The Devil's Laboratory

Think for a moment. Why is it that India can make satellites but cannot provide safe drinking water to more than 70 per cent of its people? Why is it that we can fashion sophisticated nuclear weapon systems but controlling epidemics like malaria or tuberculosis is not strategic enough? Why is that we are rooting for a mission to the moon but consider preventing floods that affect millions of lives every year unimportant?

Think for a moment again. Why do a majority of internationally reputed Indian scientists invariably happen to be either mathematicians or theoretical physicists? Or, conversely, why do we not produce great innovators, biologists, product designers, archaeologists or even, for that matter, environmental scientists?

What is, indeed, wrong with Indian science? A fast-greying scientific community, misprioritised resources and a brain drain that progressively impoverishes the atmosphere of scholarship at home-it's a lethal cocktail. The hierarchical structure of science institutions and a brahminical insistence on theory rather than on solving people's problems doesn't help matters either. Add to this the refusal of industry to patronise science and the looming synergy of the military-industrial complex, and the picture is one of utter gloom.

Pushp M. Bhargava, prominent biochemist and former founder-director of the Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, is scathing about the relevance and quality of Indian science: "Science here is characterised by a pervasive mediocrity. There is a lack of originality and of the courage to challenge absurdity in all spheres-individual or at the policy level-and to defend truth. There's widespread plagiarism and the denial of credit where it is due. There's complacency, self-glorification and cronyism in our scientific community too."

He is right. For one, Indian science is decidedly jaded today: a Department of Science and Technology (DST) study found that nearly a third of our scientists at the junior level, two-thirds at middle level and four-fifths at the senior level are on the verge of superannuation. The indictment comes from within the establishment: a study underwritten by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) said the structure and spirit of our education system produced chance brilliance and wholesale mediocrity. "Indian science today is an arid wasteland with little to recommend and less to hope," says R.N. Sharma of the Pune-based National Chemical Laboratory. "There is a complete lack of direction and a total inability to plan or even comprehend future trends and compulsions."

No wonder there's been a disturbing decline in interest in science among students. Between 1970 and 1990, student enrolment in natural sciences fell from 32 per cent to 20 per cent. Even more alarming, the quality of scientists has steadily deteriorated: proof is that India produces one of the largest number of trivial or junk papers, as judged by how often they are cited in international journals. Despite a large scientific fleet and our much-flaunted success in computer software, India ranks a sorry 15 in terms of innovation, according to The Economist.

N. Vittal, former chairman of the Telecom Mission, makes a withering comment: "We're producing an army of techno-coolies."

Strapped for funds, science departments in universities are in a shambles, with students forced to do with fewer journals and inadequate laboratory facilities. The best of the students go abroad at the first opportunity. According to a 1990-91 US National Science Foundation survey, 67 to 80 per cent of Indian engineers who receive PhDs in the US do not plan to return to India. Close to 30 per cent of those who graduate from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) emigrate to the US every year while 15 per cent float their own ventures. The brain drain is clearly shocking: half a million Indian engineers and scientists are working abroad now, according to an estimate. The cost of this drain to India: some $13 billion, according to DST. The computer software boom has only worsened matters.

The performance of state-funded laboratories has been equally disheartening. The 51-year-old Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), which piloted research to curb malaria, small pox, TB and other epidemics in the '50s, '60s and '70s, is today showing signs of middle age-mired in allegations of incompetence, corruption and unethical conduct of clinical trials. ICMR's findings of its studies of the Bhopal gas victims have not been made public for a decade now. The 10 fields in which ICMR produced most papers between '87 and '94 didn't include tropical medicine-the study of infectious diseases such as malaria-or respiratory diseases, according to a review in Medline, a bibliographic database covering medical research in the US and 70 other nations. And despite India's more than 12 million blind people, "hardly any" research was done in ophthalmology. Says Debabar Bannerji, former founder-director of the Jawaharlal Nehru University's Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health in Delhi, "Public health research is as good as dead in this country. Research grants are spent on what I call carbon copy research-irrelevant and wasteful."

That's not all. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), which takes credit for engineering the green revolution, has only recently publicly acknowledged the heavy toll that the revolution wrought on soil ecology. Indeed, the aftermath of the revolution was documented by environmental activists like Claude Alvarez and Vandana Shiva and not ICAR.

The 58-year-old CSIR, which runs 40 scientific laboratories in the country, too has not escaped this slow descent into undistinguished mediocrity. In the entire history of CSIR, only three out of over 20,000 papers published by its scientists have been cited more than 100 times against a world average of one out of every 250.

This is true of Indian scientific research as a whole. A comparison with China is instructive. Even though China's share of publications is much smaller-0.9 per cent as against India's 1.58 per cent-its relative citation index (total number of papers published divided by the citation impact) is more or less the same. This implies India produces far more trivial papers than China.

The monopoly of mega-science such as space, atomic and nuclear research has relegated the more relevant and pressing problems of India's poor to the background. State funding for research and development has fallen by 50 per cent over the last decade. More than 60 per cent of the total corpus is hogged by the departments of defence, space and atomic energy; only eight per cent goes to university sciences. Worse still, the hike in salaries by the Fifth Pay Commission has effectively trimmed funds for research to less than 15 per cent.

The politics of funding also points to the skewed priorities of Indian science. It isn't a coincidence then that the better-known physicists and mathematicians work in well-funded institutes as the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad and the Mehta Research Institute in Allahabad. Further, some institutes may represent fruits of a single individual's labours or mission, for instance the Bangalore-based Raman Research Institute founded by C.V. Raman, or the Pune-based Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics headed by cosmologist Jayant Narlikar.

