India's telecom guru Sam Pitroda has called upon scientists to concentrate on developing new technologies for the common man rather than working for the rich.

India has no standards for bricks, but it has standards for cheese that is not even used in the country, Pitroda said Tuesday at the 92nd Indian Science Congress here.

As India constantly looks to the West for inventions, it has forgotten to research on malaria, said the man who was a close confidant of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and helped pioneer the telecom advances in the country.

"We have to develop new material that would help the common man. We have to think of new building material to construct houses and new medicines to cure our diseases. We have been concentrating on 'Brahmin science' when we have to actually work on 'shudra science'," Pitroda said.

According to him, "almost all major inventions in the last 50 years, the ones that have had a significant impact on mankind, have been developed in the US."

He urged the scientific community to emulate their colleagues in the US to form a body like the National Science Foundation, the apex research body in the US.

"Believe it or not, (in India) the whole community should be restructured completely. The CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research) should be broken. It is too big and complex, and research should be funded by scientists themselves," said Pitroda, who claimed that science was currently being smothered by bureaucratic processes.

"People at the bottom of the pyramid are waiting for science to deliver. The problems might look trivial but we need the best talents in the country to work towards it," he said.