RECORDING ACHIEVEMENTS: Ted Robertson, president, SAE International (left), handing over a copy of the souvenir `Automotive Manufacturer' to V. Krishnamurthy, Patron, International Mobility Engineering Congress and Expo 2005, in Chennai on Sunday. R aymond Morris, vice-president, FISITA (second from left), and R. Seshasayee, Managing Director, Ashok Leyland Limited, look on. — Photo: V. Ganesan

CHENNAI: Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology Dayanidhi Maran on Sunday offered to give a major thrust to automotive infotronics — identified by the Core group on Automotive Research as one of the three key areas that required attention for India to emerge as a major global player in the field.

Speaking at the inauguration of the international mobility engineering congress and exposition 2005 organised by the Society of Automobile Engineers, he said engineers should take the initiative to develop power trains subsystems, telematics for safety and efficiency and the overall intelligent transportation networks.

"For this purpose the National Informatics Centre and TIFA, the autonomous body under the Ministry of Science and Technology, can effectively pilot an inter-ministerial consortium to bring together laboratories like NIC, CDAC etc. under my Ministry and institutions like the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, Vellore Institute of Technology and others for focussed academia-industry collaboration," he said.

He suggested that a "humble beginning" could be made with a fleet management telematics solution at the Koyambedu bus terminus in Chennai, the telematics toll collection application on the Chennai-Bangalore highway and a project to showcase Indian capability for an intelligent transportation system for the 2010 Commonwealth Games to be held in New Delhi.

Mr. Maran said telematics applications could add considerable value to the automobile industry. But vehicle telematics was still not commercially viable even in the developed world. One main issue related to standards.

"Since it looked like an exciting business opportunity, companies tend to play their own domain and the market gets fragmented," he observed and said that India should come up with a model based on a consortium approach wherein the telematics applications could be developed based on open standards to enhance convenience and profitability of public transportation, wireless toll collection and commercial fleet operations.

Mr. Maran also suggested the development of countrywide standards for vehicle-to-vehicle communication for traffic decongestion and underlined the huge opportunities that existed for public-private partnerships to build networks to take advantage of the benefits in terms of safety, meeting regulatory requirements and improved productivity.

"A consortium approach, in which Government institutions and labs ... component manufacturers and associations such as NASSCOM would come together and develop pre-competitive generic solutions has to be followed ... We have the ability in India to launch a powerful open source initiative for developing a library of vendors and platform independent models and software routines," he said.

If the IT and automotive sectors worked together, it would combine the advantages of the two high growth sectors.

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