Express Dialogues | Varsities have to play varied roles… Stanford created Silicon Valley: DUK VC

Saji Gopinath, the first vice-chancellor of the path-breaking Digital University Kerala, has been one of the key drivers of the state’s renewed push in the knowledge economy. He served as a member of the Chief Minister’s High-Power IT Committee from 2017 to 2019, and as CEO of Kerala Startup Mission from 2017 to 2020, before taking up his current pioneering role. In a wide-ranging discussion with TNIE, he outlines the plans and strategies at the Digital University, including tie-ups with foreign varsities, strategic alliances in areas such as graphene, and plans to attract global talents.

When we looked around, we found that Indian Institutes of Information Technology in other states had been converted into public-private universities. In Kerala, we could not do so. We realised that if we sought to scale up the institution, especially while looking at the knowledge economy, it was important to have a nodal institution/university to drive that.

That’s how the concept of the Digital University emerged, and IIITM-K was transformed into the Digital University. The ordinance came in 2020, and the Act was passed in 2021. The Digital University is not a virtual one.

It primarily focuses on creating talents to work in the digital space. There is going to be a substantial change from the physical-cum-industrial world to the digital world. Everyone has started applying AI in their work.

In the current system, the digital aspects are handled only by people who are from a technology background. But, people from other educational backgrounds also require this digital technology. The concept is to take people from conventional domains to digital technology.

We have MTech as well as MSc programmes. The people who have done physics, maths, life sciences, ecology, and environment sciences are taken into our programmes. We train students on how they can apply technology to their areas of study, and take that to the next level.

This transition is the Digital University’s strength. Climate studies require big-data applications. So the industry requires people who have fundamentals in climate studies plus a strong background in data analysis.

Data analysis, however, is not discussed much in their undergraduate programmes. In our programme, we put more emphasis on data analysis applied to particular domains. That is the way we transform them as professionals for the digital world even as they continue in their core discipline.

They are not going to be developers or programmers. Similarly, we take the students from chemistry and teach them about computational drug designing; the pharma sector requires those who know about computational drug designing. This transition is what the university is looking for.

That is why we have only postgraduate courses. We are envisaging courses like media-tech and judiciary-tech, too. Yes, the other vertical of the university is research.

We believe there is a need for a substantial amount of research in the emerging domains. People do research in technology per se. However, a fundamental shift is happening, as there are sociological aspects related to technology.

We need to study that as well. We believe in the new world, universities have to play different roles. Conventional universities will be creating talents who go on to create an economy.

However, universities can play a direct role in creating an economy by being a point that attracts industries. Like how Stanford University created Silicon Valley. We think that good faculty who are doing applied research can work with an industry.

We create an infrastructure where industries can come to us and create products by working with academia. In this concept, we have set up a graphene park or ecosystem. We are setting up an Internet of Things ecosystem as well.

The largest industrial association is in the graphene park, where we have three stages. The first stage was the applied research side, where Tata Steel is the partner. The second stage is moving from applied research to products, in which we have partnered with Carborundum (Chennai-based company Carborundum Universal).

The third stage relates to upgrading to other industries, for which we are associating with the state industrial department. In the Digital Science Park, we are looking for those companies and startups that seek research and development, and are interested in working with us. We have a startup company spin-off from the University of Leeds.

We have companies from Spain and the US working in sensor development. The good thing is that these companies are working with faculty members. Primarily, they came not because we gave the space.

They came here after knowing that there is a faculty working in a specific domain that would be useful for them. We believe that to create the next-level Google, we need to support a startup ecosystem and knowledge. The good thing is that the university is self-sustaining, and we are not taking any government funds for operations.

We try to get large research projects from across the world, and attract companies. We want to create a different model of the university system in the changing digital world. On the graphene side, we are working very closely.

We have faculty members who have done research at some well-known foreign universities. One good thing about the Digital University is that we are able to attract global talents. Indians, not necessarily Malayalis, from outside India have joined us.

For instance, we have a person who joined from Edinburgh. He works in the robotics area. We have a professor from Manchester… the faculty pool is really strong.

The first phase is happening in Kalamassery, in our space… the digital hub area. This is jointly done by the government of India, the government of Kerala, and Tata Steel. The funding came from them.

