Indian experience in capacity building as a part of development of atomic energy programme

India embarked on a programme to harness nuclear technologies for the welfare of the nation more than five decades ago and adopted an approach involving knowledge generation through research and development, disseminating the knowledge acquired to the young generation through in-house arrangement, encouraging the researchers in the university system to work on problems of interest to the nuclear industry by providing research funding, networking with the university system, collaborating with industry to upgrade their skills to take up challenging manufacturing jobs, setting up industry under the control of the Government wherever private industry was not coming forward and so on. The basic approach underlying all efforts was to tap the 'knowledge' wherever available and to upgrade the 'knowledge' by R and D. For developing new technologies and for problem solving, 'bottoms up approach' implying study of scientific basis of all issues beginning from fundamentals was used and shortcuts were avoided. This has enabled the country to be self sufficient in all aspects of nuclear fuel cycle as well as applications of radiation technology to industry, agriculture and health care. This also enabled the industry to gain skills and use the skills gained for other sectors of economy. Now that the industry in India is much more mature and the engineering education at the post-graduate level is well developed, several changes in the approach followed have been made. These include making use of the skills and size of the industry by ordering total systems of a power plant rather than individual components and involving industry as consultants for several jobs, which were done in-house in the earlier days. The paper summarizes Indian experience of the last five decades and what is planned for the future. (author)