The good news

First, the good news. The funding scenario for science in India is better than ever, with lots of infrastructure, startup funds and facilities provided to young aspiring professors. A major recent initiative has been the creation of the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs) whose primary goal has been to meld undergraduate education with research, something that’s traditionally been almost completely missing in India. Expensive new centers including a neutrino observatory, a clean nanotechnology lab and most impressively, an open-source tuberculosis drug discovery project are highlighting India’s ambition and capabilities to focus on relevant and cutting edge fields.

In addition there’s a surplus of faculty positions at some top institutes that will make faculty candidates in Western countries feel jealous. A great example is the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore which provides a premier research environment. Many of these institutes have year-round hiring. There are also a few lucrative fellowships designed to attract expatriate Indians back to their country to set up their labs. Some of them allow you to start a lab anywhere that you want in the country. Purely in terms of facilities and funding, this is a good time to do academic science in India. And after a long, fallow period of scientific entrepreneurship, there are finally opportunities for Indian scientists to turn their discoveries into profits, although time would tell how efficient the system is in reality.

In addition, being an assistant professor (or any higher middle-class working professional for that matter) in India has its perks; one gets cheap access to maids who will cook and clean for your family and a driver who will drive you around. The maids will also double as baby-sitters and will occasionally shop for your groceries. Science institutes in India often offer highly subsidized housing and meals. Adjusting for these perks and for purchasing power parity, it’s not a big exaggeration to say that being an assistant professor in a top Indian research university is a comfortable prospect.

The bad news

Now the bad news, which unfortunately points to some rather deep structural problems which have beset Indian science education and research since its post-independence conception. To gain some insight into these it’s worth looking at some history.

For a developing country India has always been pretty big on science. Nobel Prize winners like H. G. Khorana (who died a few months back) and C. V. Raman emerged from the old education system which was modeled after the British system. In some fields like statistics India has consistently produced world-class researchers. After India became independent in 1947, science was one of the top priorities for the country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, a Cambridge-educated lawyer. Even today Nehru remains India’s most scientifically literate leader and he was instrumental in establishing both the well-known Indian Institutes of Technology and several leading federal research laboratories.

Unfortunately, Nehru’s undoubtedly visionary outlook on science was severely crippled by his equally fervent belief in Soviet-style socialism. While this did not lead to the genocidal horrors seen in the Soviet Union and China, it did lead to forty years or so of socialist “reforms” and “five-year plans” modeled on the Soviet system of education under which science and especially basic science floundered. Constraints were tightly imposed both on funding and on financial incentives for Indian scientists. Scientific entrepreneurship leading to intellectual property was virtually non-existent. Keeping in line with the Soviet system however, there was heavy investment in both atomic energy and the space program and India emerged as a leading power in these sectors. Today there is a nuclear weapons complex, but more promisingly there is advanced nuclear reactor research trying to produce electricity from thorium. And as the article notes, the advanced status of the space program has led India to make ambitious plans for a manned moon landing.

But basic science has been neglected, and even after the opening up of Indian markets in the early 90s, the old system remains deeply ingrained in Indian science primarily in two debilitating ways.

Indian education: A riddle wrapped in a straitjacket

One huge hurdle is in the form of extremely limited undergraduate science education that still heavily relies on rote memorization without true understanding, discourages teamwork and most importantly, is almost completely uncoupled from research. As the articles note, this is most obvious in the large number of state-run universities in India that provide the bulk of the science education in the country. Almost no Indian state-run university offers decent research opportunities for undergraduates, a pronounced oversight that is starting to be remedied by institutes like the IISERs but still on a very small scale. An interesting contrast is that compared to top science institutes which can be awash in funds and facilities, state-run schools remain not just woefully under-equipped but blatantly ignorant of safety regulations. It is not uncommon to find chemistry labs even at respectable colleges without a single fume hood inside them.

