science 2008-2009: 13: India

Independent India has long had a technocratic streak. The relationship between Nehru and elite physicists (including select Westerners such as Patrick Blackett) was strong. One result was a nuclear programme that culminated in the first Indian nuclear test in 1974. In 1958, Nehru had asked the father of the Indian bomb, physicist Homi Jehangir Bhabha, to draft a new science policy. “the gap between the advanced and backward countries has widened more and more”, the motion that passed the Indian Parliament stated, “It is only by adopting the most vigorous measures and by putting forward out utmost effort into the development of science that we can bridge the gap” (quoted here). An outcome was another techno-scientific project whose primary output was, at least initially, national prestige: a space programme. An Indian satellite was launched from Kerala in 1980.

Following economic liberalisation in 1991, India has been sending more and more students to train abroad, funded since 2001 by government loans on easy terms. In 2002 ‘India surpassed China as the largest exporter of graduate students to the United States’ (p.79). Attractive polcies encouraged the students to return, bringing skills home.

Furthermore, this accumulation of skills has encouraged science-based corporations to set up laboratories. India’s science policy leaders were bullishly optimistic. ‘More than 100 global companies…have established R&D centres in India in the past 5 years, and more are coming’, noted Raghunath Mashelkar, director general of India’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, speaking in Science in 2005, ‘As I see it from my perch in India’s science and technology leadership, if India plays its cards right, it can become by 2020 the world’s number-one knowledge production center’.

And the prestige projects have benefited too. Between 1999 and 2003, under the leadership of Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, a coalition of elite scientists and politicians drew up proposals for Indian moon missions. ‘Their stated goals’, notes Subhadra Menon, ‘were to expand human knowledge, and to challenge India to go beyond geostationary orbit, thereby potentially attracting young talent to the space sciences and into the country’s space programme’. The moon probe Chandrayaan-I, carrying eleven payloads (five Indian, two from NASA, three from the European Space Agency, and one from Bulgaria) observed the moon in 2008 and 2009. In September 2009, just before expiring, it reported the presence of minute, but significant, quantities of water.

The Indian bureaucracy is also becoming far more protective of the country’s genetic riches. For example, in 2008 a colllaboration between the Indian Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment and the American Illinois Natural History Survey stalled because of official complaints about biopiracy. A researcher for the Askoka Trust said: “We have to send the specimens abroad for identification as we do not have the expertise at home”, while the senior official at the National Biodiversity Authority responded: “exporting 200,000 specimens is not permissible”. Exporting photographs would be fine, but not gene-rich specimens.