The Hindu : `Avoid becoming victims of technological obsolescence'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 08, 2004

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Coimbatore

`Avoid becoming victims of technological obsolescence'

By Our Special Correspondent

COIMBATORE, FEB. 7. The Vice Chancellor of the Bharathiar University, S. Sivasubramanian, today appealed to youth to avoid becoming "victims of technological obsolescence".

Delivering the Graduation Day address at the Dr. N.G.P. Arts and Science College here, he said the path-breaking discoveries owed their origin to the tremendous inter and multidisciplinary effort involving a number of disciplines such as structural biology, computer technology and environmental sciences.

The extraordinary growth of borderless knowledge, rapid technological changes and instantaneous access to data and information had become the salient features of emerging `knowledge society'. He said education was "not just more information. It is knowledge. It should take us to knowledge society. If it does not, it is not real knowledge".

Though he was happy to note the spectacular advancements in science and technology, he lamented that a third of our population continued to suffer from severe malnutrition. "Over 40 per cent are still illiterate, more than half of our population do not even have access to basic sanitation and the quality of life in the country ranks a low 130 among 180 nations in the world. Our country has the dubious distinction of having more than 30 per cent of the 1.4 billion people in the world, who are barely managing to survive at less than a dollar per day".

Referring to the deleterious effects of explosive population growth and neglect of rural development, he pleaded that an ounce of prevention would be better than a pound of cure. He asserted that sustainable development called for maintaining the fragile balance between productivity and conservation practices, through monitoring and identification of problem areas requiring application of energy intensive land use practices, crop rotation, bio-fertilisers and reclamation of wastelands.

Painting a rosy picture of the years to come, he said that within the next 20 years it would be possible to develop even more sophisticated chips containing the entire personalised DNA sequence and quickly identify rogue genes using laser fluorescence technology and simple computers to predict latent problems "rendering much of today's surgery perhaps, unnecessary".

Genetic engineering was advancing so fast that scientists were dreaming of not only controlling obesity, deadly diseases and the aging process but also speculating on the possibility of altering the behavioural characteristics of people and creating tailor made designer children.

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