State, Tamil Nadu in race for biotech park

State, Tamil Nadu in race for biotech park

The Hindu

UAS to provide 100 acres of land as stakeholder

# Land identified on UAS Jakkur campus
# Land value to be considered as university's investment
# UAS scientists may be allowed to use the facility

BANGALORE: The University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), Bangalore, may soon house the Bioinformatics Park on its Jakkur campus, and the Union Ministry of Biotechnology will participate in its development.

The contours of the park, for which the UAS will provide 100 acres of land, are likely to be drawn up on the sidelines of Bangalore Bio 2005, the annual biotech show beginning here on Friday, the Information Technology and Biotechnology Secretary, M.K. Shankarlinge Gowda, has said.

He told The Hindu that Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh are in the race for clinching the project, but Bangalore is likely to clinch it, thanks to its standing in the fields of Information Technology (IT) and Biotechnology (BT), Mr. Gowda said.

The UAS is open to having bioinformatics park because it need not part with the land and the 100 acres of land will be considered the university's investment. "The market value of the land, which the UAS will suggest, will be taken as the notional investment of the university," the official said.

As it will be a partnership, the UAS will be a stakeholder and its scientists and researchers will be able to take up projects, use infrastructure, access its laboratory, facilities, and even work in tandem with the bio-informatics park on projects that can be transferred from laboratory to field quickly.

Bioinformatics or computational biology is the use of techniques from applied mathematics, informatics, statistics and computer science to solve biological problems.

Benefit for UAS

The UAS will greatly benefit from hosting the Bioinformatics Park in all its agri-biotech research forays, Mr. Shankarlinge Gowda said.

The UAS has been criticised for having scuttled the Biotech Park, which is now coming up in Electronics City. The university's Board of Regents had given thumbs down despite pressure from the S.M. Krishna Government, because it found the demand for the land unreasonable.

The land, which the Government had sought, is a gene bank, a "live laboratory" where trees from Australia and Western Ghats have been recreated for research.

The UAS had been wary of giving up that land for good reason.