Joint defense-civil R&D platform on active cards

Pakistan’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MoS&T) has designed a joint defense-civil research and development (R&D) platform, said Fawad Chaudhry, the Federal Minister for S&T last week.
Prime Minister Imran Khan, he revealed had also given his nod and they would soon launch short-term and long term projects.
In developed countries like the US, Israel, and China, huge money goes to defense for research and development but later it comes back to civilians sectors as there is a connection between them there.
Ironically, he observes, “We do not have any linkage between defense and civilian sectors in Pakistan. Now we have formed an R&D mechanism which will be formally approved by the prime minister soon”.
Fawad Chaudhry said they would soon announce projects under the new arrangement.
Initially, Agriculture, Chemicals, and Electronics are the areas of focus.
Looking back at the performance of MoS&T in Pakistan he says we have never created a connection between industry and researchers. For instance, he claims we have extraordinary research work in all three agriculture universities in Pakistan but they are not linked with the farmers.
“I asked the prime minister to allow universities to launch commercial projects and he agreed to it but the issue is the implementation which we are facing for the last 9 months.
The minister is of the view that Pakistan did two major mistakes in the 1980s. We {Pakistan} made seminaries on foreign directives but did not seek to open campuses of institutions like Cambridge, Yale or Oxford like India did after normalization of relations with the west telling them to make MIT.
Chaudhry says we usually do not have money for science and technology and whatever we have we waste it a lot.