In addition, the curriculum in most of these places is outdated. For instance, much of the biology curriculum still asks students to memorize intricate details of invertebrate anatomy and physiology. Physical chemistry courses include outdated textbooks from the 1950s by Samuel Glasstone and Bruce Mahan (these are classics and were excellent textbooks for their time, but they cannot be part of a modern chemical education that is supposed to prepare students for a research career). Physics is full of tuning forks, inclined plains and Wheatstone bridges. The notebooks of organic chemistry students still devote reams of paper to structure determination by chemical degradation of the kind that was done before spectroscopic techniques became available. A similar situation exists in the laboratory, with many experiments and apparatus looking quaint and outdated. To be sure there are chapters on molecular biology, protein chemistry, NMR spectroscopy, quantum chemistry, combinatorial chemistry and other modern topics, but they are mostly reserved for graduate level courses, and one wonders why undergraduates are expected to be steeped in all that outdated material.

However, the bigger problem in the Indian education system may not even be this lack of research opportunities for science undergraduates but the more general blinkered education that Indian college students are forced to endure. To begin with, the system has defined an extremely strange and regressive compartmentalization of education that seems to dissuade any kind of flexibility in learning, let alone in interdisciplinary study. It is no secret that ever since India opened up its markets and globalization brought West and East under the same economic umbrella, there has been a steady demand for Indian engineers and technical professionals in the West. But this has also led to a highly skewed bias toward engineering, medical and business education in the country. Importantly, it has manifested itself in the proliferation and segregation of professional universities from those offering science and humanities courses. This means that an engineering schools teaches only engineering, and a medical school teaches only medicine. So once you are out of high school you are forced to pick your major and your career. Get into an engineering school and you are pretty much shut out from being able to study psychology or chemistry or economics. For that you need to get into a school more akin to liberal arts colleges in the US. But even there you have to pick your major right in your freshman year; you can’t study both the sciences and the humanities. If you want to take chemistry you won’t be able to take philosophy. In fact the situation is so bad that in most places students cannot study even biology and mathematics together!

Needless to say, this system places a newly-minted high-school student into a draconian straitjacket where he or she has to pick a career and then stick with it for the next four years with absolutely no flexibility in changing a major or adapting one’s talents to one’s profession. It should also be obvious that this strict compartmentalization affords almost no opportunities for developing interdisciplinary research skills, a staple of today’s complex research problems. The result is predictable; an alarmingly large number of students who when they graduate from college are either unhappy with their major or incompetent at it or both.

Compounding these problems is perhaps an even bigger one; the social perception of professional education at the expense of relegating the sciences and humanities to the dustbin of mediocrity. The great demand for engineers, doctors and businessmen has placed these disciplines on a pedestal. As a result, the standards for admissions to these professional courses are much higher than those for the sciences or humanities. This typically means that spots in these professional courses are reserved for students who graduate from high school with the highest grades. Conversely, left to study the sciences and humanities are the scum of the earth, high-school graduates who are usually at the bottom of the pile. Since almost nobody from the top is going to fill out the science or humanities application, the liberal arts colleges relax their admission criteria to accommodate the most mediocre of the lot. The bottom line: engineering colleges tend to be populated with smart, articulate, ambitious students while the liberal arts colleges fill up with students who are studying sciences or the humanities pretty much because they aren’t good enough to get into any other place. No wonder that many of these state-run colleges are filled with mediocre and unhappy students who would rather be doing something else. This is unfair both to the students but more fatally to the disciplines themselves which suffer from active neglect at best and a constant assault of mediocre minds at worst.

It needs no imagination to perceive the effect of this segregation on the occasional outlier who, in spite of getting top grades in high school, consciously stays away from engineering or medicine because he actually wants to study chemistry or physics. For one thing he will have a very hard time finding intelligent, like-minded peers who can provide intellectual companionship, and we all know how influential the peer environment in college can be. In addition, the segregated system will virtually ensure that most of his peers outside his college will look down upon him; they will think that the reason he is not studying engineering is because he wasn’t good enough and more generally, the fact that he is not studying engineering means that he isn’t really worth paying attention to. In addition to the lack of research opportunities cited above and the mediocre faculty at state-run colleges combined with the poor employment outlook for scientists compared to other professionals, it is hardly surprising that many bright science students quickly leave science and get into better-paying professional fields. Now there’s a reason for the common complaint cited in the article, that Indian students are not studying the sciences anymore.

