Science for whom?

by Ashok Khosla

After independence, successive governments in India have made major commitments –

both financial and political – to science and technology. Nowhere else in the third world
(and, indeed, in very few countries of the first world) has so much public money been spent
on research in pursuit of the elusive PROMISE OF SCIENCE. With a budget of more than
Rs. 1,000 crores per year, the scientific enterprise in India is today among the largest in the
world.
But is it among the best?
This huge investment has been made and clearly justified by our national leaders on the
strength of the vital role scientific knowledge and improved technology has to play in
“modernisation” of the nation. And, of course, the outputs of all this national scientific effort
can be seen in many years of urban life and the industrial economy. Medicines, energy
production, construction, transportation are activities that have benefited considerably from
technological advances. Accelerated food production, an outcome of the green revolution
is, of course, the prime example of how science can make a difference.
In the meantime, the poor have become poorer and the and the trees and animals in our
forests have disappeared. There are at least 650 million people in India who have had
access to hardly any benefit that can be traced to all this expenditure on science and
technology. This is twice the total number of people who lived in the country at the time of
independence.

Our natural resource base, which was once the richest on earth, has eroded precipitously.
Within a short space of forty years this subcontinent, known for thousands of years the
world over for its water and fertile land, finds itself rapidly becoming one vast,
overpopulated desert.
In this light, one must ask not only the political leadership of our country, but also the
scientific community: WHAT EXACTLY HAS BEEN YOUR CONTRIBUTION TO THE
DEVELOPMENT OF OUR NATION?
In crude terms, how much better off is our country as a result of the 30-odd thousand crore
rupees that have been dumped into the nation’s scientific research cauldron? Science in
India has certainly had some successes and we are proud of those scientists in our country
who do world class science. Yet, as a whole, it would be hard for anyone to prove that our
scientific institutions have acquired either of the two most fundamental attributes of Great
Science – excellence or relevance. If the scientific community in the country does not
recognise its responsibility in creating and nurturing a science that serves the needs of the
nation – primarily for the eradication of the poverty an the conservation of its natural
resources – it will soon find itself peripheral to the nation’s aspirations.
When will our scientific bodies bring themselves to legitimise scientific work than can have
some positive impact on the lives of the large numbers of people who today exist in the
villages and urban slums of our country? How long will it take for the mainstream scientific
community to realise that imitative research, largely reinvestigating problems of relevance
to others and defined elsewhere, can never lead to great science?
The time for meetings, reports and recommendations is long past. Science cannot survive
for long if it is not grounded in the realities of a nation’s life. Indian science, for its own
survival, must now redefine its direction and espouse both excellence and relevance

Professional rewards, largely fashioned and realised by the academics and their
constituencies, have to be redesigned. In many cases they have to encourage the
opposite of what they promote today. This will start to happen when society as a whole,
and the scientific community in particular, stops beings polite and asks WHEN WILL THE
PROMISE BE FULFILLED?