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India's war-machine has a peace-time avatar as well

While Pakistan claims to have better missiles, it cannot match the kind of technology spin-offs which India's missile programme has brought to the common man.

An example is how the indigenously developed composite material used on the nose-cone of the Prithvi and Agni missile, is now used as orthopaedic supports for polio-affected children.

After India was denied the strategically important technology for fibre-reinforced plastics, the Defence Research and Development Organisation set about developing its own heat-resistant, light-weight composite materials.

It came up with material that is now not only helping polio-stricken children, but is also being developed for making hollow-fibre dialysers, coronary stents, drug delivery implants (which replace oral tablets and injectibles) and micro-processor based '''invisible'' hearing aids.

More than five of the several laboratories under the DRDO work on life sciences and in recent times, they have come up with an automated cancer detection device called the 'cytoscan'' which can be used for mass cancer screenings.

The DRDO has also developed a low-cost cardiac stress test system which can be taken to small town and remote community health centres where such facilities are even now unheard of. Besides, defence research has come up with an external cardiac pacemaker which costs a third of imported models.

Technologies for all of these have been transferred to private industry for production in a model which defies the production system of the powerful ''military-industrial complex'' type familiar to the Western world.

Unknown to many, the DRDO has been quietly opening up its considerable research capabilities for civilian applications and has even partnered private industry and medical institutions.

Three years ago, the DRDO teamed up with the department of science and technology, and the ministries of rural development and welfare and also certain medical institutions, to form the Society for BioMedical Technology.

The primary objective of the consortium, which binds together scientists, engineers, doctors, social workers and administrators, was precisely to make available defence technology to the common man in the shape of affordable life-saving medical products.

Such has been the SBMT's success that there are plans to network medical institutions, civilian laboratories and social organisations to provide assistance to the disabled and the disadvantaged.

On the cards is the launching of an awareness-cum-prevention programme to check the growing incidence of tuberculosis and cancer among the Indian population.

Another plan is for the creation of a nation-wide cold storage chain for polio and other temperature sensitive vaccines which have prevented the national immunisation programme from taking off so far.

The DRDO has also begun supporting genuine initiatives by non-governmental organisations to better the lot of the people through laboratories like the Institute of Nuclear Medicine and Allied Sciences, Defence Bio-engineering and Electromedical Laboratory, Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences, Defence Institute of Psychological Research and High-Altitude Medical Research Centre.

The new thinking in DRDO is that while the main task of the DRDO's life sciences laboratories is to evolve and ensure combat capability, optimal health and operational efficiency in extreme conditions ranging from high altitudes to the deserts and deep oceans, there is potential for collaboration with civilian specialists.

In fact, the DRDO recently constituted a Life Sciences Research Board with precisely that view on mind.

A medical informatics system called 'Dhanwantari' has been installed at the military hospital at Secunderabad in Andhra Pradesh which digitises medical images and transmits them over distances through the existing communication infrastructures for real time diagnosis by experts sitting in other cities.

Moves are on to upgrade the experiment on a national scale which can then bring the benefits of medical expertise, already available in the country, to millions of Indians who now have no access to it.

The DRDO has been supporting the efforts of Non-Resident Indian scientist Professor M R Raju, to bring integrated healthcare to the needy people of his remote village of Peddivaram in West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh.

After 35 years as a successful radiation oncologist in the United States, Professor Raju decided to create a computerised data bank for all villagers within a five km radius of Peddivaram.

Although the data focuses on health parameters, it also takes in socio-economic and administrative details which though incidental, are imperative in the delivery of healthcare. The DRDO wants to expand Professor Raju's model in other parts of the country.

One of the better known successes of the DRDO has been the development of herbal cure for frostbite by the Snow and Avalanche Study Establishment in Himachal Pradesh and the Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences or DIPAS.

Recently, the herbal medicine extracted from the 'aloe vera' by DIPAS scientist B B Sarkar, saved the limbs of a frost-bitten soldier although doctors had recommended amputation.

UNI

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