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Subject: Science and Technology

  • Serological test for COVID-19

    The ICMR invited bids for an estimated 10 lakh antibody kits (for serological tests) for the diagnosis of COVID-19.

    What are serological tests?

    • Viral infections are mainly identified by two kinds of tests– genetic and serological.
    • Genetic tests can identify infections that are active but cannot be used to detect past infections.
    • To trace how infections like the novel coronavirus have spread so far, it is important to detect people who contracted the disease in the past and have recovered.
    • This is what serological tests seek to determine.

    How are the two different?

    • The genetic test is conducted on a swab collected from the back of the throat, a liquid sample from the lower respiratory tract, or a simple saliva sample.
    • For SARS-COV-2, the virus’s RNA is first converted into DNA.
    • By a process called polymerase chain reaction (PCR), DNA fragments in the sample are copied exponentially — one is copied into two, the two are copied into four, and so on.
    • Unlike genetic tests, which look for RNA in swab samples, serological tests work on antibodies in blood samples. Hence, they are also called ‘antibody tests’.

    How serological tests work?

    • Antibodies, or protective proteins produced by the immune system to neutralize pathogens such as bacteria and viruses, are present in one’s bloodstream for a considerable period of time after the infection has gone.
    • To disable a pathogen, the antibody latches to a unique protein molecule on pathogen’s surface, called an antigen.
    • Serological tests use antigen molecules to detect the presence of antibodies relevant to the infection.
    • Generally, a blood sample is placed in a test tube that is lined with antigens on the inside. If the relevant antibodies are present, they latch on to the antigens.
    • Such tests are relatively inexpensive, and can display results within a few minutes.

  • [pib] Project ‘Isaac’

    IIT, Gandhinagar has launched Project Isaac to engage its students in creative projects to enhance their critical skills while they are confined to their homes because of Coronavirus.

    Project ‘Isaac’

    • The project is inspired by Sir Isaac Newton, who was similarly sent home by Trinity College, Cambridge, because of the Great Plague of London in 1665.
    • During this year, Newton, then a 22-year-old college student developed some of his most profound discoveries, including early calculus, as well as his theories of optics and gravity.
    • As part of the project, four different competitions are being organized by IIT, Gandhinagar to cultivate new skills among students regarding writing, painting, coding, music, creative expression, and so on.
    • Students can take part in competitions online.

  • ‘Contact tracing’

    As the number of coronavirus cases in India increases, authorities in different states are relying on contact tracing, a concept in epidemiology that involves tracing the number of people an infected person comes in contact with.

    The idea behind contact tracing is to stop the outbreak by breaking the transmission chains.

    What is Contact Tracing?

    • Contact tracing is not a novel concept and has been used as a method to track cases of the Ebola virus in Africa.
    • It is one of the methods of detecting an outbreak and the number of infected people.
    • In 2014, when the first Ebola cases began to be reported in Sierra Leone, a contact tracing mechanism was devised.
    • According to the Centre for Disease Control (CDC), the system in the district was able to identify 13 Ebola cases, which would have been overlooked otherwise.

    Various steps involved

    According to WHO contact tracing can be broken down into three steps:

    1) Contact identification:

    • This involves identifying the contacts of the infected person by asking about the person’s activities and those of people around them since the onset of illness.
    • In the case of the first positive COVID-19 patient from Chandigarh for instance, a chain of 119 people was traced directly or indirectly to the patient.

    2) Contact listing:

    • This means listing all those people who came in contact with the infected person.
    • Efforts should be made to identify every listed contact and to inform them of their contact status, what it means, the actions that will follow, and the importance of receiving early care if they develop symptoms.
    • In some areas across India, authorities are releasing lists of those who are quarantined and are identifying their houses by putting quarantine posters in front of their houses.

    3) Contact follow-up:

    • This step involves regular follow-ups with all the contacts to monitor for symptoms and test for signs of infection.

    Limitations of Contact Tracing

    • Since everyone has many contacts, contact tracing is useful when there are only a few cases.
    • At this point, in many countries, we have so many cases that everyone would be contacted. This is essentially the lockdown — everybody isolates.
    • However, while a fifth of the world’s population is currently isolated and under lockdown, it may not be feasible to trace contacts of all the infected patients given the scale of the current outbreak.

