IIT Kharagpur's Suman Chakraborty moves research from publication to population impact

Diagnostic tests that need no lab, no fridge and no technician, just a paper strip and a smartphone, are already running in rural Indian clinics. The director of India's oldest IIT tells Innovation Report why engineering for affordability at enormous scale, not expensive laboratories, will define the future of global innovation, and how IIT Kharagpur plans to lead it.

Professor Suman Chakraborty, Director of IIT Kharagpur. Photo: IIT Kharagpur.

Professor Suman Chakraborty, Director of IIT Kharagpur, India's oldest and most storied institute of technology, has a clear ambition for the institution he leads: to move it from education provider to national-scale innovation engine. In this interview with Innovation Report, he sets out how IIT Kharagpur is repositioning itself at the intersection of fundamental science, deep technology and societal deployment, building globally networked research ecosystems, and developing affordable healthcare technologies designed to reach the most resource-limited communities on earth.

Innovation Report: How would you describe IIT Kharagpur's identity as an educational institution, and what is your role in India's research and innovation economy?

Prof Suman Chakraborty: IIT Kharagpur is the oldest of all the IITs, and that carries a great deal of responsibility in defining and redefining the directions in which the overall national technology ecosystem, including education, research, and startups, is moving.

What we have changed, as a philosophy, is that we no longer see ourselves merely as an educational institution. We see ourselves as a national-scale innovation engine, one where fundamental science, engineering, policy, deep technology, and societal deployment all converge together. We are a convergence institution.

India's next global leap is not going to come from low-cost talent alone. For a long period, India's role was to supply a low-cost, high-talent pipeline. Now it will come from original knowledge creation, sovereign technologies, and scalable societal innovation. IIT Kharagpur is positioning itself precisely at that intersection, consciously and with a clear execution model.

Our philosophy is simple: research must move from publication to population impact. That does not undermine publication. Quality publication defines research and there is no compromise on that. But there is one more level above: impact on the population. Whether it is AI-enabled healthcare, affordable diagnostics for resource-limited settings, climate-resilient technologies, semiconductor systems, sustainable manufacturing, space and defence technologies, or digital public infrastructure, we are building ecosystems for all of these, not isolated labs.

In this way, we aim to redefine what a university means in the 21st century. The university of the future is not a degree factory. It is a living innovation network connecting academia, startups, industry, government, global labs, communities, and hospitals. India is at a historic opportunity. The world is searching for trustworthy, scalable, and democratic innovation ecosystems outside the traditional geographies, and IIT Kharagpur can help position India not as the back office of innovation, but as one of its intellectual headquarters.

Innovation Report: Is India ready to take that leap now?

Prof Suman Chakraborty: The ecosystem is ready. Even looking at innovation and entrepreneurship, India offers two things that are very important globally: scale and market. That scale includes diversity.

Let me give you an immediate example. A group of students from MIT will be visiting IIT Kharagpur shortly as part of an internship programme. Their objective is to get exposure to healthcare technologies, simple technologies that can be applied in resource-limited settings, and to access data at scale. Those things are not easy to obtain even in the MIT context, not because of any limitation of MIT, but because of the natural geographical and socioeconomic characteristics that India inherits. IIT Kharagpur, located in a semi-rural setting, is well placed to provide exactly that.

What this means is that we are ready to reciprocate opportunity. Our students and young professionals have opportunities for international exploration, and those who are internationally active and want to work in India using deep technologies and science also have a foundation here.

Innovation Report: What are the biggest barriers facing Indian universities in attracting international students and research partners, and what is your approach to internationalisation?

Prof Suman Chakraborty: There are two aspects to this. The first is what I would call perception lag. Perception is qualitative, but it functions as a quantitative index in many contexts, including ranking frameworks. It is something of a chicken-and-egg situation: perception does not build automatically, it takes effort. But if the perception is not keeping pace, it is difficult to achieve the transformation you are pursuing.

India's research transformation is happening much faster than global perception is updating. As I travel worldwide, I find that even among informed international stakeholders, there is not a clear understanding of how fast India's research is transforming. Many still associate India primarily with outsourcing or talent export. What they often do not see is that India is rapidly becoming a destination for frontier research in specific areas: translational engineering, frugal innovation, AI-driven science, and globally scalable deep tech ecosystems, precisely because the living labs of India can provide scale through experiential and experimental immersion.

