If Indian science congress is a joke, it's because science in India is a tragedy

If Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan's description of the Indian Science Congress as a circus set you thinking about the state of science in the country, here are some numbers that should stop you in your tracks: 59% of secondary schools in India don't have an integrated science laboratory although science is compulsory till class 10. So, a vast majority of students 'study' science without ever seeing any experiment, let alone doing it.At the +2 level where students opt for science, just 32% schools have separate rooms for laboratories and a quarter of them are 'partially equipped'. Perhaps they are being taught via the web? No chance, because just 37% of schools have a computer with net connection.
Describing the present educational and scientific scenario as "depressing", eminent scientist and Bharat Ratna awardee CNR Rao lamented to TOI that in the large young population of rural India, "there must be a Ramanujan or a Raman somewhere". So how do we find them?
Not an easy prospect since the problem begins in schools and colleges. Students who do go through the grind and finally get into science and technology related jobs see their dreams die in India's vast but faltering science establishment.
As nuclear scientist VS Ramamurthy, who was part of the design team for India's first nuclear test at Pokharan in 1974 and later headed the department of Science & Technology, told TOI, "The human resource pipeline cannot be turned on and off at will. Tomorrow's teacher has to be trained today."
One of India's top genetic scientists and former director general of CSIR, Samir Brahmachari told TOI that the crisis in science is because it is not attracting the best minds. "Science education has moved from being a curiosity-driven exploration to a mark-scoring exercise to get admission in elite institutions and bag a fat corporate salary. In the process, academia has also lost high quality teachers who shape young minds," he said.
Besides the sorry state of affairs in all but the elite science education centres, there are serious problems facing Indian science, ranging from resource crunch to policy confusion. The current attempts to turn mythology into science make the future look even bleaker.
"Building a knowledge-based society demands significant increase in investment for S&T at several levels including education as well as research leading to outcomes in pure and applied areas," eminent space scientist K Kasturirangan, former head of ISRO and ex-member Planning Commission, told TOI. India has just 4 scientific researchers for every 10,000 people in the workforce, much lower than not just advanced countries like the US or UK but even China and Brazil.
"The goal of spending at least 2% of GDP on scientific research - outlined in the govt's science policy of 2003 - has not been achieved. Even industry funding, which was declared as the magic wand for finances, hasn't delivered," rues Dinesh Abrol, visiting professor at JNU.
As per latest available figures, India is spending less than 1% on research and development compared to 1.9% in China and 2.75% in US.
The combined result of defective grounding at the school/college level and limited resources for research is evident in the metrics that provide a partial measure of India's scientific output and its significance. Scientific papers published by Indians numbered about 90,000 in 2013 compared to 4,50,000 by Americans and 3,25,000 by Chinese. Citations too were below the world average. Indians filed just 17 patents per million population compared to 541 in China and 4,451 in South Korea.
"I am not worried about the quantity as much as the quality of science coming from India. It is also not showing any improvement. India still contributes less than 1% of the world's top 1% of research," Rao said.
However, he clarified that this did not mean that there were no good scientists in India. "There are a few individuals in various places who are doing well, but this is not enough. We need many good institutions doing outstanding work, so that we can accommodate capable young scientists," he added.
Brahmachari sees the glass half full. Given the low input, and that the best minds have left India for greener pastures, he feels Indian science has done "outstandingly well".
Ramamurthy highlights another key problem in the way science is being practised in the country - the project mode. "In today's environment of research in project mode with well-defined objectives, milestones and deliverables, curiosity-driven research is a casualty," he said.
Research objectives too are increasingly disconnected from society, asserts Abrol. Giving the example of agriculture, he says that an obsession with increasing yield while ignoring the consequences of intensive agriculture in the five major grain producing states has led to a sustainability crisis -ground water depletion, waterlogging, chemical over-kill. "Yet our research goals continue to be better yielding varieties rather than sustainable productivity," he said.