President Pranab Mukherjee on Thursday urged India's scientific fraternity to promote a robust scientific culture and work towards winning Nobel Prize in sciences in a 'time- bound' manner.
He was delivering a speech after inaugurating the centenary session of the Indian
Science Congress in Kolkata.
"It has been 83 long years since CV Raman won the Nobel Prize for physics. Another Nobel Prize in the sciences is long overdue for India," Mukherjee said.
The president also highlighted the need to evolve an educational system that imbibes a good scientific culture and increase focus on innovation to compete in a globalised economy.
Maintaining that science should be linked with a culture that is built on scientific knowledge, he said: "This calls for a scientific temper that Pt Nehru used to talk about.
Scientific culture demands that choices and decisions are made by individuals, society and the nation on the basis of scientific logic."
Talking about the importance of technology, he said there are around 19 crore mobile users in India which is second highest in the world after China.
The teledensity of India - which is 74.21% - compares favourably with the other top ranking nations. India ranks third after China and the US in terms of number of internet users.
However, the penetration of internet use as the percentage of the population is only 11.4%, which indicates the huge potential for future growth.