C.N.R. Rao is a worried man today. He is worried that he does not have too much time left to spend with science.
He is equally bothered that despite having so many scientific institutions in the country, India is not very competitive in science and that quantitatively and qualitatively, the country has not moved much forward in science.
The quantum of science research coming from India was just about 2.5 per cent of the world’s output. Of the top one per cent of the world’s scientific research, India’s contribution was a mere 0.5 per cent, while the U.S. contributed 63 per cent and Europe, 30 per cent, Prof. Rao, internationally renowned scientist, National Research Professor, and Bharat Ratna winner, said. “India does not have too much time. We have everything going and still if we do not do well in the next ten years, we can forget about it,” he said.
Prof. Rao was delivering the second G. Parthasarathy oration at the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST) here on Tuesday.
The man who took the road less travelled — he pioneered the science of solid state chemistry — lamented that, today, scientists were not after science, but positions of power.
“Greatness should go with simplicity, which is what the life of true scientists such as Faraday has taught me. The beauty of science is that it makes you very selfless. If you are a true scientist, then you learn to become selfless, happy, to go beyond the trivia and be generous in spirit,” Prof. Rao said. He spoke nostalgically about his wonderful journey which began in the meagre labs of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, when he had to make his own instruments and furnace to perform experiments.
But the value systems of those times were different. Education and science were respected; teachers, who despite not getting any salary, loved to teach, he said.
“As a nation, we have lost our sense of humour, we are high on personal criticism and we do not know to take failures. But in science, you have to fail to succeed. Unless India gets rid of the very negative atmosphere that has been pervading (the scientific institutions) in the past few years, we should not expect good things,” he said.
