New Delhi

An effort to replicate in India the world-famous Media Lab, run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has collapsed amid angry recriminations between the Indian government and the original lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Media Lab Asia, which opened in New Delhi amid much fanfare two years ago (Nature 411, 623; 2001), will continue without MIT's involvement after an acrimonious meeting last week between Arun Shourie, India's information-technology minister, and Nicholas Negroponte, chair of the MIT Media Lab's governing board.

MIT officials say that the decision to end the collaboration came after Shourie said he wanted practical technologies to flow from the laboratory, rather than the futuristic ideas and approaches for which the MIT lab won its reputation as one of the world's hottest research labs.

A Press Trust of India news agency report from New York quoted Negroponte as saying that MIT pulled out of the project because Shourie wanted to run it like other programmes in India. It said that Shourie does not believe in rural development through information technology, and that he is even less interested in basic innovation.

But Shourie told reporters that MIT's interpretation of events was “strange”, and that India called off the contract as it “gained nothing” from the collaboration.

Media Lab Asia was MIT's second Media Lab outside the United States following Media Lab Europe, which was established in Dublin, Ireland, in 2000. The Asian lab was set up in India after MIT considered offers to host it from several other countries, including China and Singapore. Its board had selected research projects to be carried out at five Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in Chennai, Mumbai, Kharagpur, New Delhi and Kanpur.

The initial agreement to run Media Lab Asia expired on 31 March and has not been renewed. Shourie says it failed not because he has no interest in rural development, but “because researchers in the five IITs were unable to quantify the contribution from MIT”. Krithi Ramamritham, head of the Media Lab Asia's centre at the IIT in Mumbai, says that after the initial planning phase, the project got virtually no technical guidance from MIT.

Shourie adds that the project was failing to attract private funds, and that the Indian government didn't want to pay US$5 million over ten years to use the name 'Media Lab', to which MIT claims the rights.