Much before he became the Governor of the RBI, Infosys Science Foundation had recognised Raghuram Rajan’s contribution to world economics by awarding him the social sciences (economics) prize. The award is also the largest monetary prize given in India for outstanding achievements across six categories.

In an interaction with BusinessLine , Shibulal SD, the former CEO of Infosys and the current President of the foundation, shares insight into how it has evolved over the years and the need for bringing back what he calls as romance into the field of research.

Do you think the lack of a scientific research ecosystem in India, reflects in the quality of research?

The effort is to recognise the best research available in the country. In one year, we did not award in the category of engineering and computer science. Our intention is to create role models and make research aspirational.

How has the Infosys Science Foundation evolved over the years?

It is important to look at the broader picture. The sole purpose of Infosys prize was to bring romance back into research. India is a nation of contradictions. We have a million engineers coming out (every year) but we have some 16 million children not going to schools. This contradiction is there in every sector such as agriculture or healthcare. We are also a country with severe social issues.

The way to solve many of these issues is through innovation and entrepreneurship and the foundation for that is basic research. It is important that we invest in basic research, an area which has not seen much progress.

Even if you look at the numbers — hours spent by a researcher is much less than US, number of students entering research has come down. We want to bring the interest back into research.

So, how does the Foundation hope to do that?

Through multiple initiatives. One of them is recognition of top research, which we pioneered and no other institution comes close to it.

The fundamentals of prize have not changed. The jury looks at world-class research, researchers within 50 years of age.

Every prize awardee of ₹65 lakh or close to $100,000 is reasonable. It is a broad set of awards. I think it has become a very aspirational prize.

People who won it have gone on to do better things. Such as Professor K VijayRaghavan from the National Centre for Biological Sciences. who won in 2009, was was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society in 2012. Similarly, Manjul Bhargava, a mathematician of Indian origin won the prize in 2012 and went on to win the Fields Medal for mathematicians.

Has the selection process undergone a change over the years?

It has not undergone too much change. The number of applicants has, however, gone up. The jury chair has, of course, constantly evolved. But we have tried to maintain consistency which is important.

Are you looking at expanding the breadth of the categories?

The more important thing is to expand into other areas. Prize is one of the few things. There are other activities that we undertake. This year we will take 50 undergraduate BSc students from all over India and give them a two-week immersion programme in the Mysuru campus of Infosys.

The idea of bringing the romance back is that you have to do this very early on in a child’s career. The curiosity of a child needs to be kindled and for this the learning system has to change. Our system till now focuses on rote learning and memory based. The idea is to expose children to more experiential form of learning. If it works well, we will expand the programme. Another pilot we undertook was Gnanadeepa, which involves training the trainers. The teachers have to come up with new pedagogical form of learning. We also work with Agastya International Foundation with whom we have developed mobile labs that bring science labs to schools. In the pilot year (2014), the foundation trained 640 teachers from government schools across Karnataka and this year plan to reach out to 2,400 teachers. Finally, we also get the laureates and jury members to conduct public lectures.

Will you be looking at funding research or have Chairs in institutes?

Our problems cannot be solved by one foundation. This is an area where the government has to play its part and it is doing so. Even corporates should play a part. It needs multiple stakeholders to achieve its goal.

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