There is also a related social reason not discussed in the article which I just alluded to; the lack of societal respect for science and the humanities. Partly because of the educational segregation outlined above and partly because of a curious mentality that equates monetary success with intelligence and capability, Indian parents are loathe to encourage their kids to study anything other than professional disciplines. One theory I have about this has to do with the environment that many of these parents grew up in, that of socialist India. If you were an Indian parent who could not make money because of government constraints and if your son or daughter were growing up in a new, more market-friendly India, you certainly wouldn’t want your children to forgo the opportunities that you didn’t have. In this sense, many Indian parents who want their kids to become affluent are living the dream that they themselves couldn’t live. This is reasonable within limits, but it’s also creating a significant social bias towards all kinds of other professions including the sciences, humanities and the arts. In turn, the kids are judging other kids by the same standards that their parents have applied to them. In their worldview, any other kid who is not doing the same thing that they are doing must be unintelligent, misguided in his ambitions or both. This attitude feeds upon itself and perpetuates and has created a manifestly unhealthy peer environment. If India is to attract its best minds to science, it must create a society where science is respected for its intrinsic value at all levels, from parents to kids to teachers.

In India, B doesn’t stand for ball

One of the distinguishing features of all socialist countries and especially the old Soviet Union was the ubiquitous bureaucracy that pervaded every aspect of life. Indian bureaucracy and red tape are famous and recalcitrant, so recalcitrant that it seems that even twenty odd years of free-market reforms have been ineffective in undoing them. There has undoubtedly been much progress; for instance, getting a simple telephone line installed in your office in the 1980s could take up to a year. Other simple services could results in unacceptable delays and a trail of paperwork that would put a rainforest conservationist to shame. Setting up a small business in India was a nightmare and to some extent it still is; by one account you need 165 licenses to open a hotel in the country. But things have changed. Wireless companies have flooded the market and ensured that the Indian telephone experience is no different from anywhere else in the world, and Mumbai today probably sports a more diverse collection of cell-phone models than Los Angeles. Setting up a business is still not easy, but you don’t have to spend your entire life waiting for it.

Yet science seems to be straggled by unacceptable bureaucracy. But before we move on to its more predictable effects, we should first note its most startling aspect: the lack of a tenure system in Indian academia. For the longest time, even in top Indian institutions, there was no tenure review process and mediocre performers essentially hung around for life. Sometime in their 40s or 50s they would be bumped up from “assistant” to “associate” position by virtue of “seniority” alone. But institutions would naturally be obliged to pay their salaries and benefits even as they were producing little noteworthy research and blocking positions for younger scientists. A mandatory retirement somewhat compensated for the problem, but the effect of this accumulation of deadwood cannot be underestimated. The renewal of scientific blood and constant assessment of existing personnel is an essential condition for scientific productivity. Without tenure, not only was there no replenishment of the stock but there was a constant, general sense of malaise that spread to other faculty members and students. This factor is so obviously important that it’s not even worth elaborating on it too much. Whatever the merits and drawbacks of existing tenure systems in the West, it goes without saying that there should be some system of periodic evaluation and tenure. Thankfully some institutes like the NCBS have now instituted tenure reviews, but this is still a drop in the ocean compared to the vast majority of Indian science institutions.

Then there are the more prosaic but undoubtedly debilitating effects of bureaucracy. Senior Indian scientists cited in the Science articles remember the 60s and 70s when they had to wait months for simple chemicals and equipment and were asked to justify the details of every single purchase. State-of-the art equipment is now found at many top Indian institutions, but the justification part has largely stayed the same. Funding for Indian science may have grown, but every rupee is watched with a fervor that would evoke Big Brother. The article quotes an Indian scientist lamenting this situation and saying that he feels stifled by a system that asks him to submit a detailed report on his work every 3 months. It’s one thing to ask for detailed progress reports, it’s another to almost dictate the direction of someone’s research by scrutinizing every detail. Bureaucracy also engenders a lack of transparency, with officials conveniently hiding their responsibilities and mistakes under layers of obfuscatory paperwork. It’s pretty obvious that open science and freedom of inquiry can never thrive under such constraints.

