The wrong formula
In India, 28 February is celebrated as National Science Day. It is reported that on that date in 1928, a 40-year-old Tamil Brahmin named Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, sitting at 210 Bowbazar Street in the erstwhile building of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Calcutta, discovered certain phenomena regarding the scattering of light when passed through a transparent material, which would come to be known as the Raman effect. For this discovery, Raman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930. This was India's first Nobel in the sciences, the first awarded to an Indian for research done in India. It was also the last one.
Under the prodding of the National Council of Science and Technology Communication, since 1987 the Indian government has celebrated 28 February as National Science Day; it is perhaps unsurprising that many Indians don't even know of its existence. Indeed, the day largely bypasses most universities in the country, and instead is mostly observed by those who receive patronage from the central government. In states where the provincial education boards and councils are still dominant – Tamil Nadu and West Bengal (Paschim Banga), for example – National Science Day is largely unknown. Organised celebrations occur at schools following the national syllabus dictated by New Delhi and at central government offices, especially educational and research institutions. These events often bring in sarkari chief guests, ranging from the dubious to the infamous, with the occasional savant. Lamps are lit, speeches are made, marigold garlands are worn and hung up, a lot of tea and coffee is drunk, and some samosas are consumed. And then everyone goes home.
In addition, the government presents awards recognising excellence in popularising science and in innovative scientific education. The prime minister, the minister of science and technology and, where they exist, state ministers of the same gladden newspaper owners by buying full-page ads, typically exhibiting their own beaming faces and a paragraph extolling some supposed recent leaps in the country's scientific progress. This is how the citizens of India get their annual peg of the scientific spirit.
Some schools organise competitions and prizes, often showcasing some genuinely energetic kids. Yet almost invariably these students' enthusiasm will be suppressed by the mindlessness of the bureaucrats organising the prize-distribution events, turning them into yet another of the many state-sponsored farces that pepper the Indian school year. The scientific aspirations of many a future Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, Meghnad Saha or Jagadish Chandra Bose will thus meet an untimely end. The only ones left smiling at the end of the day will be some petty functionaries and bureaucrats, and the decorators, caterers and suppliers. Such is the fate of our young scientists.
What more can we expect from such an unimaginative, top-down exercise so divorced from people and society? The idea behind National Science Day is undoubtedly to give India's young minds an admiration for science, to seed dreams of unravelling the mysteries of the world, the universe, the human condition. But a population whose idea of success is defined by the INR 5 million salaries of Indian Institute of Management graduates, and whose best mathematicians, physicists and engineers will end up as number-crunchers for financial speculators, has a rather poor appreciation of scientific research.
In the absence of this appreciation, there is no social audit of science in India. Hence, the many professors who gleefully plagiarise and publish third-rate research work in fourth-rate journals, which are read by very few and cited by even fewer. Some of these people pass themselves off as experts, even serving on committees and sub-committees in a cynical waste of everyone's time. With such role models, it is unsurprising that many youngsters are turned away from pursuing science, in school or beyond.
Unpopular science
In stark contrast to such government-sponsored initiatives to inculcate scientific culture, India has a long tradition of popular, broad-based scientific and rationalist thought sustained by grassroots support. These movements grew without state patronage, and have been most successful when the ideals of scientific culture have been integrated into the day-to-day lives and social realities of the people. The brightest examples are from certain epochs of the Indian nationalist movement, and the anti-caste rationalist movements of the Dravidian political current.
The Indian nationalist movement often promoted the scientific aspect of the idea of self-reliance. This first came to fore during the Swadeshi movement in the first decade of the 20th century when boycotts of British-made goods were meant to be followed by the development of technologies 'of our own', especially in Bengal. Small scale industrial units inspired by a Swadeshi bent started taking baby-steps forward. Swadeshi institutions of technical learning were also conceived – the most important one was the National Council of Education's Bengal Technical Institute, which was to become Jadavpur University. Later, during the non-cooperation movement, when a large-scale boycott of Raj-sponsored educational and research institutions was taking place, a concomitant stress was placed on building up independent institutions of science and higher learning. This saw the birth of the National Medical Institute (Jatio Aurbiggyan Bidyaloy) which would later become the Calcutta National Medical College.
Scientists such as Jagadish Chandra Bose, Meghnad Saha and Satyendranath Bose were invariably skilled at communicating scientific ideas to the masses. They were not simply denizens of the laboratory, but wrote both fiction and non-fiction in widely circulated publications, gave extensive public talks, and started popular science magazines. Jagadish Chandra Bose became an especially potent symbol of the 'scientific' flank of the emerging pan-Indian nationhood. Similar trends were also evident in the first half of the 20th century in the writings of Rabindranath Tagore and Rajshekhar Basu 'Parashuram', literary giants who penned lucid articles and reflections on the scientific discoveries of their time.
Generally, these men went beyond the narrow formulations of a nationalistic 'Indian' science. This is important, for already those of the Hindu-nationalist ilk had started to claim that many new scientific discoveries and technological innovations were already present in ancient times in India, that such knowledge could be found in the scriptures, and that India could thus rediscover and recapture some long-lost glory. Meghnad Saha rebutted such claims, and saw his famous sarcastic quip 'Shob byade achhe' (Everything is in the Vedas) become common idiom in Bengali.