    Way forward

    • While contact tracing is an important step during a disease outbreak, it is insufficient alone in controlling it, requiring other interventions.
    • Rapid and effective contact tracing can reduce the initial number of cases, which would make the outbreak easier to control overall.
    • Effective contact tracing and isolation could contribute to reducing the overall size of an outbreak or bringing it under control over a longer time period.

  • Why need a 21-day lockdown period?

    Amid diverse opinions on nationwide lockdown, there is a public health/epidemiological significance to the 21-day lockdown period announced by PM.

    What led PM to impose 21-day lockdown?

    • It seems that rich scientific data has fed this decision to announce a 21-day lockdown period.
    • In fact, 21-day quarantines have been discussed elaborately in the context of Ebola and the calculations are based on the estimated incubation period of the virus in a human host.
    • The 21-day quarantine value is derived from interpretations of outbreak data, past and present, public health experts said.

    Median incubation period

    • In epidemiological terms, the logic is that we have arrived at an incubation period of 14 days.
    • Give another week for the residual infection to die out, for the tail end, to be entirely safe, and you arrive at 21 days.
    • This being a new coronavirus, they have estimated that the median incubation period (the time between the entry of the virus to the onset of symptoms/ disease) falls within this period.

    Significance

    • This is the most effective way of preventing the spread of the infection from those already infected into the community.
    • In fact, for infections that are transmitted in this manner, this is the one thing to prevent the rapid spread of infection within the community.
    • The lockdown or quarantine also creates some breathing space — to convince people of the seriousness of the situation and build positive public opinion, carry out disinfection of all buildings, vehicles and surfaces, and allows hospitals to prepare themselves for the next phase of operations.

  • [pib] Laser Surface Micro-texturing

    International Advanced Centre for Powder Metallurgy & New Materials (ARCI) an autonomous R&D Centre of Dept. of Science and Technology has developed ultrafast laser surface texturing technology, which can improve the fuel efficiency of internal combustion engines.

    Laser surface micro-texturing

    • This technology offers precise control of the size, shape and density of micro-surface texture features. This has gained momentum as a way to control friction and wear.
    • In this technology, a pulsating laser beam creates micro-dimples or grooves on the surface of materials in a very controlled manner.
    • Such textures can trap wear debris when operating under dry sliding conditions and sometimes provide effects like enhancing oil supply (lubricant reservoir) which can lower friction coefficients and may enable reduced wear rate.
    • The texture surfaces were created on automotive internal combustion engine components, piston rings and cylinder liners using 100 fs pulse duration laser.
    • The micro dimples of 10-20 μm diameter and about 5-10 μm deep which have been created with laser beams had a regular pattern.

    Benefits of micro-texturing

    • The created textures were tested in an engine test rig under different speeds and temperatures of coolant and lubrication oil, and it was observed that there was a 16% reduction in the lube oil consumption with the use of texture on the piston rings.
    • The 10-hour lube oil consumption test shows that the blowby substantially reduced with textured rings.
    • Fabrication of a pattern of micro dimples or grooves on the surface of materials results in a change in surface topography which generates additional hydrodynamic pressure, thereby increasing the load-carrying capacity of the surfaces.
    • Hence these become useful for trapping wear debris when operating under dry sliding conditions and sometimes provide effects like enhancing oil supply (lubricant reservoir) which can lower friction coefficients and may enable reduced wear rate.

  • The Covid-19 crisis could bring the country up to digital speed

    Context

    The Covid-19 pandemic gives us a chance to re-evaluate the worth of two major initiatives of the government: demonetization and digitization.

    Importance of digitalisation in pandemic

    • The importance of digitization in a pandemic cannot be exaggerated when we are repeatedly told to maintain social distance and work from home in order to avoid infection.
    • Consider how nigh impossible it would be to avoid contact with retail cashiers and point-of-sale (PoS) terminals if we were to use credit cards and cash to pay for our daily necessities.
    • Today, most bill payments have moved online and barring older people, who may prefer to pay their electricity bills at physical counters, digitization is delivering in spades.
    • But digitization is not just about payments and financial transactions. Consider what all will happen as the current lockdown persists across the country.

