Dr. V K Saraswat, Chairman TIFAC Governing Council, and Prof. Pradeep Srivastava, Executive Director, TIFAC, Dr. Sanjay Singh, Scientist ‘G’ and Shri Mukesh Mathur, Incharge (F&A), TIFAC were also present on the occasion.

Dr. Harsh Vardhan requested “our Industry friends, Research and Policy Bodies to refer this White Paper in designing the path for upliftment of economy.”

He emphasized that “This calls for furthering investment in developing infrastructure, industrialization, strengthening supply chain mechanism, creating demand for goods and services, converting farming into a business proposition etc.” The Minister said, “The current pandemic is global, but the solutions to the challenge should be local.”

Prof. Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, DST, in his message, said, “The White Paper by TIFAC presents a compelling map of high priority sectors, technologies, and strategies to fuel growth in the time of COVID-19 and immediately beyond. The sector-wise reports being worked on currently will also be an invaluable resource in defining the opportunities even more sharply.”

This is precisely important for the development of technology clusters in champion segments, creating Technology Start-up Exchange, identifying, supporting, and piloting ten blockbuster technologies and collaborating with new dynamics with incubators of Israel, Germany, towards promoting import substitution as well as evolving technology platforms in sunrise technologies.

Prof. Pradeep Srivastava, Executive Director, TIFAC gave a power-point presentation and explained that “The white paper by TIFAC will help understand, evaluate and define the impact of the pandemic on the Indian economy and provide policymakers (Government of India) and public with the guidance that can be taken to mitigate the widespread economic shock and boost the Indian economy, cut through the noise of fall and prepare the ground for recovery using self-reliance as the new mantra”.

The recommendations are directed towards giving immediate technology and policy impetus to make India “ATMANIRBHAR”. Based on the linkages and interdependencies between the outputs of different sectors, output multiplier and income multiplier for various sectors have been presented in the paper.