The second barrier is structural friction: mobility, administrative agility, interdisciplinary integration, and globally synchronised collaboration frameworks. On an individual level, there is significant collaboration between Indian scientists and those abroad, but globally synchronised collaboration requires an ecosystem approach. Nationally, the ecosystem is much better now than it was fifteen years ago. But this cannot be driven by a single national framework. It must be institutionalised at the level of individual institutions.

Research today moves at the speed of startups, while many university systems still operate at bureaucratic speed. This is not unique to India; it is a challenge in many places.

In this our platinum jubilee year, IIT Kharagpur is addressing this through aggressive internationalisation and ecosystem building. We are creating globally networked research platforms, which is very different from isolated bilateral connections. We are strengthening industry-linked translational research units, which we call strategic outreach centres, and we are planning to open these at different locations around the world. We are also developing interdisciplinary centres, AI-enabled labs, joint PhD research ecosystems, and innovation-linked mobility programmes.

This year we introduced special platinum jubilee grants to mobilise two-way movement of faculty and students between IIT Kharagpur and international institutions and industry partners. Let me give you a concrete example of how this works. Typically, when a PhD student travels to a conference abroad, they are only there for three or four days, and by the time they absorb the culture of that conference environment, it is over.

What we are now doing is extending that stay. With some local travel by bus or train from the conference location, a student can reach a research lab nearby. We fund the student's stay at that lab for at least three months. To access this, the student must have identified a potential mentor at the overseas lab and developed a research proposal jointly agreed upon by that mentor and their supervisor at IIT Kharagpur. The selection process is competitive and takes into account the student's academic and research record.

That three-month stay can extend to six months with a modest contribution from the collaborating lab. We also support a reciprocal visit: a student from the overseas lab comes to IIT Kharagpur to work on a related topic. In this way, although the professors themselves may have limited mobility throughout the year, their students are seamlessly working with each other, spending time in both the Indian lab and the overseas lab, and driving the research agenda forward together.

We also support international visiting professors for their stay, teaching, co-supervision of research, and their overall appointment as visiting or distinguished international professors, with full salary and other benefits.

At every stage, we are bringing in the industry and startup ecosystem. International collaborators are looking for partners who can solve high-impact global problems under real-world constraints, and India has a unique advantage here. We innovate not just for luxury markets, but for scale, affordability, sustainability, and inclusion. That creates the opportunity to work on globally relevant science.

The future of the global research map, as we see it at IIT Kharagpur, will not be defined only by who has the most expensive laboratories. We cannot compete with many global peers on resources. But it will be defined by who can create the highest impact in social innovation and human-centric development, and India is extraordinarily well positioned for that future.

Innovation Report: Tell us about one or two of IIT Kharagpur's flagship innovation projects: what you are working on, and what the potential impact could be, socially, economically, or environmentally.

Prof Suman Chakraborty: Rather than a single project, I would point to a transformative ecosystem with measurable indices of impact. Let me focus on two areas.

The first, and a major one in which I personally work, is affordable and accessible healthcare technologies. We are developing globally scalable, low-cost, highly accurate diagnostic technologies that can function in extremely difficult and resource-limited conditions: dust, dirt, high humidity, extreme heat, no refrigeration, no air-conditioned lab, no skilled technicians. This involves a combination of physical technologies, for example paper microfluidic systems, which I work on directly, alongside smart sensing technologies and AI-enabled health platforms.

There is currently a polarisation in how people approach AI in healthcare. One school of thought suggests AI can solve everything, predicting diseases without any testing through a smartwatch or similar device. Another holds that traditional methods are the gold standard. Both schools have merit and both have limitations. What we are developing is an integrated view: AI-enabled infrastructure that brings down cost and reduces the resources required for a device, while retaining some degree of human intervention as an essential check and balance, rather than relying entirely on a black box.

We started with low-cost point-of-care devices and have now moved to applications where no device is needed at all, just a paper strip on which body fluid is tested, and a smartphone. Both fit in your pocket. We are working on a wide range of tests, particularly in women's health: reproductive health, anaemia, and other significant public health challenges. These technologies are not just being developed in the lab; many have been translated to commercialisation and are being used at rural health clinics at grassroots level, engaging frontline health workers.

