India- Israel Bilateral Innovation Agreement (BIA)

India- Israel Bilateral Innovation Agreement- Relevance for UPSC Exam

GS Paper 2: International Relations- Bilateral, regional and global groupings and agreements involving India and/or affecting India’s interests.

Recently, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Directorate of Defence Research and Development (DDR&D), Ministry of Defence, Israel have entered into a Bilateral Innovation Agreement (BIA).
Bilateral Innovation Agreement (BIA) is a tangible demonstration of the growing Indo–Israeli technological cooperation.

Funding: The development efforts will be jointly funded by DRDO and DDR&D, Israel.
Key Objective: Bilateral Innovation Agreement (BIA) aims to promote innovation and accelerated R&D in startups and MSMEs of both countries for the development of dual-use technologies.
Focus Areas: Under Bilateral Innovation Agreement, Startups & industry to bring out next-generation technologies & products in areas such as Drones, Robotics & Artificial Intelligence.
- Other Focus areas- Quantum technology, Photonics, Biosensing, Brain-Machine Interface, Energy Storage, Wearable Devices, Natural Language Processing, etc.
Benefits: The technologies developed under BIA will be available to both countries for their domestic applications.
- Products and technologies will be customised to meet the unique requirements of both countries.

Background: DRDO was formed in 1958 from the amalgamation of the then already functioning Technical Development Establishment (TDEs) of the Indian Army and the Directorate of Technical Development & Production (DTDP) with the Defence Science Organisation (DSO).
About: DRDO is the R&D wing of the Ministry of Defence, Govt of India, with a vision to empower India with cutting-edge defence technologies.
Mission: to achieve self-reliance in critical defence technologies and systems while equipping armed forces with state-of-the-art weapon systems and equipment in accordance with requirements laid down by the three Services.
Key Achievements: DRDO’s pursuit of self-reliance has resulted in the successful indigenous development and production of strategic systems and platforms such as-
- Agni and Prithvi series of missiles;
- Light combat aircraft, Tejas;
- Multi-barrel rocket launcher, Pinaka;
- Air defence system, Akash;
- A wide range of radars and electronic warfare systems; etc.,