Fixing Indian Science: Between Incremental Drift And Disruptive Breakthroughs

Science is the endeavour of human beings to understand, control and manage the material world around them, and apply the knowledge so gained to create conditions where life becomes more convenient, pleasant and enjoyable. It is, quite simply, a question of better science for better living. Science usually includes the allied areas of engineering and technology. The benefits of scientific activity are amplified by our leaders through their political priorities, so that they reach and improve the life of common citizens.

This continuous stream of productive learning and application has been a hallmark of civilised society ever since man learned to grow crops, rear livestock, make implements, and cure diseases. After such basic necessities were attended to, man became curious and started observing the heavens. In this way, systematic science began.

An unalterable fact of life is that better science can be done only when there is more money in a society. Good science creates the money that makes for better science. A Galileo required a prosperous Venice, and a Faraday required an England which was colonising and industrialising rapidly.

Most problems and impediments to doing good science are of economic origin, and when these problems cross a certain threshold, it is only a matter of time before scientific sluggishness sets in. At this stage, politics enters the picture because the elected representatives, namely from the legislative and executive wings of government, who are entrusted with the amplification of science for overall social betterment, are unable to properly discharge their responsibility. They then descend into clientist politics.

This is what happened in independent India. This combination of economics and politics in a continuous thread has stitched the fabric of science in our country after 1947.

Indian science is a story of heroes, heartbreaks and hopes. The heroes belong to the past, the heartbreaks have to do with the present, and the hopes are for the future. It is a matter of interest that in the age of heroes, science in India was not doing too badly in terms of money.

The critical breakthrough in C. V. Raman’s research that won him a Nobel Prize was the grant of ₹22,000 from G. D. Birla in the 1920s, which enabled him to buy a spectrometer for his measurements. The equivalent today would have been a grant of ₹6 crore, which is not unreasonable for a piece of advanced equipment with which one could do competitive research.

Many of the labs of yesteryears’ centres of excellence such as Allahabad University took shape and nurtured scholars, in part due to heavy donations by scientists of their earnings through patents. The message is clear: more money leads to better science.

When Meghnad Saha left Allahabad for Calcutta, his professorial chair was offered to Erwin Schrödinger after the latter had won a Nobel Prize in physics. Schrödinger actually accepted the offer but could not take it up because the onset of World War II prevented him from travelling from Germany to India. This was the glorious situation with regard to science education and research in India in the pre-independence days. The same university is in a sorry shape today.

The decline of science in India, what I refer to as the era of heartbreaks, set in with the 1955 Avadi resolution of the Congress Party. This political decision committed India to a socialistic pattern of society. Money would be spent mostly on freebies, sops, and subsidies rather than investing it in developing the intellectual capital, educational strength and moral fibre of the country. In the end, this would have been the only long-term solution for the problems of the really disadvantaged communities in a chronically poor country.

Poverty is degrading and we saw a situation where bad economics led to bad politics. In science, our scarcity-driven economy led to the consolidation of a gatekeeper class, who captured most of the limited funding for science that was available and distributed it amongst their group.

Good science always originates from a sound system of education and it is perhaps here that India has made a misstep. It is curious that our defence, space and atomic energy organisations seem to have done well to the extent that we were able to land a satellite on the hitherto unexplored south pole of the moon, and design weapons of war that seem to have inflicted considerable damage on the enemy in Operation Sindoor.

On the other hand, the government almost seems to have deliberately neglected primary and higher education, allowing the status quo, where there is little connection between education and employment, to continue.

Using Occam’s razor, a beloved ploy of scientists, the above-mentioned successful organisations do not follow caste-based reservations in hiring or promotions. Is it the case then that we have been unable to balance equity with excellence in India? From the earliest days in any society, very good science only came about if merit was prized. We seem to have reconciled ourselves to a situation where, for political compulsions, merit has been sidestepped in favour of government-sponsored mediocrity.

What of the future and our hopes for India to assume its rightful place in the international scientific scene? By this I mean a stage where Indian scientists are doing excellent science of a world-class standard and not the imitative copycat science we do, believing it to be the real thing.

Our country is at a cusp in time. Incrementalism, of which we are inordinately fond and which is symptomatic of fearfulness, our national characteristic, has conspired to condemn Indian science onto a flat trajectory. The best technology, in terms of being the one that gives exponential economic growth, only comes from owning one’s science.

Indigo was synthesised in Germany, the silicon chip was fabricated in America, and penicillin was discovered in England. These were all home-grown breakthroughs and the benefits that accrued to the countries of their origin were simply enormous. Unless we have our own science, we cannot aspire to competitive technologies.

India faces a stark choice in science and technology today between incrementalism and disruptive change. We are at a renaissance moment with no time to lose. The kālachakra is relentless and unforgiving. We need to choose between the familiar and the unknown. There must be a balance between these two avenues of progress.

Where and when do we move in increments and where and when do we disrupt? Disruption is, by definition, fast. How slow or fast should incrementalism be? There must be a golden mean between disruption and incrementalism where the economic gains that accrue to the country are disproportionately large.

This is the mean we must seek. Such are the questions that politicians, bureaucrats and most of all, Indian scientists must ponder over. There is no time to waste.

Gautam Desiraju is in the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and UPES Dehradun. He has the highest citations-to-papers ratio of 104 among Indian scientists.