    Application in the judiciary

    • Courts are beginning to use video-conferencing to conduct hearings. It is ironic that something that should have been done years ago to hasten hearings is now being done to prevent infections.
    • India’s judiciary has been resisting technology for as long as one can remember.
    • Witnesses do not have to drag themselves to court every day; they can video-record their statements in advance, and submit themselves to questioning through Skype or other such video-calling apps.
    • When the entire case is recorded, the possibility of judges conducting trials in an unfair way gets substantially reduced, for those at the receiving end of judicial injustice can seek retrials based on video recordings.
    • These recordings will also enable the higher judiciary to figure out who its good judges are, and who adopts dilatory tactics and frequent adjournments, delaying justice.
    • At some point, a judicial appointments commission will have video records of all judges shortlisted for promotions. They will thus know whom to recommend for elevation and whom to sideline. Corruption is also likely to come down.

    Application in the healthcare sector

    • In the current Covid-19 crisis, doctors and nurses are putting themselves at huge risk, and so are those handling millions of samples of throat swabs that need to be analysed for the virus
    • Applications: Remote patient examinations, analysis of symptoms with the help of databases and algorithms, and even the basic task of taking down a new patient’s medical history can all be done remotely through a digital app or interface.
    • The doctor will know even before he has met the patient what could be wrong, something she only has to confirm after interacting with the patient.
    • India is spending humongous amounts of money, and so are to-be doctors, to master medical knowledge that doubles every 75 days. In short, by the time your average MBBS doctor completes his or her degree, much of that knowledge could be outdated.
    • He or she has to use technology to update himself or herself, and also rely on databases and artificial intelligence to deliver healthcare without the risk of misdiagnosis.
    • India may be spending too much on training doctors at a cost of millions of rupees per head when a lot of that money could have been spent on technology to deliver competent and lower-cost healthcare.

    Conclusion

    If we just stop to think where we would have been in this pandemic but for digital technology, we would recognize the importance of going digital. It should make us think of how to convert the Covid-19 disruption into an agenda that brings us up to technological speed in various spheres of human activity.

  • The race to find a cure for COVID-19

    Context

    The world is dealing with an unprecedented and unimaginably serious crisis. Therefore, the speed of vaccine development is crucial.

    Speeding up the vaccine development

    • Availability of rationale and information: The race for developing an anti-COVID-19 vaccine has begun. Reasonable scientific rationale and the information needed for vaccine development are available to all stakeholders in academia and industry.
    • Vaccine platforms: A large number of candidate vaccines based on different vaccine platforms, including delivering the virus genetic materials (RNA, DNA) or using synthetic biology to produce key viral proteins, have already been developed.
    • Phase-I safety trials of an experimental vaccine, jointly developed by scientists at the National Institute of Health and at Moderna, a biotechnology company, has already been administered to healthy volunteers for its safety and immunogenicity.
    • The speed with which the experimental vaccine has entered safety trials is unprecedented.
    • Another vaccine jointly developed by China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences and CanSino Biologics has reportedly been cleared for early-stage clinical trials.
    • Development in India: The Serum Institute of India has also recently announced its readiness to start safety trials following animal experiments.
    • According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report, more than 20 vaccine candidates are in advanced stages of development and will be ready for Phase-I safety trials.
    • However, it is also clear that it will not be possible to roll-out any efficacious vaccine for at least another year.

    Questions that need to be answered

    • While these developments are encouraging, several questions will need to be answered for this vaccine development to move further.
    • Triggering immune response safely: Although it is quite evident that humans mount a strong immune response and clear the viral load, the nature of the immune response and how to trigger it safely through vaccination will be key questions to address.
    • Duration of the acquired immunity: How long the acquired immunity in humans will last is another important question to be asked before experimental vaccines move forward.
    • We will need to know this because if the immunity is transient, then humans will be susceptible to reinfections.
    • Ensuring no disease enhancement: Before moving to Phase-II trials in a large number of healthy volunteers, we also have to ensure that the immune response induced by vaccination does not lead to any disease enhancement.

    Repurposing the already available drugs

    • Therapeutic interventions, not only for curing severe cases of the disease but also for protecting all front-line healthcare workers, are urgently needed.
    • Using already approved drugs: Since developing new drugs is a complex and lengthy process, scientists and pharmaceutical companies have rushed to investigate and use drugs that have already been approved by regulatory authorities.
    • Using available molecular and structural biology information on the virus, a group of scientists have analysed all interactions of the viral proteins with human proteins that are crucial for the virus to enter human cells and use the host cell machinery to rapidly reproduce itself.
    • Of the nearly 70 short-listed molecules that may interrupt these key interactions, 24 happen to be already approved drugs which can now be tested in laboratory animal models as well as humans.
    • However, the re-purposing of several drugs, alone or in combinations to treat COVID-19 patients, have already been reported.
    • More confusion than hope: There are many success stories of curing patients of COVID-19 doing the rounds in different parts of the world, but these have managed to create more confusion than hope.
    • Without any appropriate controls, careful dosing and safety concerns, such small experiments can only do more harm than good.

