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The Hindu
an hour ago
- Science
- The Hindu
World Environment Day 2025: Why climate resilience needs development management leaders?
On World Environment Day, as the world debates net-zero targets, electric vehicles, and renewable energy milestones, it's vital to remember that climate change is not only about carbon emissions. It is, at its core, a human crisis. In India, vulnerability to climate extremes is no longer hypothetical. An assessment by the Department of Science and Technology found that over 80% of Indian districts face high flood or drought risk, with the impacts disproportionately affecting rural and marginalised communities. As climate-related disasters become more frequent, they compound pre-existing inequities in health, livelihoods, and gender, demanding a more people-centred approach to resilience. To mitigate these issues, there is a need to build a cadre of development management professionals supporting an ecosystem of fellowships, leadership programmes, and institutions that strengthen development management capacities within the social sector. The human blind spot in climate action Despite the gravity of this crisis, much of our climate discourse remains dominated by top-down narratives driven by policy, technology, and capital. These are all crucial elements, but they are not sufficient. The lived realities of climate change, migration, loss of livelihoods, and collapsing ecosystems require solutions that are relational, adaptive, and deeply rooted in the social fabric of our communities. The missing link in our response is leadership from India's vast, diverse, and indispensable social sector. Climate resilience is not built through technology or investment alone. It is built through trust, collective participation, and a deep understanding of how communities function and survive under pressure. The social sector, encompassing NGOs, self-help groups, community-based organisations, and grassroots movements, has long worked within these realities. It is this sector that steps in when families are displaced by floods, when heatwaves trigger public health emergencies, and when farming communities face successive crop failures due to erratic rainfall. Lessons from the ground Across India, community-led efforts have long demonstrated the power of local knowledge in building climate resilience, from reviving traditional water structures to adopting adaptive agricultural practices. When supported and scaled, these approaches play a vital role in addressing local vulnerabilities. The Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) continues to support women farmers in adopting climate-resilient livelihoods Programmes like MISHTI, which restore mangrove ecosystems, and MGNREGS, which enable water conservation and drought-proofing in rural areas, demonstrate the potential of people-first climate action. Yet, despite this record, the social sector remains systematically under-recognised and underfunded in India's climate action plans. The majority of green finance continues to flow towards large-scale mitigation projects. Adaptation, which directly impacts vulnerable communities, receives a much smaller share. While new policy frameworks like India's Climate Finance Taxonomy are promising, implementation has been slow and fragmented. Bridging the investment gap Some argue that the social sector lacks the scale or sophistication to lead India's climate response. But this critique overlooks what truly drives resilience. Social purpose organisations possess deep-rooted credibility, contextual knowledge, and the trust of communities. They act as connectors, translating government policy, technological innovation, and philanthropic investment into solutions that work on the ground. What is missing is not intent, but investment in leadership. According to the India Philanthropy Report 2025 by Bain & Company and Dasra, the social sector has grown at a compound annual rate of approximately 13% over the past five years, reaching ₹25 lakh crore (approximately USD 300 billion, or 8.3% of GDP) in FY 2024. These organisations indirectly enable an additional ₹25 to ₹30 lakh crore in public spending on development. Yet the people leading them often lack access to the kind of management training, strategic support, and institutional strengthening available to their counterparts in the corporate or government sectors. If we are to scale community-rooted climate action, we must invest in the people who make that action possible. Catalysing future leadership This means building a cadre of development management professionals supporting an ecosystem of fellowships, leadership programmes, and institutions that strengthen development management capacities within the sector. It also means reimagining CSR and philanthropic capital to fund not just projects, but long-term institutional resilience. According to an analysis by Sattva Consulting, only 19 Indian non-profits reported incomes exceeding ₹100 crore in FY 2021-22. This starkly contrasts with the scale of