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The Nano Mission is successor of this programme. The Government approved this as Nano Mission in 2007 with an allocation of Rs 1000/- crore for 5 years. The Nano Mission has been structured in a manner to achieve synergy between the national research efforts of various agencies in this field and launch new programmes in a concerted fashion. Today India has emerged 6^th worldwide in terms of scientific publications. An active research community of about 1000 researchers has emerged. Besides, some interesting applications have already come out of the country.

Research

Academia-industry partnership at the international level is one of the under international collaboration. Besides, exploratory visits of scientists, organization of joint workshop, conferences and research projects, access to sophisticated research facilities abroad etc., are being achieved.

Individual scientists have been supported for R & D projects. Detailed technologies have been developed for the medical purposes. Membrane scaffolds for wound healing using chitin/chitosan gels containing nanoparticles and nanoparticles for ophthalmic drug delivery have been developed by Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi and Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad and USV, Mumbai respectively. Around 130 projects have been supported for individual scientists mainly working on fundamental scientific aspects of nanoscale system. Extensive studies on semiconductor nanocrystals have been undertaken in several projects. As semiconductor particles exhibit size-dependent properties like scaling of the energy gap and corresponding change in the optical properties, they are considered as technologically important materials. Several projects have looked into synthesis of important nano materials like CdSe, ZnO etc. Size tunable, nanocrystals have prepared by employing novel solvo thermal techniques and some soft chemical routes.

have been sanctioned across the country. They house some of the more sophisticated facility for sharing with other scientists in the region and would help in promoting scientific research on nanoscale system in a decentralized manner. Seven centres for Nano Technology focusing on development of specific applications and a centre for excellence on Computational Materials has also been established. Joint R & D activities are taking place with several countries. DST has also promoted Joint Institution-Industry Linked Projects and some other Public Private Partnership activities for human resource development.