No wonder scarce public funds are spent on such research as probing the origins of the universe. At least four of these major institutes-TIFR, Narlikar's iucaa, the Mehta Institute and the Bangalore-based Indian Institute Of Astrophysics-do work on cosmogonic theories. The most recent example of this twin tendency of profligacy and self-congratulation: a Rs 53-crore telescope in Ladakh, said to be the world's highest.

Then our scientific institutes are run in a dictatorial fashion. Scientists claim there is little democratic freedom for junior researchers. Disgruntled junior scientists in TIFR went on a strike in protest against the "bossism" of their seniors. Or take physicist Parthasarthy Joardar, who is currently fighting his unceremonious dismissal from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. "I joined as a regular faculty member with a probation of one year. One fine day, I received a letter from the director asking me to pack my bags because 'my performance had been found unsatisfactory'. I wasn't given any chance to defend myself," he complains. He has gone to the courts to fight his case. "Few science administrators are willing to even concede that there is a problem. For them it is business as usual," says P. Balaram, molecular physicist at Bangalore's Indian Institute of Science (IISC) and editor of Current Science, the country's most reputed science journal.

Unfortunately, even assessments of Indian scientific research, introspective or objective, are few and far between. Possibly the only large-scale study was done way back in 1991. Authored by Rais Ahmed, former director of the National Council for Educational Research and Training, and Madhulika Rakesh, a researcher at CSIR, the study investigated the quality, character and efficiency of scientific research in 27 institutions in the country-six central universities like Delhi University and IISC; 16 state universities; and the five IITs. There is no reason to believe that things have vastly improved after that (see infographic).

Alarmed by the misdemeanours rampant in the scientific community, about 450 researchers from all over the country got together this April in Hyderabad and drafted the first ever code of conduct for scientists and institutions. The 15-point code says, among other things, that scientists shouldn't "cook" results, pad their publications list or "yield to social or political pressures". The code for institutions calls for protecting whistle-blowers by "institutionalising dissent". The DST has been asked to evolve a charter for scientists based on this-though its use-value may be limited to being an index of moral outrage in the ranks.

In this atmosphere, it's not surprising that most Indian scientists rarely debate on controversial issues like big dams, appropriate technology, environmental pollution, biotechnology and strategic nuclear research. The rhetoric over India's explosion of a nuclear device reinforced their faceless nature. Says T. Jayaraman, an astrophysicist at the Chennai-based Institute of Mathematical Sciences who was served a showcause notice for penning an article critical of the bomb, "The claims of scientific achievement have been accepted without any challenge. Nor has there been any significant criticism of the political role of the atomic energy and defence research establishments in the abrupt and adventurist reversal of India's established nuclear policy line." The lack of candour and openness among Indian scientists was evident when Outlook sent a questionnaire to 25 scientists around the country to get their opinions: only two of them finally responded.

So what are the viruses that have gnawed hollow the vitals of Indian science? Why haven't we produced more Ramans, Meghnad Sahas or G.N. Ramachandrans in the last 50 years? What explains the popular opinion that we are not a nation of inventors? Why is there such contempt for anything "made in India"? And why have they failed to contribute to any uniform national development-except for producing hi-tech pockets of notional value?

Ashok Khosla, founder of Development Alternatives, a Delhi-based ngo, says Indian scientists are out of sync with realities. Writing in Current Science, he says: "Eminent scientists often complain of inadequate funding and lack of support from society for their valuable endeavours. However, few are in a position to describe what their community actually contributes in return for such support. Scientists clearly feel no more compulsion to be accountable than any other privileged group in our country."

One school of thought, however, contends that the genesis itself of Indian science and technology had significant defects. Nehru's grandiose, messianic and top-down vision of science as the liberator of Indian masses from the shackles of poverty, illiteracy and superstition had triumphed over Gandhi's idea of gram swarajya, of science nourishing the villages. Scientists like M.N. Saha and P.C. Ray, who were in favour of a more democratic approach to science, were sidelined by czars like Homi Bhabha, P.C. Mahalanobis, S.S. Bhatnagar and D.S. Kothari, who between them drew up the blueprint of Indian science. "Bhabha believed that the problem of transforming an industrially underdeveloped country to a developed one could be solved by establishing big organisations. He did not perceive the significance of social forces in bringing about scientific and industrial transformation. His perceptions were directly borrowed from technologically advanced nations," says Dhirendra Sharma, a science policy analyst and a staunch critic of India's nuclear policy.

P.V. Indiresan, former director of IIT Madras, also is convinced that "creating CSIR, which has only bred incompetence and inefficiency at the expense of our universities, was our biggest mistake". No wonder J.B.S. Haldane, the famous British biologist who emigrated to India, parodied it as the Council for the Suppression of Independent Research! Even Raman was opposed to building of large national laboratories, which he feared would eventually become 'mausoleums of science' and mockingly referred to it as the outcome of the "Nehru-Bhatnagar Effect".

To whip it out of its mediocrity and sloth, CSIR director general R.A. Mashelkar has chosen to run his organisation along the lines of a research corporation. He calls himself the ceo of CSIR Inc. More patents, more world-class research papers, more consultancies-this is the new research ideology, science as a market, and not public, good. Although the ceo may have more patents and consultancies to show since he took over CSIR, critics have raised questions over whether the new profit ethic would not limit academic freedom, let alone improve the lot of India's wretched millions.

While there is talk about raising s&t budget from the current 0.8 per cent of gnp to about 2 per cent, there is still little talk of restructuring corrupt organisations like the ugc and the scientific bureaucracy, of setting up norms of accountability, of a rethink on what constitutes strategic science. Without revamping and revitalising universities, without democratising the process of funding and peer review, and without taking into account people's choices and aspirations, Mammon alone cannot revive the zombie of Indian science.