BackgroundDuring three multi-segment visits to India, Professor Gerard Parr will visit Institutes of Technology in Madras-Chennai, Delhi, Bangalore, Bombay and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. The purpose of the visits are three-fold in order to:-.(i) develop parallel research proposals on NGN Management to the Indian Department of Science & Technology and EPSRC with Professors Timothy Gonsalves and Mani Subramanian (IIT Madras).(ii) develop plans for future collaborations on architectures and protocols for resource-constrained SLA-convergence in NGNs, taking into account e2e requirements across the fixed-wireless boundaries. This will be between Professor Kumar (IISc Bangalore), Prof Asoke Talukder (IIIT Bangalore) and Professor U.B. Desai (IIT Bombay) and Professor Surendra Prasad (IIT Delhi). (iii) build upon previous and existing collaborations between UK and India to assist in the investigation and development a unique consortium-based research and technology-transfer Centre of Excellence in NGNs/ICT.Leading on from (iii), as a result of an excellent workshop event in Madras, the challenge now is to maintain the momentum with all the interested academics and industrial players who participated in the discussions and technical presentations and to develop an agreed programme of work that will represent the interest of the UK and Indian consortium that was established. The intention is that the programme will help identify and develop priority research areas and seek out relevant funding mechanisms to actively encourage leading researchers and companies to pursue innovative research and technology transfer. Such a research aganda will power the next generation of communications technology and usher in a new era of ICT research and technology transfer between Britain and India, the world's second fastest growing economy. This is very much in keeping with the recent 2006 Budget Statement from the UK government to ensure the UK can maintain its goal as a competitive centre for global investment in technology-led sectors .Context for ProposalPreviously, the Technical Workshop (as evidenced in the appendices) was developed, planned and organised by Professor Parr on behalf of the EPSRC/British High Commission in India in response to a desire to further academic research and technology transfer collaboration between the UK and India. The proposal was based on previous meetings and discussions organised during British High Commission (Delhi) UK-India ICT visits (8th-14th January 2005) and subsequently. These visits included top research Institutes of Technology (Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai) and key companies in the ICT sector within India, including Wipro, InfoSys and Sasken Communications. The background to these visits was to determine the level of interest and capability to develop a more in-depth UK-India collaborative effort in ICT, particularly concerning the fixed-wireless interface and its management. For the past twelve months under the invitation of EPSRC and the British High Commission in Delhi, Professor Parr has established a UK-India advisory group which has been formulating the development plan between the two nations. In the activity, Professor Parr has been designated the UK Consortium Academic Lead.

The RESIDE (Residential building energy demand reduction in India) project will help support the improvement of living conditions for millions of Indian citizens through establishing the knowledge base to develop a residential building code for high quality, low-energy housing across all five climatic zones in India. The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of architects, engineers, digital scientists, urban planners and behavioural researchers to assess all aspects of the residential energy use problem, including performance of the building fabric; in-home appliances including heating, ventilation and air conditioning; indoor environment and occupant behaviour. RESIDE will undertake surveys and monitoring of energy consumption in 2000 homes spread across the five different climatic zones in India in order to build up a new, open access database for policy and practitioner communities in India and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. In 10% of these homes, we will also trial and evaluate a Smart Home Energy Management System, to be designed within the project, to enable householders greater control over their comfort and energy consumption. These activities will be used to develop low-cost monitoring and post-occupancy evaluation protocols suitable for the Indian situation. This will not only improve Best Practice, but allow a framework by which consistent data can be collected and added to the RESIDE database. Using novel techniques developed by the project team for assessing the potential up-scaling of individual household measures and actions to a neighbourhood level, RESIDE will explore and establish protocols for assessing the potential for, and likely benefits of, widespread take up of energy efficiency and rooftop solar technologies at a community scale. By engaging with a wide range of stakeholders involved in planning and construction throughout the project, and by undertaking an extensive review of policy experiences in similar countries, the RESIDE project will establish the key factors essential for consideration in the development of a new residential building code for India. Then, building on the extensive data collected through the project, and a set of co-design workshops, the project will develop a proposed framework for a new residential building code.