The operation is managed by Digital University, C-MET, which is a national institution, and Tata Steel because they put the research into the product. The second phase, which is the larger one, will come up most probably in Ottappalam, in the Defence Park, which is a much bigger area. It will be a three-acre area to set up the pilot production facility.

And then, the industries department will set up a materials park, again, perhaps, in Ottappalam itself. As of now, we have set up a 12,000sq. ft space at the Kabani building in Technopark Phase-4.

We created primary plus software infrastructure. A company named ARM, which is into chip design and related areas, has partnered with us to set up an electronic design centre for startups and research work. We are also in discussions with other companies for similar infrastructure.

Once the Digital Science Park is fully functional, there will be more facilities. There will be facilities for digital fabrication, bioinformatics and drug design, which are among the seven sectors we are focusing on. We have tied up with three top universities – Oxford, Edinburgh, Manchester.

We also have tie-ups with the University of Southampton. We are exploring similar tie-ups with other universities. We are looking at areas where we can have mutual collaboration.

It is not exactly correct. Software startups have comparatively foot-loose staffers. They easily migrate from one place to another.

They go to places where easy money is available. Partially, it is right because, in the earlier stages, we were like a nursery. We bring in a person, and then they go to a school and a college in another state.

Many of the good startups in the country started their early operations here in Kerala and moved out later. There are people from Kerala who are running these startups elsewhere. For example, Fresh-to-Home was started by Keralites, but they operate from Bengaluru.

It is easy to get venture funds in other states, especially when it comes to software startups. Hardware startups require a completely different ecosystem, and it is not easy to build that. We created the early prototype and ecosystem, and tied up with MIT to set up the Fab Labs.

This means, people who are into the hardware can, almost at zero cost, develop products. They stick to this place. We have reasonably booming hardware startups in Kerala.

Genrobotic is a good case because very few startups in the country have become profitable and achieved value growth in such a short period. So high-tech, deep-tech and hard-tech are the areas Kerala has the strength. This whole concept of Digital Science Park that we are speaking about aims to take them to the next level.

As far as I see, startups and unemployment are two different things. This is because startups create a lot of value, and employment generation comes later. We have around 6,000 startups, and they must have jointly created a little less than 1,00,000 jobs.

However, the SME sector might create much more jobs. That way, it is not only job creation. Job creation is one aspect of it, but it is more of a value creation.

I didn’t say that people migrate for jobs. I said that if one is looking at creating an asset like a startup, the funding ecosystem available in some of the growth centres in the country is different. That makes some of the startups move out.

But that doesn’t mean that they are leaving and going. They have their back-end and development offices here. This happens even outside the country.

Some of the big names don’t have funding coming from India. What we have done is that we have taken this as a metric and said, ‘Let us see how many startups we can retain here and also bring from outside’. So we developed support systems and infrastructure.

I don’t think too many states provide such things. However, we have not marketed it well, when compared with other places. That is happening in three ways.

We have set up 23 Fab Labs in various colleges and universities. There are Atal Tinkering Labs in schools; we, too, might set up something similar in schools. Our unique model is that we are starting from the grassroots and building up.

In this process, maybe some of them might leave in between. But they go with great skills. When I was the CEO of KSUM, I used to give talks at the IEDCs (Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Centres) in colleges.

I would say that students launching a startup and then leaving is not a loss. They will make fantastic employees, as they have done something hands-on. There are two ways we need to look at it.

One is the wafer level – it requires a huge amount of investment, and power and water. I don’t know whether Kerala is the right place for that because we may not have that sort of resources. But we can look at the packaging, which is an important element.

At Digital University, we are training students in the entire chip process, including its making. I think packaging is a major industrial opportunity. Well, when we talk to Indian professors working abroad about the developments happening here, they are actually happy to hear it, and they have been recommending some of their spin-offs to come to the state.

They want our sort of infrastructure. The GR8 (American multinational GR8 Affinity) started a centre in Kulakkada, Kollam. It should be noted that employees are given the same salary as in their Bengaluru centre.

This shows that they know that we have the necessary infrastructure and the talent pool they need. Yes, he did. Not only in IT, he played a key role in many areas.

When he handled multiple posts, like tourism director and director of the Directorate of Public Instruction (DPI), he played significant roles and contributed quite a lot. In the startup sector, too, he did quite a bit when he was the IT secretary. Well, I don’t want to comment on the controversies.

I worked very closely with him and found him to be a great professional. I found him to be a very bright person who made quick decisions. .