It is an interesting and remarkable fact that every Nobel-prize winning
piece of work in Experimental Physics has been carried out on apparatus
which has been designed and developed by the physicist in question, be
it Raman, Mossbauer or Binnig. This makes the question of how we build
an instrumentational base for cutting-edge research in India relevant. I
will discuss this in the context of two hi-tech instruments which my
team has developed: Scanning Probe Microscopes for various applications and
Physical Properties Measurement Systems for research in nano-science,
from both the materials and condensed matter view-points. The talk will,
in addition, focus on how the expertise we have built up can help in
facilitating research (in the pertinent fields) at all our institutions.