N Kalaiselvi, Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), on Wednesday proposed an indigenously developed email, exclusive to India.
Speaking at the Fourth Paradigm Institute, one of CSIR’s 37 constituent laboratories, Kalaiselvi said it was time the country developed its own mail system in line with its stature as an IT leader and suggested that CSIR-4PI be an “initiator”.
The institute can form an action group and take the idea forward, she said. “Despite the global acceptance for our knowledge in IT and related domains, why are we not using an Indian-origin mail system? Where is the gap? Can we think of something like imail (where i stands for India)? I will propagate the idea with our think-tanks and try to generate support,” she said.
In an increasingly data-driven world, it is prudent to develop an “indigenised cloud” for data-sharing that could constitute an exclusive-to-India mail platform, the CSIR DG said.
Kalaiselvi who is also secretary, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, said new thought processes in science and technology would be critical during the next six to seven years because the period could decide the “fate of the country” in six to seven decades.
She was speaking at a curtain-raiser in connection with the CSIR’s nationwide programme ‘One Week One Lab’ (OWOL), where CSIR labs showcase their innovations. CSIR-4PI will organise OWOL from July 10 to 15.
Kalaiselvi inaugurated a centralised supercomputing facility at the institute. Sridevi Jade, head, CSIR-4PI, said the facility would cater to the traditional and AI computational needs of CSIR laboratories and have an enhanced total peak performance of 4.2 petaFLOPS (floating point operations per second).
The Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre (KSNDMC), one of CSIR-4PI’s major collaborators, gets data it acquires analysed at the institute’s supercomputational facility to identify patterns and develop predictive models. “About 28 crore data points hit our server (every year); this is where CSIR comes in with its AI and ML competencies,” Manoj Rajan, director, KSNDMC, said.