In the back burner

In good faith

Gangan Prathap

The abysmal state of science in India is a result of cruel and wicked negligence

About thirty years ago, while I was doing my PhD, I became interested in Eugene Garfield’s essays on a subject that was to be named Scientometrics. It is about measuring science activity, at all levels of aggregation. At the simplest level, it examines the basic unit of science communication, the research paper and the references it makes to previous literature and also conversely, the way each paper would in future invite citations to itself.

Out of this grew a huge industry, but the activity also enabled science and sociology to mingle, even at the level of groups, institutions, agencies and countries. Soon, the scientific wealth of nations and its future economic potential was being measured out using such scientometric indicators.

In 1995, I noticed from a study done by a well known scientometric team that due largely to neglect, Indian science was slowing down. This was based on macro-level scientometric indicators for the 1980s. From the first half to the second half of the decade, India’s total contribution to world publication output (as measured by Institute of Scientific Information’s Science Citation Index database) dropped by 17.8% while the world output increased by 9.7%. India was the only leading country where such a trend was noticeable.

This was surprising given that in the 1960s and ‘70s, India was the leader of third world science and was poised for greatness that should have lifted it to one of the leading nations in science. From this position India slipped to a rank of 15th in 2000. More careful analysis revealed later that if a quality evaluation is done, this rank of 15th in 2000 would drop to even lower. India was no longer a high ranking nation amongst first rate countries; it was barely able to hold its own even among low ranking countries.

Why was this so? Years ago, an engineering college in Bangalore invited me to speak about India’s potential in scientific research in 2020. To make a meaningful statement of what the scenario could be in 2020, I compiled indicators that could reveal the status in 2003. What I found was shocking.

What was done to science by our elders was no less that a “cruel and wicked act of negligence,” to borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, who commented thus about leaving India to its own rulers.

This boded ill for a country which had only 157 R&D Scientists/Engineers for every million of population as compared to 1/50th of S Korea’s or 1/30th of USA’s. Our R/D expenditure per capita was 1/100th of S Korea’s.

Over the last twenty years of the last century, India’s scientific output as measured by the number of papers appearing in the Science Citation Index journals had also declined. In fact, this has happened while other countries which were in our league like China, Israel, S Korea and Brazil have gone rapidly ahead.

I am reminded of Solomon’s Proverbs 8: Receive my instruction, and not silver; and knowledge rather than choice gold. For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it. Solomon’s is a proverbial truth.

As a commonplace truth, it is obvious that rubies gold and silver have nothing to compare with them. But knowledge and wisdom are incomparable possessions. Thermodynamically, it is easy to convert a little training, and/or a little knowledge into wealth. This is what our IT, ITES and BPO companies have shown can be done.

Basic research is the motivation for institutionalising R&D, i.e. Knowledge & Wealth activity. Today, we have turned Solomon’s wisdom on its head and we are asking R&D institutions to convert them into gold and silver rather than the other way around. This is clearly where India is failing today.

In the most recent past, the most remarkable turnaround of any economy has been that of China. It has been an all-round performance, taking care of everything a self-confident nation needs to do, from land-reforms to universal education, to building up a manufacturing base, to research and development.

Most recently, it has occupied the second rank after the US in terms of papers published. It is worrying that China has an army of 800,000 scientists while India is left behind with a puny R&D workforce of about 120,000.

In a speech at Harvard University in September 1943 Winston Churchill observed that the empires of the future are the empires of the mind. The territory one has to defend in future will not be geographical space but intellectual space of know-how, patents, intellectual property and the world of new ideas. As a nation, we do not seem to have learned this.

The writer is Scientist-in-Charge, Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation, Bangalore