Muhammad Abrar Wadera is a man with a mission. After graduating as ECE/Bio-Medical engineer in nineties from Regional Engineering College (now NIT), Srinagar, he briefly took to training students of Delhi College of Engineering at different vocational courses. In 1998 he was appointed as a Customer Support Executive by Siemens (New Delhi) where he worked for two and half years. Later he flew to Germany where he took up the position of Managing Engineer with Siemens Medical Solutions in 2003 and was given Process Analyst portfolio. It was during his stay in Germany that he developed many systems that are used in many parts of the world.
Now having worked in countries like USA, Germany, Saudi Arabia and India in many areas of high end Bio Medical Engineering like Instrumentation and Application of Linar Accelerators, Nuclear Medicine, Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Application Specialist, Software Trainer, Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD), he believes that “it’s time to sit down and bring people together and create systems and institutions which will solve our problems and contribute to our state and people.”
In a chat with GK Magazine’s Muhammad Tahir, the Germany based engineer spoke about his plans and hopes for his motherland. 

You have been working in the area of bio-medical engineering. Tell us something about you work so far in this field?
I had passion for creating new systems and improvising on what we had in hand, I have worked with Siemens Medical Solutions in India for two years and worked with prominent physicist Prof. Pant of All India Medical Institute Delhi. We worked on improvising a Siemens based software for Glomerolus Filtration Rate (Kidney Analysis), we innovated this program and is used in many countries including Germany where it was developed. This  I believe is a point where I discovered myself and moved forward with confidence. Till now I have worked on many new and innovative applications like CLI, CAI, SR300SW etc., and have been very successful. Our system SR300SW is being used in twelve research based institutes in India including Tata Memorial Hospital for their research and analysis of Thyroid diseases. It’s being cleared to be used in Europe and US markets soon.

Technological innovation is a hard and demanding enterprise. How do you manage your work?
I still depend on foreign manpower mostly my former collegues in USA and Germany as my core development team but have started to take engineers from India and Kashmir, we are now working on development of new frameworks for Windows and Web application development, and have a product in sight called UltraRAD, this will introduce very well defined framework rules and encapsulate many complexities in this development environment and I am sure we can utilize present manpower in development of international rated products without much trainings, success in this venture will on one side give us ability to develop international products in Kashmir and help in some bit of local employment and on other and higher side we can donate softwares to many needy organizations in Kashmir at the implementation cost only which will help them streamline their processes.

Your extensive stay in the technologically advanced countries must have been a great learning experience. What are your impressions?
I have learnt from my stay in Germany (which has a very brutal past of Adolf Hitler), that everything will taste the agony of death, however institutions will continue to survive. This country was devastated during World War II, however, institutions have come back to life. This inspired me to believe and propagate that we should make as many institutions as possible which are not tied to any individual and our future will finally be written by the success of these institutions.

What is your opinion regarding use of technology in Kashmir?
I believe we not only have to have equipment to run in hospitals and other institutions, but use of correct procedures to run them which should also be imported along with them and strictly followed, otherwise users will invent their own curtailed ways to run them (folk named Kashmiri way), this is what we are lacking and this is what I am working upon. We have to create a scientific temperament and then implement and import scientific ideas and technology otherwise they will be rejected as a western gimmick. I am sure (Inshallah), I will come up with improvised processes in fields of healthcare and education in consultation with prominent national and international professionals.

Have any of your softwares been used by any organisation in Kashmir?
I have donated the RIA System free to department of Immunology in SKIMS and once our UltraRAD is published I will be in a position to give away more systems to needy organizations which require them the most; we have a system called Net-C which will help to organize activities related to healthcare, education and other fields and will bring about order, transparency and accountability in respective fields.

Do you have any collaboration with any foreign company?
I have collaborations with Indian, European and American Companies. We will be working with US Health care providers to come up with proactive health care solutions. In Europe we are concentrating on SR300SW market with Bechman & Coulter.
We will be making a partnership with more international companies like AgaMark in USA, Hoil Med in Korea, Beckman Coulter in Europe, Siemens in Germany, Medanta in India etc.

What are your plans for Kashmir? 
Intelligent Human Resource is like other rich mineral resources nature bestows us with, they occur in very tiny quantities and are difficult to find, as we search for these mineral resources, same applies with  Intelligent Human resource as well, we have to have a system to look for this resource, our success lies in finding people with passion & burning desire. Knowledge regarding building any industry, be it bicycle or rockets is readily available from many sources, it’s all about determination to acquire it. We require intent and will from our leadership be it in  politics, education, healthcare etc. explore the world and see how new methods and technologies have been used to solve the problems of masses; for all this to happen this leadership has to be in love with masses, nothing can work without this relationship.
I have plans to work with some NRIs and a prominent university where some people will try to group to create a system to track and document such human resource all over the state and have a net enabled state database and may be (Inshallah) we all will try to promote and support this resource via a different channel.

Our vital institutions like health care and education are marred with corruption. Do you really feel technology can bring a change?
Corruption is nothing but freedom of a system to do otherwise; we have to brainstorm our systems and rewrite our processes so that we could come up with improvised processes that can track the efficacy of our activities through a separate and independent feedback process. Systems which have to get rid of corruption should have very early detection process for their wrong outputs and take corrective measures. We have sectors where Kashmiris are working but there is no corruption, like banking; not many people complain about this sector, mobile industry both govt. and private, schools like Bisco, Mallinson, and Convent etc. These institutions are well equipped with processes which do not allow them go astray. One can say corruption is a result of a weak system than bad people.
Since I am also working as IT Consultant for TMU Diagnostic Center, I will later introduce new closed loop processes, that can track and document the feedback of our activities like Laboratory Testing, Clinical consultations, Quality of Drugs we sell etc, we will work upon lots of feedback data and find as how to handle corrupt processes in Kashmir and Inshallah may set a remedial trend.

What kind of reforms do you envisage for our education sector?
 How we will teach in schools and NOT in colleges and universities; this is implied from data of most German universities which are running for last 1200 years. They say universities’ output is directly proportional to output from schools, a mediocre from school will remain a mediocre whatever efforts we put in the university, however, an intelligent can become a genius.  A noted Chinese proverb comes to my mind "It’s easier to reshape a river, but it’s harder to reshape a man". So once somebody is spoiled, it’s almost all over for him unless we go through a rigorous rehabilitation process which usually fails; some examples are smokers, school drop outs etc. I think this is one of the most important sectors we have to concentrate on.

Abrar Wadera can be contacted at abrarwadera@yahoo.com

Lastupdate on : Mon, 6 Aug 2012 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Mon, 6 Aug 2012 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Tue, 7 Aug 2012 00:00:00 IST