This 75th year of Independence is a major milestone for India; a time to take stock of the developments in various spheres over the last seven decades. Sadly, with some notable exceptions such as this newspaper, the print and electronic media have not really taken stock of what has happened to science education in this country. While politicians, writers, artists, actors and other celebrities have been given their due, science and scientists seem to have been largely ignored. The general apathy towards science, and the lack of scientific temper among the public and politicians, is a poor commentary on the Indian sensibility.
The loss of a scientific temper
Although India has made some significant scientific advances in research fields such as molecular biology, agricultural/pharmaceutical science, and solid-state chemistry, and some creditable leaps in space, nuclear science, and information technology, it has failed to propagate scientific literacy not only among the public, but also among scientists themselves. Parliament underscored our commitment to propagate scientific temper by including it as a duty in Article 51A of the Constitution through the 42nd Amendment. Article 51A says, “It shall be the duty of every citizen of India to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.”
But despite these efforts, scientific temper has continued to remain a lofty ideal and has not really percolated into society. This has left much of our national psyche a prisoner of obscurantism and paved the way for retrogressive religion-based politics at the expense of constitutionally guaranteed secular values. A solid foundation for modern science was built by scientists in the 1950s and 1960s, facilitated by the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. So, what went wrong?
A part of the problem may lie with scientists themselves and the science academies they belong to. Scientists half-heartedly stood up for scientific causes, even when the situations demanded that they fully do so. The eminent molecular biologist, Pushpa Bhargava, in an article Scientists without a scientific temper in The Hindu on January 17, 2015, said, “...The bulk of scientists in the country, including many who were occupying high positions, were themselves not committed to scientific temper which calls for rationality, reason and lack of belief in any dogma, superstition or manifest falsehood.”
In 1994, Bhargava resigned from all the three academies — the Indian National Science Academy, the Indian Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences — protesting their lack of commitment to “science-related social problems”. He also wrote in the 2015 article that India had not produced any Nobel Prize winner in science since 1930 “largely because of the lack of a scientific environment in the country, of which scientific temper would be an important component.” Like sport, which requires an athletic culture, science will flourish only if a scientific temper is generated across the country. It is the job of the science academies to chip in and inspire the country to attain greater science literacy among the public. This will perhaps better justify their existence.
