The Indian Institute of Technology, Madras played host earlier this week to the first meeting of the Space Technology Cells (STCs) established in various research institutes across India. These were set up by ISRO and the government's Department of Space.
The ISRO - IIT Madras STC Confluence was held at the university over September 16 and 17. The main goal of the meet was to promote all of the institutes with STC's to share their research underway, as well as findings and experiments that could come in handy for ISRO.?
ISRO and the Department of Space have operated Space Technology Cells for over three decades in IIT Madras as well as IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru, and the Savitribai Phule Pune University. Their main purpose is to carry out research focused on space-related technologies. IIT Guwahati and IIT Roorkee are the two institutes to most recently have received STCs.
The idea is that it can't be completely up to a single organisation like ISRO to experiment in every avenue of space-related research. Progress happens when institutes can share their work. That way, there's no unnecessary duplication of labour because two different IITs are working on the same project. Or at the very least, they can agree to use similar experiments to corroborate each other's findings.
In fact, at the event IIT-M Director Bhaskar Ramamurthi highlighted how important it is for the academia to collaborate with government organisations like ISRO. He even suggested a partnership where IIT faculty could spend a few weeks at ISRO centres interacting with the scientists, so they could come up with joint proposals together.