    Controlled randomised trials

    • Given the urgency of finding a cure, it is absolutely necessary to find out unequivocally what works well and what does not. For that conducting carefully controlled randomised trials is the only way to go.
    • In a welcome move, the WHO has announced clinical trials called the ‘Solidarity Project’.
    • Under this project four drugs or drug, combinations will be tested in many countries around the world.
    • These candidates include the anti-Ebola drug, Remdesivir, Chloroquine, anti-HIV drugs, and the Ritonavir/Lopinavir combination, with or without Interferon-beta.
    • The European counterpart of the trial, Discovery, will conduct these trials in countries including France, Spain, Germany and the U.K.
    • The pharma company Roche has also decided to initiate large, randomised Phase-III trials of its arthritis drug Actemra for its safety and efficacy in adult patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia.
    • It is complex and tedious to conduct randomised, large multi-centric trials.
    • Quickly getting all the stakeholders together is laudable and underscores the notion that everyone needs to fight the deadly virus together. Hopefully, these trials will lead to tangible drug therapies against COVID-19.

    Conclusion

    It is most heartening to see scientists in academia and industrial partners coming together to fight a monumental public health crisis. The battle between pathogens and humans will continue but let us hope that we win the present one sooner than later.

  • Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs)

     

    Researchers from a Canadian space observatory have been recording the periodic radio waves hitting Earth from a neighbouring galaxy from past few years. These radio waves are called Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).

    Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs)

    • FRBs are super intense, millisecond-long bursts of radio waves produced by unidentified sources in the space.
    • Their discovery in 2007 by American astronomer Duncan Lorimer led to the term ‘Lorimer Bursts’.
    • Since then, just a few dozen similar events have been observed in data collected by radio telescopes around the world, building evidence that points to a variety of potential causes.
    • Only a handful of emissions have been traced to specific areas of the sky, indicating sources in other galaxies.
    • The flash of radio waves is incredibly bright if distant, comparable to the power released by hundreds of millions of suns in just a few milliseconds.
    • This intensity suggests powerful objects like black holes and neutron stars could be involved.
    • The events were once considered to be largely transient – they seemed to happen once, without obvious signs of a repeat emission. However, a number of such bursts have been identified since then.

    Why are they significant?

    • First noticed in 2018 by the Canadian observatory the waves have created ripples across the globe for one reason — they arrive in a pattern.
    • This gave birth to theories that they could be from an alien civilization.
    • Initially, it was believed that the collision of black holes or neutron stars triggers them.
    • But the discovery of repeating FRBs debunked the theory of colliding objects.

  • What is Hantavirus?

    China has reported the death of a person from Yunnan Province who tested positive for the Hantavirus.

    What is Hantavirus?

    • The Hantaviruses are a family of viruses spread mainly by rodents. It is contracted by humans from infected rodents.
    • Cases of the Hantavirus in humans occur mostly in rural areas where forests, fields and farms offer suitable habitat for infected rodents.
    • A person can get infected if he/she comes in contact with a rodent that carries the virus.
    • In the US and Canada, for instance, the Hantavirus carried by the deer mouse is responsible for the majority cases of the Hantavirus infection.
    • Like this, there are various other kinds of Hantaviruses that find hosts in rodents, like the white-footed mouse and the cotton rat among others that may lead to infections in humans if transmitted.

    Its origin

    • The Hantavirus is not novel and its first case dates back to 1993, according to the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC).
    • In the Americas, the family of viruses is known as ‘New World hantaviruses’.

    Symptoms

    • A person infected with the virus may show symptoms within the first to eighth week after they have been exposed to fresh urine, faeces or the saliva of infected rodents.
    • Symptoms may include fever, fatigue, muscle aches, headaches, chills and abdominal problems.
    • Four to ten after being infected, late symptoms of HPS may start to appear, which include coughing and shortness of breath.

