CHANDIGARH:
In a damning indictment of the Indian Science Congress, Indian-born
Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan has refused to attend the
Congress ever again.
When asked by TOI on Tuesday why he wasn't attending the ongoing annual
Science Congress in Mysuru, Venkatraman said, "I attended one day (of
an earlier Congress) and very little science was discussed. It was a
circus. I find that it's an organization where very little science is
discussed. I will never attend a science congress again in my life."
Last year, he had objected to politics and religious ideology being
mixed with science.
Addressing a gathering at Panjab University earlier in the day,
Venkatraman alluded to a claim made by a participant at the 2015
Congress in Mumbai about planes having been invented by a sage in the
Vedic era. He said, "The idea that Indians had airplanes 2,000 years ago
sounds almost essentially impossible to me. I don't believe it. The
point is that if that technology was produced in a method so described
that anybody could replicate it, then it becomes science."
Venkatraman, who was born in Tamil Nadu, is a structural biologist at
Cambridge University; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009.
-TOI
If Indian science congress is a joke, it's because science in India is a tragedy
If
Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan's description of the Indian
Science Congress as a circus set you thinking about the state of science
in the country, here are some numbers that should stop you in your
tracks: 59% of secondary schools in India don't have an integrated
science laboratory although science is compulsory till class 10. So, a
vast majority of students 'study' science without ever seeing any
experiment, let alone doing it. At the +2 level where students opt for
science, just 32% schools have separate rooms for laboratories and a
quarter of them are 'partially equipped'. Perhaps they are being taught
via the web? No chance, because just 37% of schools have a computer with
net connection.
Describing the present educational and
scientific scenario as "depressing", eminent scientist and Bharat Ratna
awardee CNR Rao lamented to TOI that in the large young population of
rural India, "there must be a Ramanujan or a Raman somewhere". So how do
we find them?
Not an easy prospect since the problem begins in
schools and colleges. Students who do go through the grind and finally
get into science and technology related jobs see their dreams die in
India's vast but faltering science establishment.
As nuclear
scientist VS Ramamurthy, who was part of the design team for India's
first nuclear test at Pokharan in 1974 and later headed the department
of Science & Technology, told TOI, "The human resource pipeline
cannot be turned on and off at will. Tomorrow's teacher has to be
trained today."
One of India's top genetic scientists and
former director general of CSIR, Samir Brahmachari told TOI that the
crisis in science is because it is not attracting the best minds.
"Science education has moved from being a curiosity-driven exploration
to a mark-scoring exercise to get admission in elite institutions and
bag a fat corporate salary. In the process, academia has also lost high
quality teachers who shape young minds," he said.
Besides the
sorry state of affairs in all but the elite science education centres,
there are serious problems facing Indian science, ranging from resource
crunch to policy confusion. The current attempts to turn mythology into
science make the future look even bleaker.
"Building a
knowledge-based society demands significant increase in investment for
S&T at several levels including education as well as research
leading to outcomes in pure and applied areas," eminent space scientist K
Kasturirangan, former head of ISRO and ex-member Planning Commission,
told TOI. India has just 4 scientific researchers for every 10,000
people in the workforce, much lower than not just advanced countries
like the US or UK but even China and Brazil.
"The goal of
spending at least 2% of GDP on scientific research - outlined in the
govt's science policy of 2003 - has not been achieved. Even industry
funding, which was declared as the magic wand for finances, hasn't
delivered," rues Dinesh Abrol, visiting professor at JNU.
As
per latest available figures, India is spending less than 1% on research
and development compared to 1.9% in China and 2.75% in US.
The
combined result of defective grounding at the school/college level and
limited resources for research is evident in the metrics that provide a
partial measure of India's scientific output and its significance.
Scientific papers published by Indians numbered about 90,000 in 2013
compared to 4,50,000 by Americans and 3,25,000 by Chinese. Citations too
were below the world average. Indians filed just 17 patents per million
population compared to 541 in China and 4,451 in South Korea.
"I am not worried about the quantity as much as the quality of science
coming from India. It is also not showing any improvement. India still
contributes less than 1% of the world's top 1% of research," Rao said.
However, he clarified that this did not mean that there were no good
scientists in India. "There are a few individuals in various places who
are doing well, but this is not enough. We need many good institutions
doing outstanding work, so that we can accommodate capable young
scientists," he added.
Brahmachari sees the glass half full.
Given the low input, and that the best minds have left India for greener
pastures, he feels Indian science has done "outstandingly well".
Ramamurthy highlights another key problem in the way science is being
practised in the country - the project mode. "In today's environment of
research in project mode with well-defined objectives, milestones and
deliverables, curiosity-driven research is a casualty," he said.
Research objectives too are increasingly disconnected from society,
asserts Abrol. Giving the example of agriculture, he says that an
obsession with increasing yield while ignoring the consequences of
intensive agriculture in the five major grain producing states has led
to a sustainability crisis -ground water depletion, waterlogging,
chemical over-kill. "Yet our research goals continue to be better
yielding varieties rather than sustainable productivity," he said. -TOI
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