The ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) has tied up with Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) to set up a National Centre for Marine Biodiversity in Jamnagar. This will be the first research institute in the public private partnership (PPP) mode and would focus exclusively on the conservation of the country's marine biodiversity.

"A world class research centre cannot be built in a governmental set up and can never attract young people. So we want to think differently. We have to think differently, how we are going to organise our research institutions. And this is one way of building PPP,” India’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh said in New Delhi on Monday.

On being asked about any conflict of interest in collaborating with Reliance, the environment minister said, “Life is one large conflict of interest. Jamnagar is also the site of India's first marine national park.”

The MoEF is also trying to convince the World Bank to fund a Rs 130 crore project for protected areas in the country. These include a wildlife sanctuary in Himachal Pradesh and Little Rann of Kutch in Gujarat.

“It is a 5-6 year project that will also make sure that the local communities are not excluded. We plan to have a people friendly approach to biodiversity,” environment minister Jairam Ramesh said while speaking at a conference.

Addressing the Stakeholders’ Consultation on the Convention on Biological Diversity, Ramesh said that one of the biggest frustrations in his two-year stay in the UPA-II government was his inability to make Botanical Survey of India (BSI) and Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) autonomous. "The maximum resistance in making these two prestigious institutions independent and autonomous is coming from the scientific community within BSI and ZSI. They want to have this umbilical cord with the ministry because this umbilical cord is the cord of job security," Ramesh added.

The MoEF wanted the ZSI and BSI to run on the lines of the laboratories of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) laboratories. "We have been fighting this battle for the last one and a half years. We are not able to attract young people. We are not able to retain them. When you go there see the sad state of affairs in these institutions,” he added.

Slamming the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM), Ramesh said, "There is hardly any worthwhile research from our IITs. The faculty in the IIT is not world class. It is the students in IITs who are world class. So the IITs and IIMs are excellent because of the quality of students not because of quality of research or faculty.”