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India must focus on five core
areas: Kalam

President A P J Abdul Kalam has said India must focus on five key areas to achieve faster economic growth.

Addressing a gathering at the silver jubilee celebrations of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad on Tuesday evening, Kalam told scientists to have an open mind and imbibe new ideas.

India is very rich in natural and human resources, he said adding that the country has everything ranging from uranium to titanium and tremendous water and other resources. "I have visited 10 states, including the north-eastern states, in the last two to three months. India has got great biodiversity and rich resources."

"We are a billion people and we can produce two million software professionals. Many countries cannot compete because of their small populations. At the same time, we have 300 million people below poverty line, accounting for nearly one-third of the population," he observed.

Kalam said India would be able to uplift the poor and disadvantaged sections only by accelerating economic growth. The gross domestic product was growing at five per cent per annum. If the growth rate could be doubled to 10 per cent over the next 5-10 years, the country would succeed in ameliorating the condition of poor.

He said the nation must focus on five key areas; agriculture and food processing, education and health care, infrastructure, information technology and communications, and self-reliance in core technologies.

Kalam said over the next 20 years, tuberculosis, HIV, malaria and heart disease would be a cause of concern in the country. Hence, the scientific community should work to evolve vaccines for HIV and malaria. "We have to go in a mission mode in this area. Faster drug development is very important for India," he added.

He expressed concern over the plight of the mentally challenged children and recalled how he had been guiding Father George, a research scholar at the Anna University where he was teaching before he became President.

Stating that bioscience and biotechnology were already bringing in revolutionary changes, he expressed confidence that "we can perform miracles and marvels".

He asked the scientists and researchers to network and share information with their contemporaries. "The Universe and God conspire with you when you dream."

He said he was puzzled by a book Age of Spiritual Machines, which predicted that by 2009 AD, a personal computer costing $1,000 would perform a trillion calculations per second.

The growth in memory and computing capabilities would be such that personal computers costing $1,000 apiece would match the human brain by 2019. And, by 2029, the $1,000 PC would have the power of a thousand human brains. However, he felt that "computer can never compete with human brain. We can make computers our tools..."

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