Interview : ‘I've been called a girl geek'

"With her book Geek Nation just released, Angela Saini talks to VIJAYSREE VENKATRAMAN about India's aspirations to being a scientific superpower....[Q:] Where is all the innovation happening, then, if not at these prestigious research institutes? [A:] There are shoots of Indian innovation all over the country. One example in my book is that of Open Source Drug Discovery, a revolutionary project to collect research into tuberculosis from small-scale researchers across India, pool it on an open-access website and use this to come up with a possible cure. Another is the Spoken Web — a technology being developed by a team of Indian researchers working for IBM in New Delhi — which is a way of building audio information networks that can be accessed through simple mobile phones and landlines...."