The red tape also dissuades existing scientists from striking out in new directions; as the Indian Institute of Science’s director Prof. P. Balaram puts it in one of the Science articles, “Even the best of intentions can disappear without a trace in the quicksands of officialdom”. This is especially stifling for expatriate Indian scientists who have been exposed to a different kind of research environment for many years and are now seeking to starts their own labs back in India. Unfortunately the experiences of scientists coming back to India after a long time seem all too alike; almost any effort by these scientists to institute progressive practices and cultures ingrained during their experience abroad can be construed as elitism and an insolent effort to rock the boat. It’s pretty clear that unless bureaucracy is seen as a culture-independent, fundamental barrier to scientific progress, research aspirations will continue to disappear into the “quicksands of officialdom”.

The battle hymn of the old guard

Many of the problems riddling Indian science could be distilled down to one factor; what’s been called the Indian “scientocracy”. This may well be the hardest hurdle to surmount since it really reflects a problem endemic in Indian society as a whole. Although it has been rapidly changing in the past few years, Indian society remains hierarchical at all levels, from the family to private organizations. Traditionally society has been organized, at least implicitly, by class, caste and official titles. The caste system may have been largely shaken off, but other layers remain.

India has a very strong paternalistic streak in its many organizations and scientific organizations are no exception. Hero-worship is a rather deeply ingrained part of Indian culture, although the young generation seems to be showing some promising signs of shaking it off. Age usually commands great respect and obedience. “Senior” scientists who have done especially noteworthy work can be virtually worshipped. Some are treated akin to Gods. Students are explicitly or implicitly encouraged not to talk back to professors or ask them probing questions. I have heard too many cases of students being “shown their place” when they tried to be too inquisitive in class. In most cases even younger scientists are not addressed on a first-name basis. In the lab the PI reigns supreme and most labs are run as minor fiefdoms. Even minor decisions and ideas may have to be approved by the PI. Irreverent inquiry is almost always squished, even if it may lead to productive science. This is the case even in private companies.

All this has led to a rather conspicuous lack of open inquiry of the kind that fosters efficient scientific communication and the dispersal of ideas. Science especially is the quintessentially egalitarian system, where the only thing that should matter is how good someone’s ideas are and not how old or distinguished they are. Last year in an Op-Ed in Science, a previous director of India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (the Indian counterpart to the NSF and the NIH) bemoaned the lack of irreverence in Indian scientific culture, although he must have been aware that his generation has played an active role in perpetuating it. He gave examples of famous scientists – Feynman, Watson, Crick, Feigenbaum, Venter – whose playful irreverence and lack of automatic respect for the “elders” in their field has led to both revolutionary ideas and a strong culture of innovation. The implications are clear; an Indian Feynman would probably be silenced and perhaps even cast out of the scientific establishment for daring to question his superiors. The Indian scientocracy dissuades bold, probing questioning.

The articles in Science don’t address this aspect of Indian science which I believe is of paramount importance. One does not create a scientifically fertile environment by surrounding himself with yes-men. There are countless cases to prove the contrary; the Manhattan Project and Bell Labs being only two examples of organizations where thinking outside the box led to great advances. True breakthroughs can only arise from individuals, and especially young individuals, questioning the status quo and boldly treading the boundaries of knowledge. Indian science clearly has to catch up.

The future?

The articles in science seem to strike a note of cautious optimism. India is certainly paying much more attention to its scientific landscape than it ever did and it is clearly eager to leave its mark. Whether symbolic or real, its aspirations for a moon shot signify its ambitions. The hurdle as I see it is that the problems outlined above run very deep and their roots extend through many generations. They are not problems which can be resolved in one year or even in ten. Plus, as some scientists in the article say, the sheer magnitude of the issues is such that even with all these efforts Indian science has not reached a critical mass; a startling statistic says that the total number of biologists in India is less than the number in Boston alone. So what can be done?

