Science & Technology

KEY POINTS

Challenges

·         Little recognition being given to scientist who made global achievements.

·         E.g. Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri in cosmology, G.N. Ramachandran in protein crystal structures, and C.K. Majumdar and Dipan Ghosh who extended the quantum Heisenberg spin model were household names in the international scientific field, but are little promoted by the Indian scientific establishment, even neglected in graduate teaching.

·         All the significant work produced in India is theoretical work because of its fewer requirements for money. 

·         Experimental science is abysmal in India because of a very low fund allocation.

·         To succeed, experiments require at least two conditions

a)     Guarantees of long-term funding.

b)     Scientists’ collaboration with each other.

·         Funding varies with the political climate: there will be money to buy equipment but no certainty that resources will flow for all the years needed to ensure significant results.

·         Collaboration is a social process, not an intellectual one.

·         Our research institutes, despite having far greater resources were risk-averse and eased into safe, albeit good; research, but not the ground-breaking work.

·         Our scientific institutions dependent on political patronage for continued funding, groom loyalists and yes-men rather than cutting-edge researchers (and women are scarce).

·         Hard work yields no rewards unless one is already defined as smart.

·         This has led to an insider culture, reproducing privileges rather than promoting excellence.

·         It is the little-recognised lone rangers who usually produce the best work in such a system, and not the research groups that get the major share of resources.

·         Bureaucrats no longer active in cutting-edge research regard themselves as capable of judging working scientists.

·         India’s scientific institutions have been a blind spot in the state’s modernisation project.

·         They symbolise reason and are immune to criticism.

·         Acknowledging internationally celebrated scientific accomplishments, and asking why they were ignored for so long, can start a useful discussion.