NATIONAL CHEMICAL LABORATORY

With the changing scenario in science, technology, and industry, this premier organization is changing constantly to be current and contemporary.

Pune-based National Chemical Laxboratory (NCL), a constituent laboratory of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), started five decades ago with the purpose to advance knowledge and to apply chemical sciences for the good of people, is a vibrant organization. It is striving to deliver outstanding performances in each sphere of its activities and live up to the mission that it was entrusted with.

It has one of the best track records in the nation through its contributions to the corpus of human knowledge in the area of chemistry and allied disciplines. It has been committed to the development of processes, materials, and products. It is second to none in terms of maintenance of national resource centers of expertise, facilities, information and knowledge. It has created and trained a cadre of highly skilled scientific workers. Its influencing role in national and international scientific associations, governmental bodies etc., is very lofty. For all this and more, it falls in the category of "high output, high impact" institutions in the country along with IISc, TIFR, AIIMS, IIT-B, IIT-K, IACS and Hyderabad University.

The laboratory over the years has forged strong industrial and academic collaborations in pursuit of its objectives. It works closely with many international companies and over 50 Indian companies. Some of the largest companies, within and outside India, have benefited by such collaborations. Examples include Reliance Industries, Indian Oil Corp., Oil and Natural Gas Commission, and pharma majors like Ranbaxy, Cipla, and Cadila, and global companies like GE, Dupont, Dow Chemicals and Unilever. It has close academic links with several universities both Indian and foreign as well as with several multilateral international R&D organizations.

Besides biotechnology, the core R&D areas of NCL include catalysis, organic chemistry, polymer science and engineering, advanced molecular materials, chemical and process engineering, scientific computing, theory and molecular modeling. Strong biochemical science and engineering backed by inputs from other diverse disciplines provided an extra dimension to NCL’s biotechnology program.

Multidisciplinary biotech group

The biotechnology group at the laboratory is a multidisciplinary and multi-skill R&D group with interest in the area of biochemistry, molecular biology, microbiology, botany, and biochemical engineering. It is supported by the state-of-the-art experimental facilities, large-scale pilot plants for plant tissue culture, and scaled up facilities for microbial processes and downstream separation.

The laboratory’s strong knowledge base has established its competency in taking up projects in the areas like plant molecular biology and agricultural biotechnology, plant tissue culture and microbiology, and enzyme technology. In addition to taking up the projects, its process development and design activity provides the vital link for translating a laboratory process to a commercial plant. A team of chemists, technologists, and engineers work together in achieving this task. The team members have acquired considerable experience by implementing a number of projects of NCL and also participating with industrial organizations and engineering companies on other projects. The process technologies developed and implemented encompass a variety of areas like catalytic and non-catalytic processes involving esterification, hydro-genation, oxidation, acylation, chlorination, fermentation as well as polymerisation. The process design and development groups has state-of-the-art of pilot plants for scale ups as well as design tools for preparing basic and detailed engineering packages, equipment specifications and mechanical design.

A strong team of scientists at NCL, having vast experience in academic as well as industry, is working on several biotechnology-related projects. The projects are from as diverse fields as agriculture, environment, and industry. The scientists, in agri division, are working on transgenic crop plants, micropropagation, production of phytochemicals, biotechnological investigations for improvement of mango and medicinal plants. They are involved in the development of eco-friendly bioprocesses like use of enzymes as alternatives to hazardous chemicals in leather processing, cellulase-free xylanases in biobleaching of wood pulp, biosorption of heavy metals and biocontrol of injection in plants. Although the focus is on taking up pilot projects, the NCL is doing to good work by having tie-ups with universities and companies.

Market-oriented research

To meet the requirements of the society and industry in particular, NCL is offering services in the form of technology licensing, doing contract research, working on collaborative projects, doing consultative and technical services, and information-based products and services by developing state-of-the-art technologies for clients in India and abroad. With a mission to "Linking NCL Research to Market Needs" the laboratory has a Research Planning and Business Development (RPBD) Group that handles all administrative matters relating to agreements between NCL and a client.

Even though, it is part of CSIR, it has faced financial hurdles. In early Nineties, it had taken loans from private financial institutions and the World Bank to pay for reimbursement of research facilities. This drove NCL to look at contract research with multinationals as a business opportunity. These lessons helped the laboratory to negotiate with the companies, which have immense legal clout far superior to what a lab like NCL possesses, to generate more than 18 percent of its total budget. Over the years, it has improved its credibility and aggressively pursued the patents as a goal and this has helped the organization in earning the respect among customers. NCL has learnt to negotiate and license IPR’s to the companies outside India.

NCL plans to look at such technologies, which are highly proprietary and are difficult to source. This, it wants to create an inventory of such technologies and explore its relevance to India. Besides NCL looks at materials whose transportation costs are higher. Indian manufacturers of such products are effectively insulated from the threat of competition by imports. At the dawn of new century, NCL looks to the future with renewed optimism. Its vision is to ensure the supremacy of the laboratory in emerging areas of chemical and biotechnology related fields and to perform research, which is intellectually challenging and globally competitive. To fulfil its mission to use chemical and related sciences to produce useful materials and substances efficiently thereby creating value to the customers in particular and society in general, NCL believes that its research must be related to the real world and go beyond mere intellectual stimulation.

Narayan Kulkarni