It is clear that the solution will have to come from multiple fronts. Some problems are easier to address than others. The syllabus will have to be overhauled and this can be accomplished at least locally at some places by convincing the administration of the value of including modern topics. The compartmentalization problem is more entrenched since it depends on demand for professional versus scientific jobs, a situation that’s unlikely to change in the near future. But at least in some cases it could be accomplished by driving home the conceptual and commercial value of cross-dsciplinary topics like neuroscience, biophysics and biostatistics.

The centrality of science in human progress and thinking must be driven home by the media, by educated intellectuals and most importantly by the senior scientists who seem to command public attention; perhaps some of them can put the hero-worship to good use. As upholders of the scientific status quo and guardians of the purse-strings, they can do a lot. This might generally improve the standing of science in the public consciousness. It might lead more top students to study science and it may lead their parents to support their ambitions. A lot of Indian scientists have blamed lucrative IT jobs for presumably drawing away scientific talent. It is clear that a nation full of IT professionals cannot fulfill its scientific destiny and demonstrate real progress, but this situation is unlikely to change any time soon, and as they say, it’s much better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. The new scientific initiatives melding undergraduate education and research and offering thousands of scholarships to bright high-school students are certainly a step in the right direction, but the fact that these initiatives have not yet touched the preponderant state-run universities leaves much to be desired.

Ultimately the transformation will take time, probably a long time. Young Indian scientists including homegrown researchers and expatriates have to work together and implement positive changes in scientific culture, lab safety and communication. They will start anew and there is no doubt that we will have to wait perhaps twenty or fifty years to see truly significant changes. They will nonetheless face resistance from some of the old guard , but one can always remember Max Planck’s statement: “A new scientific theory does not prevail because it convinces its detractors of its validity, but rather because its detractors die and a new generation grows up on it and recognizes its value”.

Renewal can be the only true catalyst for fundamental change.

[Image Credit: By Pérot [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons]

Most of those, whom I know, who make the mistake of quoting Einstein at this juncture to appease themselves, are those who after a certain time of practising science have come to the point where they need to face the reality. The reality that fate is in the hands of us human beings and that we have a huge responsibility for all our actions. That the world is based on causality and is not some puppet show. Or it is those who have always believed in God but in a lab their belief system is contradicting their science. Or those, like me, who have always been agnostic but gone along with the flow of religious rituals because they never needed to question their religious views. (It is not uncommon to not have to face your own religious views when you are surrounded by people of very similar views, which happens a lot in urban India).

Before I state my case, I will make it clear that my main source of reference is Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Einstein’s essays on this topic. And I am aware that this may put off many of those who consider Dawkins to be wrong. I certainly don’t think Dawkins is wrong but I also am not an in-your-face-atheist (or a ‘new atheist’ as people call it these days). I say this because, irrespective of your views of Dawkins, his account of Einsteinian religion is an objective account of Einstein’s beliefs and as such can be considered independent of his views on God. So read the following without prejudices please:

Much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion (a supernatural creator that is appropriate to worship). Einstein sometimes invoked the name of God, inviting misunderstanding by supernaturalists eager to misunderstand and claim so illustrious a thinker as their own.

One of Einstein’s most eagerly quoted remark is ‘Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.’ But Einstein also said, “It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious conviction, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

Here are more quotations from Einstein to give a flavour of Einsteinian religion:

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.

The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive.

Einstein was repeatedly indignant at the suggestion that he was a theist. He admired Spinoza’s philosophy. He said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings’?”

I’ll end this discussion with Dawkins’ explanation:

There is every reason to think famous Einsteinisms like ‘God is subtle but He is not malicious’ or ‘He does not play dice’ or ‘Did God have a choice in creating the Universe’ are certainly not theistic. ‘God does not play dice’ should be translated as ‘Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things.’ ‘Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ means ‘Could the universe have begun in any other way?’ Einstein was using ‘God’ in purely metaphorical, poetic sense.

The UK public values science and is interested in finding out about it, with two-thirds agreeing that knowing about science is important to them personally. The society is more at ease with science than a decade ago and sees science as leading to more benefits than harmful effects.

