology.
It also accelerated cooperation between India and the U S in areas such as life sciences, which will produce vaccines and drugs to treat diseases disaster management and energy, Sibal said.
''These are the new challenges of the new millennium and I think this umbrella agreement allows us to meet those challenges together,'' the minister told a press conference here at the Indian Embassy on Monday night.
Under the agreement, US federal agencies can negotiate specific protocols, memoranda of understanding and other limited agreements with Indian government agencies, Sibal added.
However before the agreement was signed, both sides engaged in negotiations for 15 years and scientists on the US side ''were not willing to engage on such a technical level with the Indian community for fear that their interests in intellectual property rights (IPR) would not be protected by the Indian government and that their Indian collaborators would exploit the technology,'' according to State Department sources.
[inline:1]ence efforts to conclude an umbrella science and technology agreement between the two countries had languished since the mid-1990's, snagged by disputes over intellectual property rights or IPR.
But the accord signed on Monday, for the first time establishes I P R protocols necessary to conduct active joint research.
It is being described by Sibal as ''a great leap forward in joint cooperation.''
The new agreement establishes for the first time the intellectual property rights protocol and other provisions necessary to pave the way for undertaking active collaborative research between the two countries.
It will also eliminate the need for legal groundwork to be laid before each collaborative undertaking.
This is significant because a 1993 effort to develop a bilateral science and technology agreement stalled over disagreements about IPR provisions.
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