SATHI Initiative

Current context: The budget speech 2020-21 focused on scaling up technology clusters through measures like SATHI initiative.

 

• The Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her budget speech said that “Knowledge translation clusters will be set up across different technology sectors including in new and emerging sectors for designing, fabrication and proof of concept and further scaling up technology clusters harbouring such testbeds and small scale manufacturing facilities would be established”.
• In this direction, The Department of Science & Technology has launched a unique scheme called “Sophisticated Analytical & Technical Help Institutes (SATHI)”.
• SATHI is a shared, professionally managed, Science and Technology infrastructure facility, which can readily be accessible to academia, start-ups, manufacturing units, industries and R&D Labs.
• SATHI address the problems of accessibility, maintenance, redundancy and duplication of expensive equipment in Institutions while reaching out to the less endowed organizations in need, e.g., industry, MSMEs, startups and State Universities.
• The primary objective of the science and technology infrastructure facility will be to extend help to the academic institutes, industries, manufacturing units etc. in the neighbouring regions.
• DST has already set up three such centres in the country, one each at a total cost of Rs 375 Cores at:

1. IIT Kharagpur
2. IIT Delhi
3. IIT BHU

• It is planned to set up five SATHI Centres every year for the next four years.
• SATHI will have facilities for fabrication work, rapid prototyping, material testing, characterisation, new device fabrication, smart manufacturing and characterisation facilities etc.
• SATHI facilities will be used for 80% of their available time by External Users i.e. out-side of the Host Institutes and rest 20% of available time for Internal Users of the Host Institute.
• The facilities provided by the SATHI may be utilized by any user/organization on payment of nominal charges.

Question: 

Q.1 The “S” in “SATHI”, which is an initiative of the Department of Science & Technology stands for?
a. Smart
b. Service
c. Science
d. Sophisticated