The UK government has recently released a study titled Public Attitudes to Science 2011. (See summary below). A foreword by the current Science Minister, David Willets, points to the fact this is the fourth in a series. The others were published in 2000, 2005 and 2008. I was glad to see that such initiatives have been taken at a governmental level. I’ll discuss some of the findings.

Many people feel their attitudes to science, both positive and negative, were formed at school.

Most also see careers in science as desirable, although there is less enthusiasm for working in science among 16- to 24-year olds.

The most interesting point in the UK report was the fact that. It makes me wonder how important it is to have a good science teacher given the impact he/she can have on a person’s life. It must make schools worry about how uninterested the youth seem to be about science.

The data suggest that recent media controversies such as “climategate” have had little impact on how much people feel they trust scientists, with a clear majority saying they trust scientists “about the same as they did five years ago”

Most support Government funding of science even for projects that bring no immediate benefits, even in the current context of reduced Government spending generally.

But it was pleasantly surprising to know that people still trust scientists especially after all the climate change skeptics have been rallying around the country to put to shame the scientists involved in the ‘climategate’. That trust is well demonstrated by the fact the public are ready to support blue skies research.

While searching for similar studies done in India, I found that the Indian National Science Academy had published a report back in 2005 which covers a wider a range of topics. The questions asked in both the two surveys have some common points but not many. I really like how well the executive summary of the UK report has been compiled compared to cluttered one in the Indian report.

The Indian Science Report looks at Science Education, Human Resources and Public Attitude towards Science and Technology. For this post I will focus on the findings related to the Public Attitude towards Science and Technology.

India’s attitude to science is hard to understand (probably because the surveyors did not ask the right questions?). I found the executive summary difficult to read. It was more facts thrown out at the reader where as it should have somewhat of a storyline.

Over three-fourths of the public feel S&T is are important for education. The perception is that the benefits of S&T are slightly higher (1.1 times) than its deleterious effects.

Less than 12% of the illiterates feel computers and factory automation create more jobs than they destroy while over half of the graduates and postgraduates feel this way. Just a fourth of all Indians are in favour of mechanisation.

Indians consider science to be an important part of our education but don’t think that it does much good. And, by the way, most Indians seem to be Luddites (!).

Television remains the primary source (57%) of information in the country, and is almost five times as popular as newspapers.
Weather news is the most popular S&T show watched on TV.

Most of the information Indians get about science is from watching TV and the weather report is the most popular science and technology show (!).

The most disappointing bit of the report for me was how little Indians read about science. Of course, it is not just the public to blame but the lack of science in the newspapers and the dearth of science magazines.

95% of graduates feel S&T makes life healthier, easier and more comfortable as compared to 56% of the illiterates. 80% of graduates think S&T will create better opportunities for the next generations as compared to 30% of illiterates.

The blame of the skewed results here also goes to show that the lack of education can make it very hard to understand and appreciate science. But the most annoying thing about the report was that comparisons mentioned were made between graduates and illiterates. What happened to those who are literates but not graduates?

A little over half of those in the lowest income quantile feel that new technology makes work more interesting way as compared to 80% in the top-most income quantile.

The difference in the few of the poor v/s the rich toward science is also expected. Do have a look at the full report for more ‘insights’.

Given that it is India’s first report, there is nothing to compare the current results with. Hopefully, there will be another report published in a few years that will give us more insights in to how the education policies affect India’s attitude to science.

=====Part III=====

Just when it seemed that Saini was finally getting to the plot of how India might become the next ‘scientific superpower’, she stumbles on the piles of pseudoscientific beliefs that Indians subscribe to. The exercise starts when she tries to understand why some research institutes like the Academy of Sanskrit Research still believe that Vaimanika Shastra is a definitive text for the future of aeronautics.

Of course, she then comes across ‘scholars’ telling her how all the science that the west has discovered was already all written down in the Vedas. She finds it difficult to argue with these people even though some of them are well educated. She concludes:

Many of the ideas in these old scientific texts are mixed up with spiritual and religious notions. Genuine theories about the world works are not separate from murkier pseudoscience. That is fine though because the experimental method wasn’t really invented until about 350 years ago. It took this long for science to develop a recognisable structure, using hypothesis and tests.

