In today's global economy, the ability of a country to develop, adapt and harness its innovative potential is becoming critical for its long term economic performance. This fact acknowledged by the endogenous growth literature is starting to generate policy results as seen by the focus on innovation as a top government policy agenda in most developing and emerging economies of the world. India is no exception to this trend. Recently, India's Prime Minister has called upon the country's scientists to unleash a decade of innovation. Even though India is yet to formally adopt a national innovation policy, the different ministries and departments associated with various sectors have articulated and budgeted for three main innovation policy challenges: enhancing innovation potential in new technologies, building technological capabilities and competitiveness in the manufacturing and service sector and reconfiguring the formal and informal sectors. In this context, the S&T and Industry chapter seeks to identify the nature and extent of innovative activities in the country, while it provides an overview of available policy support, enabling regulatory framework and S&T intervention mechanisms which could take India to the forefront of global innovative activities.

Overview

The current century has already earned the sobriquet, – ‘the scientific century’. The phrase aptly sums up what a nation needs in order to survive and advance, as the twenty-first century unfolds. In the short term, any neat linear relationship between science, innovation and economic prosperity may not exist. But in the long term, economic history reveals the central role of science and innovation in productivity growth of industrialised nations. The writing on the wall for India is clear, ‘unless we get smarter, we will remain poor’.

Increasing demand for skilled work force intensifies the pressure to produce manpower of a higher quality, which is a part of, what Gunnar Myrdal called, ‘the modernisation process’. Since India joined the global knowledge economy, it has operated in a framework in which the human capital of a nation increasingly assumes a central role in its organisational success, economic prosperity and technological competency. The educational system of a nation is a key ingredient in defining the quality and volume of its human capital.

This theme on S&T Human Resource presents different facets of S&T education in India. It begins with a study of enrolments at primary level of education followed by secondary to tertiary (including professional education, technical and medical levels. The theme also highlights the available infrastructure at different levels of education. It further captures the social aspect of science education at secondary level and attempts to take a stock of India's science education from secondary to tertiary level of education.

In today's global economy, the ability of a country to develop, adapt and harness its potential for innovation is becoming critical for its long-term economic performance. Most of the developing and emerging economies of the world are following a proactive approach and policy towards innovation. India is no exception to this trend. Recently, the president of India has declared the present decade as the decade of innovation and the prime minister has called upon the country's scientists to unleash the best innovative potential. Even though India is yet to formally adopt a national innovation policy, different ministries and departments associated with various sectors have articulated and budgeted for three main innovation policy challenges: enhancing innovation potential in new technologies, building technological capabilities and competitiveness in the manufacturing and service sector and reconfiguring the formal and informal sectors. In this context, ‘India: Science and Technology (S&T) Report 2010-11’, the sequel to ‘India: S&T 2008”, has been designed with innovation as its core concept. Thus, the central focus of this report is to identify the nature and extent of innovative activities in the country, to identify the lacunae in innovation support mechanism and to suggest S&T interventions in the policy matrix so that India could be in the forefront of economic development.

This theme maps out the existing organisational arrangement for promotion of technological innovation in India. For the present purpose, innovation is defined as, ‘application of knowledge in the production system and realisation of the benefit of new application from the market’. By knowledge we mean technological knowledge. As we know, from generation of new knowledge to its application to the production system, it is a long way with difficult terrain of both technological and non-technological nature. Support system essentially means shortening the long way and also making it smother and easier journey for a technology, from research to production or as it is generally said, from lab to land. In between, there are issues related to adequate infrastructure, access to financial resources, availability of skilled manpower, availability of raw materials, facilities for marketing new products or adopting new processes, capabilities for developing tools and equipments specific to new innovations, new management tools etc. As it is evident from this list of various issues related to innovation, each of them would need different institutional arrangements, and at the same time, since innovation is all about bringing various expertises together, different initiatives have to finally get consolidated as a concerted effort to the main agent of innovation, that is, an enterprise or firm.

Knowledge is becoming a key source of competitive advantage for firms that have the ability to absorb and translate knowledge into a tradable commodity. Countries are investing greater amounts of resources in knowledge creation and dissemination and are looking for opportunities for appropriation. Proper utilisation of knowledge is seen as an enabling tool for strengthening economic and social activity in a country. In this context, it is important to assess the extent to which a country is generating new knowledge and whether any tangible component, that can be appropriated by firms and/or other institutions in the country, can be derived from it. Research papers (primarily in peer reviewed journals) and patents are the most commonly used proxies in assessing intensity of knowledge creation and utilisation. Research articles act as major channels for dissemination of scientific knowledge and their number serve as indicators of scientific production. Patent is a very powerful form of protection. It protects the idea itself irrespective of the way in which it is expressed. Patents are, thus, one of the most useful instruments in transforming raw outputs of science into tradable commodities for knowledge-intensive industries. Patent is seen as output to research and development (R&D) and input to process of innovation. Patent, as indicators of innovation, has limits. Innovation does not always correspond to patented invention and not all patented invention possesses technological or economic value. Not all products are patented and not all patents yield products.

Introduction

This chapter will impart the basic understanding of –

1. • The methodology of pipeline construction, the various steps involved in the sequence of activities

2. • The process and procedure for each activity

3. • The special machinery used in pipeline construction work

A pipeline construction set-up may be described as a moving assembly line. The basic differences with an assembly line of a manufacturing unit include the space of the plant which in case of a pipeline does not take place inside a protected plant, but is out in the open countryside subject to natural and man-made interference/impediments. Also, it is a moving unit which has to constantly move ahead, working in new surroundings, dealing with new situations every day.

A Historical Overview Of Pipeline Construction

The discovery of oil in the United States and the subsequent growth in demand of petroleum products gave birth to a new branch of construction industry – pipeline construction. There was rapid growth in industrial activities requiring the increased supply of petroleum, and pipelines came to be relied on more and more to sustain the country's economic expansion. As a result the pipeline industry matured and so did its construction methods aided by many innovative and imaginative adaptations to a number of engineering techniques.

The appearance of petroleum in the world energy scenario revolutionized the fields of energy, transportation and industrial development and catapulted the world into what we called the modern era. We can no longer imagine living in a world without cars, aeroplanes and petrochemicals. It is no wonder that per capita consumption of petroleum is taken as a yardstick for a country's development. Contributing greatly to this success is the ability to transport and distribute petroleum products and natural gas – thus starting the story of pipelines.

Pipelines are suitable for transportation of any type of fluids. However, cross-country pipelines are, all over the world, mostly used for transportation of petroleum – both liquid and gas. In this book the term ‘pipeline’ will refer to liquid petroleum and natural gas pipelines. Cross-country pipelines are, except for very few exceptions, buried underground leaving the surface unspoilt and undisturbed. A pipeline operates literally beneath our feet without disturbing anybody's normal pursuit.

Pipeliners are fond of saying ‘pipelines are the lifelines of a nation’. It may sound self-important, but the statement is by and large true. The very fact that few are aware of the important role pipelines play is evidence of its success. Pipelines, lying underground, function silently and unobtrusively and, like the body's circulatory system, are an unseen but vital supply network transporting millions of tonnes of liquid petroleum and billions of cubic metres of natural gas in unbroken streams.