Education and research in science and technology are what drive ties between India and Britain, Chancellor of Exchequer Gordon Brown said Thursday.

Speaking at the UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI) awards ceremony here, Brown, Labour's prime minister-in-waiting, said: "Education and research in science and technology is the key to the development of our two countries."

The UKIERI is an initiative announced by Prime Minister Tony Blair during his visit to India in 2005. Launched in April 2006, it aims to improve educational links between India and Britain.

There are three main strands of the UKIERI - higher education and research, schools and professional and technical skills.

Joint projects in various sectors between Indian and British institutes are awarded annually under the UKIERI.

Lauding the award winners of 2007, Brown said, "These are the signs of economic, cultural and political ties between our two countries."

There are two categories of the UKIERI awards: the UKIERI Major Awards, which support projects of up to 500,000 pounds in value and the UKIERI Standards Awards supporting projects worth between 10,000 and 150,000 pound.

Stating that there are 23,000 students from India studying in Britain today, Brown said that 50 more collaborative projects would be undertaken in the five years that is the duration of UKIERI.

Among the major award winners this year is a research project on whether the first human beings that came out from Africa landed in India. It is being conducted by Cambridge University's Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad.

Other major award winning projects are between Nottingham University and Lucknow's Industrial Toxology Research Centre, Leicester University and the Indian Institute of Science, Imperial College and the Indian Institute of Science, Reading University and the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and City University and Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Under the standard awards category, there are 23 Indo-British projects this year.