But the strange thing about some of the books is that even the recent ones have the same bizarre mix of science, religion and pseudoscience.

There is an interesting analysis that follows this passage where she meets up with Sanal Edamaruku of the Indian Rationalist Association and Meera Nanda to understand why is there such wide spread belief in these irrational notions.

Nanda the historian says, ‘Indians have a weird psychology, I think. With respect to the rest of the world, we have an inferiority complex which we hide in a superiority complex. It is very aggressive way of defending your own faith by projecting it as superior.’

Edamaruku says, ‘Indians have two lives. For example, when a scientist consults an astrologer for the appropriate time for the marriage of his daughter, where is the scientific approach there? He’s the scientist, but he does not use his scientific approach or his scientific mind when it comes to his private life.

Edmaruku’s words resonate with something I have harped about before. Unsettling is the fact that it is not just the illiterate who are being pulled by the likes of modern day gurus and rishis into believing the non-sense but it is also the rich and the middle class. The richer section of the population is actually investing money in these quacks to be able to make sense of their beliefs and modern science.

At this point the book is well past the half way mark and there has been nothing that has especially impressed me or informed me but the storyline has kept me interested. Somehow though, the book is just seeming to be the story of someone who spent their time in India discovering the country around the word science.

In the last quarter of the book she spends time with Professor Mukundan who has developed Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature profiling for lie detection and whose data has been accepted by courts in India to support judgements. Here again, from her research Saini finds that there has been no peer review or analysis of how good the technique really is.

She meets up with researchers in Delhi and Chennai who are working and making progress towards finding a cure for tuberculosis. It is something that these researchers have to do because the western pharmaceutical corporations don’t think it is a disease that will have a big enough demand to defend their investment.

She discusses India’s attempts at e-governance and modern projects such as Lavasa. She travels to Trombay to hear all about India’s progress towards building thorium reactor and it could be the way India could some day become energy self-sufficient even with the demand rising much faster than supply.

And lastly, she goes to the Indian National Science Congress in Thiruvananthapuram where she finds that people talking about pseudoscience are given the freedom to present alongside world class researchers. She attends the Prime Minister’s talk where he talks about the importance of science in the progress of the nation.

At this point Saini ends the book leaving the reader in a state to make up their own minds. Probably a good thing.

=====Part II=====

After the depressing start to the book, Angela continues her journey on to Bangalore to understand the IT boom that the country went through and what the industries are doing now to help the nation.

She sees the Infosys Campus, interviews Narayan Murthy and meets engineers from Tata Consultancy Services but gets an impression that what these IT giants are doing is not innovative work but  providing quality resources at a very cheap rate to do a lot number crunching, outsourcing and such menial tasks. She couldn’t see ‘innovation’ as she was hoping to. She quoted the dismal figures of what these big corporations invest in research and development especially compared to the giants like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

But there was some optimism:

Ananth Krishnan of TCS says, ‘Making existing things cheaper is something India has always been good at, ever since it started carrying out affordable software maintenance in the run up to the millennium bug.

There’s certainly something to be said for this approach to science and engineering. After all, this is how Japan launched its electronics industry in the 1970s. The island nation became a scientific powerhouse by undercutting American manufacturers on imported technologies like auto mobiles, computer hardware and consumer gadgets while maintaining great quality and an educated workforce.

To begin with, Japanese innovations did tend to focus on management practices and how factories were organised, rather than fresh science and new products. But as they got bigger, the Japanese developed their own cadre of inventors. They ended up doing research and making products that the world had never seen.

There were some other innovations too. TringMe was started by two Indians who left their high paying Silicon Valley jobs to start this service in Bangalore. Also, the Spoken Web technology that was conceived and built in the Indian labs of IBM.