    Mortality risk

    • It is the cause of Hantavirus pulmonary disease (HPS), a severe respiratory disease. The HPS can be fatal and has a mortality rate of 38 per cent.
    • It remains unclear whether human-to-human transmission of the virus is possible.
    • There have been no reports of human-to-human transmission of Hantavirus in the US.

  • [pib] National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)

    The Union Ministry of Science & Technology has informed about the progress of the National Supercomputing Mission.

    National Supercomputing Mission (NSM)

    • NSM is a proposed plan by GoI to create a cluster of seventy supercomputers connecting various academic and research institutions across India.
    • In April 2015 the government approved the NSM with a total outlay of Rs.4500 crore for a period of 7 years.
    • The mission was set up to provide the country with supercomputing infrastructure to meet the increasing computational demands of academia, researchers, MSMEs, and startups by creating the capability design, manufacturing, of supercomputers indigenously in India.
    • Currently there are four supercomputers from India in Top 500 list of supercomputers in the world.

    Aims and objectives

    • The target of the mission was set to establish a network of supercomputers ranging from a few Tera Flops (TF) to Hundreds of Tera Flops (TF) and three systems with greater than or equal to 3 Peta Flops (PF) in academic and research institutions of National importance across the country by 2022.
    • This network of Supercomputers envisaging a total of 15-20 PF was approved in 2015 and was later revised to a total of 45 PF (45000 TFs), a jump of 6 times more compute power within the same cost and capable of solving large and complex computational problems.

    IWhat is a Supercomputer?

    • A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer.
    • The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS).
    • Since 2017, there are supercomputers which can perform over a hundred quadrillion FLOPS (petaFLOPS).
    • Since November 2017, all of the world’s fastest 500 supercomputers run Linux-based operating systems.

    Why do we need supercomputers?

    • Developed and almost-developed countries have begun ensuring high investments in supercomputers to boost their economies and tackle new social problems.
    • These high-performance computers can simulate the real world, by processing massive amounts of data, making cars and planes safer, and more fuel-efficient and environment-friendly.
    • They also aid in the extraction of new sources of oil and gas, development of alternative energy sources, and advancement in medical sciences.
    • Supercomputers have also helped weather forecasters to accurately predict severe storms, enable better mitigation planning and warning systems.
    • They are also used by financial services, manufacturing and internet companies and infrastructure systems like water-supply networks, energy grids, and transportation.
    • Future applications of artificial intelligence (AI) also depend on supercomputing.
    • Due to the potential of this technology, countries like the US, China, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia have created national-level supercomputing strategies and are investing substantially in these programmes.

    When did India initiate its efforts to build supercomputers?

    • India’s supercomputer programme initiated in the late 1980s, when the United States ceased the export of a Cray Supercomputer due to technology embargos.
    • This resulted in India setting up C-DAC in 1988, which in 1991, unveiled the prototype of PARAM 800, benchmarked at 5 Gflops. This supercomputer was the second-fastest in the world at that time.
    • Since June 2018, the USA’s Summit is the fastest supercomputer in the world, taking away this position from China.
    • As of January 2018, Pratyush and Mihir are the fastest supercomputers in India with a maximum speed of Peta Flops.

    What are the phases of the National Supercomputing Mission?

    Phase I:

    • In the first phase of the NSM, parts of the supercomputers are imported and assembled in India.
    • A total of 6 supercomputers are to be installed in this phase.
    • The first supercomputer that was assembled indigenously is called Param Shivay. It was installed in IIT (BHU) located in Varanasi.
    • Similar systems, Param Shakti (IIT Kharagpur) and Param Brahma (IISER, Pune) were also later installed within the country.
    • The rest will be installed at IIT Kanpur, IIT Hyderabad and Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Studies (JNIAS).

    Phase II:

    • The supercomputers that are installed so far are about 60% indigenous.
    • The 11 systems that are going to be installed in the next phase will have processors designed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and will have a cumulative capacity of 10 petaflops.
    • These new systems are to be constructed more cost-effectively than the previous ones.
    • One of the 11 proposed supercomputers will be installed
    • at C-DAC exclusively for small and medium enterprises so that they can train employees as well as work on supercomputers at a very low cost.

    Phase III:

    • The third phase aims to build fully indigenous supercomputers.
    • The government had also approved a project to develop a cryogenic cooling system that rapidly dispels the heat generated by a computing chip. This will be jointly built together by IIT-Bombay and C-DAC.