CSR allocations by many large companies, whose individual budgets often exceed this threshold. The disparity reveals a persistent challenge, even as philanthropic and CSR capital grows, the organisations working most closely with vulnerable communities continue to face institutional and financial limitations. Dedicated pipelines that strengthen the strategic capabilities of grassroots organisations are urgently needed. India has made ambitious commitments on climate action. But these goals will remain out of reach unless we address the leadership vacuum at the heart of our adaptation response. Social sector leaders are not just service providers. They are catalysts for systemic change. And if we are serious about climate justice, we must centre their voices, build their capacity, and trust their vision. In a country as complex and diverse as India, climate action must begin and end with people. And the social sector is where that work already quietly, urgently, and persistently continues every day. (Ravi Sreedharan is the President and Co-founder of Indian School of Development Management)
Time of India
2 days ago
- Politics
- Time of India
Bharat Gen, AI-based multimodal LLM for Indian languages, launched
New Delhi: Science and Technology Minister Jitendra Singh launched ' Bharat Gen ', an indigenously developed artificial intelligence-based multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) for Indian languages, here on Monday. Developed under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) and implemented through TIH Foundation for IoT (Internet of Things) and IoE (Internet of Everything) at IIT Bombay , Bharat Gen aims to revolutionize AI development across India's linguistic and cultural spectrum, Singh said. The initiative is supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and brings together a consortium of leading academic institutions, experts, and innovators. Singh described Bharat Gen as a "national mission to create AI that is ethical, inclusive, multilingual, and deeply rooted in Indian values and ethos". The platform integrates text, speech, and image modalities, offering seamless AI solutions in 22 Indian languages. "This initiative will empower critical sectors such as healthcare, education, agriculture, and governance, delivering region-specific AI solutions that understand and serve every Indian," Singh said. The minister recounted a success story from his own constituency Udhampur where an AI doctor communicates fluently in the patient's native language. "It not only builds trust but has a placebo-like psychological effect, enabling better care in remote regions connected with superspeciality hospitals across India," he said. Singh emphasised the transformative role of Generative AI in grassroots governance, citing the integration of multilingual feedback systems into platforms like CPGRAMS to enhance citizen engagement and grievance redressal.
NDTV
3 days ago
- Health
- NDTV
'Bharat Gen', Indigenous AI-Based Model For Indian Languages, Launched
New Delhi: Science and Technology Minister Jitendra Singh launched 'Bharat Gen', an indigenously developed artificial intelligence-based multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) for Indian languages, here on Monday. Developed under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) and implemented through TIH Foundation for IoT (Internet of Things) and IoE (Internet of Everything) at IIT Bombay, Bharat Gen aims to revolutionize AI development across India's linguistic and cultural spectrum, Mr Singh said. The initiative is supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and brings together a consortium of leading academic institutions, experts, and innovators. "Launched India's first-of-its-kind, indigenously developed, Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven , government-funded Multimodal "Large Language Model" (LLM) for Indian languages. "BharatGen" is not a mere technology venture but indeed a national mission to create AI that is… — Dr Jitendra Singh (@DrJitendraSingh) June 2, 2025 Mr Singh described Bharat Gen as a "national mission to create AI that is ethical, inclusive, multilingual, and deeply rooted in Indian values and ethos". The platform integrates text, speech, and image modalities, offering seamless AI solutions in 22 Indian languages. "This initiative will empower critical sectors such as healthcare, education, agriculture, and governance, delivering region-specific AI solutions that understand and serve every Indian," Mr Singh said. The minister recounted a success story from his own constituency Udhampur where an AI doctor communicates fluently in the patient's native language. "It not only builds trust but has a placebo-like psychological effect, enabling better care in remote regions connected with superspeciality hospitals across India," he said. Mr Singh emphasised the transformative role of Generative AI in grassroots governance, citing the integration of multilingual feedback systems into platforms like CPGRAMS to enhance citizen engagement and grievance redressal.