Even the IIT Delhi which she had left unimpressed last time had something to offer after all. She writes about a club called Technocracy started by students as ‘they were tired of the theoretical, nose-in-a-book culture developing at the IIT.’ (Interestingly, they organise Science Quest which is aimed at creating and promoting a culture of Science Journalism at IIT Delhi). Finally, it seemed Saini had started to see real progress and innovation but that was not to last for very long as she came across the anti-GM lobbyists next.

To unearth the whole story she travelled to the interiors of Maharashtra and to the National Botanical Research Institute in Lucknow. She concludes at the end that in the anti-GM lobby science and nationalism have gotten jumbled up. In the one hand the lobby lacks any scientific credibility but on the other hand it has found a lot of support because the people fighting seem to develop nationalistic pride in the process. If instead of American manufacturers providing these seeds, Indian research institutes had done it then there would not have been so much support for the movement. The farmers were of a similar opinion.

India: it’s a nation of geeks, swots and nerds..[Skipped statistics of how Indians are taking over the world]..Geek Nation is a journey to meet the inventors, engineers and young scientists helping give birth to the world’s next scientific superpower.

As a sceptic, irrespective of the rave reviews that the book has got, I was going to read it. While I read it, I will share with you what I find to be the interesting bits about the book as well as give you a brief look at the story line.

=====Part – I=====

Saini starts the book by pointing out that India was once the most advanced scientific nation pointing to the likes of Aryabhatta. But the years since it has been ravaged by rulers and colonial powers, and has lost out on all that it once possessed. Yet, according to Saini, this century brings with it the hope that India will become a ‘scientific superpower’ to understand how and why she has decided to tour the country.

Her first stop is the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre where she chats with Prof. U R Rao. He tells her of the story of how the space research program in India began and how it always aimed towards the betterment of the society.

She then meets Dr. Vijay Singh who is the National Co-ordinator for Science Olympiads. Where he tells her about how sports is just not part of Indian culture but science is. He talks about a wunderkid named Nitin Jain and to understand the ‘prototypical Indian nerd’ she goes to meet him next. He has recently written a book called the ‘The story of my success’.

At his Faridabad home, she is unimpressed by the lack of excitement for science shown by Nitin.  But she even quotes him as ‘nothing much to do with the book, my parents wrote most of it’. He studies at IIT Delhi where she is headed next and describes it as ‘a real geek factory’.

At IIT Delhi she interviews a few current students who complain about the ‘filthy’ campus but praise the engineering classes. She compares how the annual budget of all of the IITs (15 in total) is equal to just 8% of MIT’s annual budget. But the most interesting bit of her experience was she attends a humanities course called ‘Macro perspectives on science and technology in humans’.

I’m the only person in the gloomy room at the top of a flight of grey steps for ten minutes. ‘I’m going to start anyways’, Professor Ambuj Sagar announces. Just a few late comers arrive.

The topic of the lecture is fascinating – the social reasons that automobiles went from small invention to mass-market marvel in the twentieth century – but almost all of the students stare at him blankly, uninterested. If it won’t help them pass their engineering exams, they don’t want to know. None of them are willing to ask questions, and even when he picks people to speak to the class, they look uncomfortable.

Returning the latest essay papers, he tells them, ‘I was a little bit disappointed that having harped on about innovation systems, the answers were not that impressive.’

By the end, he seems exasperated, ‘An innovation system is not an object, it’s what is in our minds,’ he implores.

Ambuj an IIT Delhi alumnus, returned after decades as a researcher at MIT and Harvard. ‘Students just don’t care anymore’, he complains. ‘What unfortunately globalisation has done is brought to India globalised opportunities and salaries and that is the incentive that students are looking at.’

Another student Nishant Ranka tells her that the only reason students come here is that when you leave you are likely to earn more than your father. When chatting to the dean of undergraduate studies, he tells her that coaching classes put students under tremendous pressure and their all-round development is affected.

The National Crime Records Bureau reports more than 2000 students committed suicide across India because they failed their exams.

At the end of her week at IIT Delhi she concludes, ‘I had hoped to find a geek’s paradise here but I haven’t. Instead of being the hothouses of intellectual curiosity and innovation that they promised to be when India created these grand institutions fifty years go, the IITs seem to have developed a culture of getting the grades and getting out.’