The ecosystem approach is important here. It is not simply a case of championing a technology, publishing, patenting, and moving on. On one side is the translational path leading to a commercialised system. On another is the deployment ecosystem, training rural women to act as champions and carry out these tests themselves. And there is a third dimension: AI-driven intelligent cyber-physical systems for sustainable manufacturing. India's manufacturing ambitions require not just production but a highly innovative yet cost-effective manufacturing pathway. We are training small and medium enterprises to build these technologies. The entire journey, from lab to field, lab to use, lab to market, for affordable and accessible diagnostic technologies is one of IIT Kharagpur's prime areas of focus.

This focus has historical roots. IIT Kharagpur is the only IIT where the integration of technology and medicine was embedded from the foundation. In 2001, we started the School of Medical Science and Technology to train medical doctors in a Masters in Medical Science and Technology programme. At that time in India, the importance of technology in medical research and education was not widely appreciated. Since then, we have established a super-speciality hospital for clinical research, built an integrated ecosystem for technology development, deployment, and commercialisation, and recently launched a medical school. We have also applied to offer postgraduate medical education as part of an integrated health science and technology framework.

The second major area is AI-driven scientific and engineering systems. This is not about foundational AI models per se; it is about physical AI, intelligent cyber-physical systems, digital twins, AI-enabled infrastructure, sustainable manufacturing, and next-generation computational platforms. Because this involves physical systems rather than foundational models, we are also building strong ecosystems in specific adjacent areas: semiconductors, advanced materials, clean energy, climate technologies, robotics, aerospace, and deep tech entrepreneurship in space and defence.

What distinguishes our approach is a deployment-emphasised model of innovation. A technology is not transformative because it is sophisticated. It becomes transformative when it reaches millions, possibly billions, of lives. That is the scale we are targeting. We are learning how to engineer under the constraints that are naturally visible in India: affordability, sustainability, and inclusiveness. Some regard these constraints as weaknesses. We see them as challenges converted into opportunities, and we are making them the drivers of a globally relevant innovation ecosystem.

Innovation Report: How confident are you that AI and emerging technologies will have a positive impact on education and wider society? What would you say to those who are more concerned about the risks?

Prof Suman Chakraborty: It is a double-edged sword. On a lighter note, when I was in school in India, a very common essay topic was: "Science, a blessing or a curse?" You can now replace "science" with "AI." The simple reason is that it is a tool, and it depends on how we use that tool for teaching, learning, and research.

There are certain things we must be conscious of. One is the ethical and responsible use of AI, something that must be embedded in educational programmes. We are developing best practices and creating awareness around the use and misuse of AI, the dos and don'ts for research and teaching.

When it comes to unethical access to AI in education, we have to understand that modern education is no longer about content retrieval. Using a generative AI to retrieve an answer to a textbook problem is retrieving content; that is not the purpose of the education we are providing. The purpose is to train students to think within a complex, interconnected, and interdisciplinary framework, so that when demands evolve, and they will evolve, they are ready. We are preparing our students for kinds of jobs that do not yet exist.

The certificate will have value to the extent that it reflects how well a student has been prepared for dynamic change as the global landscape evolves. It is about synthesising foundational knowledge. In engineering, there is a natural tendency in the AI era to overlook foundational principles and treat AI as a black box, which is very dangerous. If you do not understand how a car engine works, you cannot make the car drive autonomously. As AI is used more and more, we must use it rightly, carefully, and ethically, while also ensuring students understand the core technology with which AI interfaces.

The second concern is training young minds about misuse and abuse: deepfakes, manipulated images, videos, and voices, and the unethical practices that can be executed using simple, freely available AI tools. How we bring a check on that, ensuring AI is used in the right context for both education and research, is the framework within which we are building what we call our AI practice.

As that practice matures, it will inform a balanced AI policy, one that neither says AI will do everything, nor dismisses it entirely. We want to strike a balance: using AI as a decisive tool for advanced applications that were not possible before, while maintaining the additional lifelong skills that no tool can replace. Students may at some point return to the university system to be upskilled, reskilled, or retrained, and that dynamic environment, with AI as an essential and beneficial resource when used with caution, will be the foundation of our new curriculum and research policy development.