    What are the advantages of the National Supercomputing Mission?

    • The National Supercomputing Mission can ensure accessibility to supercomputers at an affordable rate to the scientific community and medium and small enterprises.
    • It can exponentially enhance the quality and quantity of R&D and higher education in the areas of science and technology.
    • It can solve the current and future challenges that are plaguing the country.
    • Currently, the world’s top supercomputers are mostly under the control of advanced nations like the US, Japan, China and the European Union. This Mission has the potential to bring India into this select league of such nations.
    • These supercomputers can be used in the areas of climate modelling, weather predictions, computational biology, atomic energy simulations, defence, disaster simulation, astrophysics etc.
    • These computers have played a crucial role in scientific and technological advancements in numerous fields.
    • Unlike other computers, these high-performance machines can crunch the most complex of data at a speed, which is millions of times faster than a desktop PC.
    • This mission, aiming to provide supercomputing facilities to about 60-70 institutions across the nation and thousands of active researchers, academicians, is moving fast towards creating a computer infrastructure within the country.
    • This mission can also enhance the country’s capacity to develop the next generation of supercomputer experts.

    How do other countries make use of supercomputers?

    China:

    • Jiangsu Province has a supercomputer called “Sunway TaihuLight”.
    • This supercomputer performs a wide range of tasks, including climate science, weather forecasting and earth-system modelling to help ships avoid rough seas, improve farmers’ yields and ensure the safety of offshore drilling.
    • TaihuLight has already led to an increase in profits and a reduction in expenses that justify its cost ($270 million).

    United States:

    • In the US, supercomputers are radically transforming the healthcare system.
    • The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) has used supercomputers to create a far more detailed model of the Hepatitis-C virus, a major cause of the liver disease that costs $9 billion in healthcare costs in the US alone.
    • Using supercomputers, the researchers have now developed a model that comprehensively simulates heart down to the cellular level and can lead to a substantial reduction in heart diseases.

    These are some of the very few cases of how supercomputers have enhanced breakthroughs in various fields.

    How do supercomputers help fight coronavirus?

    • Earlier, the US had established COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium that will bring together industry, academic institutions, and federal laboratories to try to identify or create candidate compounds that might prevent or treat coronavirus infection.
    • One of the members of the consortium, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, aimed to look into compounds that are already available in the market that might combat COVID-19.
    • For this purpose, the world’s fastest supercomputer “Summit” was used.
    • Like other viruses, the novel coronavirus uses a spike protein to inject cells.
    • Using Summit with an algorithm to investigate which drugs could bind to the protein and prevent the virus from doing its duty, the researchers have a list of 77 drugs that show promise.
    • Starting with 8,000 compounds, Summit has shortened the time of the experiment exponentially, ruling out the vast majority of possible medications before settling on 77 drugs, which are ranked based on how effective they are likely to be at halting the virus in the human body.

    Way forward

    • It is evident that supercomputers would become a vital part of our lives as it can provide solutions to the current and future problems and India, one of the most populous nations in the world, must ensure that it also has access to this technology for the welfare of its people.
    • Supercomputers, as they operate at such incredible speeds, will encounter numerous barriers like network and interconnectivity hardware that previous generations of designers did not have to deal with.
    • The cooling system is also one of the major design constraints.
    • Hence, India must give a high emphasis on innovation to tackle these challenges.
    • India must also give high emphasis to the application rather than the technology itself.
    • Supercomputing research also requires fundamental research of the next stages of computing like quantum computing that are still in the theoretical stage.
    • Bureaucratic red-tapism must be circumvented and scientists and researchers must be allowed to take bold and radical steps without fear of reprisal.
    • The government must also invest in necessary physical and digital infrastructure.
    • It must also address the challenges of:
    • Limited funding and delayed release of funds
    • The increasing need for imports for necessary hardware components to build supercomputers

    Conclusion:

    • Supercomputers are strategically important for India as it can help the country to become a knowledge-driven economy.
    • This technology also can support cutting edge research that can benefit the economy, society, businesses, environment, etc.
    • Thus, enhancing investments, improving flexibility for research and providing other necessary infrastructures must be ensured for it to grow.
    • Without this technology, India risks being surpassed on the global stage by other nations and will consequently miss the huge benefits that come from having this strategically important technology at the disposal of the country’s best and brightest minds