Nuclear man with a clear mind

Venkatachari Jagannathan
18 July 2003

IGCAR director Dr S B Bhoje, an authority on fast-breeder reactors, believes an organisation should define its basic purpose of existence and stick to that

Chennai: He is a nuclear scientist with a difference. Cost-conscious and tempered with commercial sense, he runs the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR) like a small corporate outfit with clearly-defined goals.

"We get around Rs 150 crore as annual grant from the Indian government, but it is finally taxpayers' hard-earned money and, hence, should not be fritted away," says IGCAR director Padmashri Dr Shivram Baburao Bhoje.

An authority on fast-breeder reactors, Bhoje strongly believes that a research and development (R&D) organisation should define its basic purpose of existence and stick to that. "The entire organisation should work with a single objective and any tendency to move away from this must be checked."

According to him the four cardinal rules that an R&D organisation should follow are:
(a) define the work clearly under each discipline and activity,
(b) assign the work to proper individuals,
(c) review the progress at regular intervals and take correction action in case of variance, and
(d) integrate the results into the overall project.

"R&D activities should have velocity and direction. The research projects should be based on deliverable outputs, rather than on the input desires of individuals or groups," he says. It is this velocity and direction that IGCAR's 500-mw indigenous design prototype fast-breeder reactor (PFBR) programme has gained ever since he assumed the mantle in November 2002.