The annual science con

Scientists need funds, freedom and better career prospects

It would be instructive to check out how many of the speakers who addressed the 98th session of the Indian Science Congress in Chennai were below the age of 40. The programme circulated suggests not more than a handful. As in the past so many years, delegates to the 98th Congress had to hear many of the same worthies who have been addressing these annual jamborees year after year but whose contribution to science in the past several years has been at best questionable. Science in India needs a fresh lease of life. A liberation from the bureaucratic and feudal stranglehold of those who fund it and the gray eminences who either continue to hold the purse strings or preside over institutional empires. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, therefore, quite understandably expressed the hope, in his inaugural address, that “more young people (should) increasingly participate in the deliberations of the Indian Science Congress in years to come. Science is ageless, but our scientists must be younger!” The prime minister has declared 2012-13 as the “Year of Science in India”. This opportunity should be used to bring about fundamental changes in the way science teaching and research are funded and managed in India. Without a paradigm shift in the prospects for science in India, the hoped for link between science and development will not really materialise.

Dr Singh also asked two important questions that Indian industry must ponder over. “Why is the translation of good science and research into products so weak in our country? How do we strengthen the link between universities, research laboratories and industry?” The answers to these two questions will determine the future development of science in India. Unless the market for science grows, widens and deepens, thereby generating demand for science, there would be no basic improvement in the supply of science. Indeed, much of the flight of talent from India to the West, in the sciences, occurred because the supply of good scientists in the past exceeded the demand. Better career prospects abroad, and better institutional support, with more freedom and funds, encouraged India’s best scientific talent to migrate. Those who chose not to do so were held back more by a sense of patriotism, as was definitely the case with scientists in fields like nuclear physics, than because career prospects at home were better. The era of retaining talent only with such ideological inducements is over. India has to improve the market for science talent to be able to generate more of it and retain it.

An important step in this direction would be to make a career in science more attractive, liberating it from the stifling feudalism of government-run institutions. Equally important is to get more private investment into research. Indian business is not yet doing enough to invest in the sciences. More can and should be done. Prime Minister Singh was also right to recognise that any improvement of the supply side in science must begin at the school and college level, when he said, “Unless we strengthen the base of our educational system, we can never hope to extend the height of the pyramid of excellence.” Annual jamborees like the Science Congress are unlikely to achieve that. Making a career in science more attractive could help.