Time of India
4 days ago
- Science
- Time of India
AI datasets by IIT-Bombay to simplify Indian texts, help in AI research
AI datasets by IIT-Bombay to simplify Indian texts, help in AI research (ANI) MUMBAI: For years, research in Indian knowledge systems, often available in Indian languages such as Sanskrit, was challenging for researchers. However, a data curation exercise carried out by the premier IIT-Bombay, as part of its contribution to the central govt's AIKosh portal, has simplified it to some extent by digitising 30 different textbooks. A dataset containing around 2.18 lakh sentences with 1.5 million words from these textbooks, covering diverse topics such as astronomy, medicine, and mathematics, with some even as old as 18 centuries, is now available on the govt portal. AIKosh, launched in March, is a source for datasets, models, toolkits, and more from diverse sources that aim to help AI-based innovation and research. IIT-Bombay, one of the leading contributors to the AIKosh platform, along with BharatGen, a consortium of seven institutes again led by IIT-Bombay, has contributed 37 diverse models and datasets on the portal so far. IIT-Bombay alone launched around 16 culturally significant datasets on the platform to contribute to the country's AI mission. BharatGen, funded through a section 8 company formed by the Department of Science and Technology with IIT-Bombay, IIT-Kanpur, IIT-Madras, IIT-Hyderabad, IIT-Mandi, IIM-Indore, and IIIT-Hyderabad as partners, launched 21 models on the portal. 'We are not only researching Large Language Models (LLMs) and other generative models for AI that are effective and data and compute efficient, but also building sovereign models for India from the ground up. We are creating datasets for training these models and fine-tuning them for downstream tasks such as conversation and question-answering, while creating benchmarking datasets towards calibrating the performance of these models,' said Prof Ganesh Ramakrishnan from IIT-Bombay, who is spearheading the project. The team has not only put out datasets relevant to the Indian knowledge systems but also others that can help in audio-visual learning, such as tutorials capturing practical skills like waste-to-toy creation or organic farming. There is also one on Sanskrit translation for contemporary prose, a math word problems dataset in Hindi and English which will train the AI in mathematical reasoning, and culturally-grounded multi-lingual question-answering datasets, including questions and answers from historian Dharampal's books, among others. One of the datasets also enables the AI to answer questions about images using external knowledge, and another interesting one is on recognising text in videos with camera movements. Most of these models are trained from scratch, not just fine-tuned, said Prof Ramakrishnan. The models also uniquely balance Indian data alongside English data, ensuring relevance to our country, he said. 'We are creating benchmarks for the AI ecosystem in the country, but these can be pulled out by researchers, enterprisers, companies, or even academia and developed further,' he added.
The Hindu
7 days ago
- Science
- The Hindu
RRI team find new code for detecting hidden properties of exotic materials
A team from the Raman Research Institute (RRI) found a new code for detecting hidden properties of exotic materials. According to the Department of Science and Technology, scientists have found a new way of spotting a property of topological space called 'topological invariant' in quantum materials, which remains unchanged under continuous deformations or transformations. Topological materials are at the forefront of next-gen technology — quantum computing, fault-tolerant electronics, and energy-efficient systems. 'But detecting their exotic properties has always been tricky. Topological invariance implies that if you can deform one shape into another without cutting or gluing, any topological invariant will be the same for both shapes,' department said. It added that in certain materials like topological insulators and superconductors, strange things happen. 'Electrons behave differently depending on how the material is 'shaped' at the quantum level. These shapes are defined not by their appearance, but by something deeper—topological invariants, such as winding numbers (in 1D systems) and Chern numbers (in 2D systems). These numbers are like hidden codes that determine how particles move through a material,' it added. Spectral function The RRI team found a new way to detect this hidden code using a property called the spectral function. Professor Dibyendu Roy and PhD researcher Kiran Babasaheb Estake have carried this out by analyzing the momentum-space spectral function (SPSF). Traditionally, scientists used techniques like ARPES (Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy) to study electron behaviour. The new research published in Physical Review B. showed that the same spectral function holds clues to the material's hidden topology—a revolutionary way to see the structure without directly observing it. 'The spectral function has been used for many years as an experimental tool to probe the physical quantities such as density of states and the dispersion relation of electrons in a system through ARPES. It was not seen as a tool to probe topology or topological aspects of an electronic system.' said Kiran Babasaheb Estake, PhD student in theoretical Physics at RRI and the lead author. Universal tool The study potentially offers a universal tool to explore and classify topological materials, that could pave the way for new discoveries in condensed matter physics that could be useful for quantum computers, next generation electronics, and facilitate energy-efficiency.
