The project to detect neutrinos—mysterious, chargeless, massless sub-atomic particles—was called off in 1990 because the Indian government was unwilling to shell out Rs 50 crore. But others kept pegging away at it, and a Japanese researcher (Masatoshi Koshiba) eventually went on to share the 2002 Nobel with two others.
The Kolar gold fields experiment was initiated in the 1950s by the nuclear physicist, Homi J. Bhabha, to study cosmic rays. But it was in 1965 that neutrinos were detected by M.G.K. Menon and his associates V. S. Narasimham, B. V. Sreekantan and Ramanamurthy, and their Japanese collaborator S. Miyake.
For its experiments, the Indian team installed, 8,000 feet below the earth’s surface, a giant 140-ton detector. They did a large number of experiments, most of them with Miyake from Osaka City University till 1980, when support for the project gradually began waning.
Coincidentally, Masatoshi Koshiba initiated his work in 1982. He built detectors in Kamioka that were about 100 times more sophisticated than the kgf one. Now called the Kamiokande detector, they could spot neutrinos coming from the explosion of a star 1,70,000 light years away.
Although Menon acknowledges the "top-class" contributions of Koshiba, he adds ruefully: "Our team did the pioneering work which subsequently opened up the field for further exploitation." Adds Ramanath Cowsik, director, Indian Institute of Astrophysics: "We had all the wherewithal. We lost out because we never dared to invest heavily in building detectors."
How much? India used to spend about Rs 1 crore on the kgf experiments. An annual outlay of Rs 50 crore was required to take the project into the next orbit. That was not coming because the gold mining had trickled to a halt.
Wise after the event, the government is now talking of flagging off the project again.
The June 2003 issue of the British journal Nature reports: "Indian high-energy physicists are seeking to revive neutrino science in the country by building an underground physics laboratory. If all goes to plan, the proposed Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO) could be operational by 2010."
An initial grant of Rs 5 crore has already been made to select a site in West Bengal. A location under the Nilgiri Mountains in Tamil Nadu where suitable man-made shafts of huge length are already available is also under consideration. The project is expected to cost Rs 2.5 billion.