Scientists in India are unhappy, they are marching to protest
In as many as 12 cities of India, scientists and citizens have gathered today to #MarchForScience. In New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Pune, Thiruvananthapuram, Pondicherry, Allahabad, Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad and Wardha – thousands have decided to throng to the streets with children holding up placards showing the message – “Always question, always wonder”.
These kids have the right messages on their posters! #marchforscience #Bengaluru pic.twitter.com/563z0lsa2p
— IndSciComm (@IndSciComm) August 9, 2017
It’s a beautiful sight. Beautiful, not only because this is the India chapter of the global “March for Science” that occurred on April 22 of this year mostly as a protest against the extreme funding cuts that followed US President Donald Trump’s limited and terrifying budgetary allocations, but also because India at present is in the throes of a very similar epidemic of obscurantism. And, this national malaise – a disease in which newly rekindled antediluvian dogmas get rehashed and spread like the plague – is setting India back by decades, if not centuries, and that needs to be stopped.
In case you are wondering what the #marchforscience is all about. pic.twitter.com/V1DgrAyxt8
— IndSciComm (@IndSciComm) August 9, 2017
In its simple but elegant website, the scientists behind organising #MarchForScience have put forward basic demands that they have made. The manifesto for science needs to be reproduced verbatim for its sheer clarity of purpose and precise diagnosis of what’s ailing the Indian mind:
“We are delighted to note that, on 22nd April this year, more than a million people undertook a March for Science in 600 cities across the globe, demanding robust funding for science and demanding that governmental policies be guided by scientific evidence.
We are planning to complement and supplement this global effort in India as we feel it is very relevant in the current juncture. On the one hand, scientists from India have played a commendable role in the discovery of gravitational waves and of Higgs Boson, in the interplanetary mission through Mangalyaan and in reducing foreign dependence through the development of indigenous satellite launching capability. But, on the other, science in India is facing the danger of being eclipsed by a rising wave of unscientific beliefs and religious bigotry, and scientific research is suffering serious setback due to dwindling governmental support.
We note with deep concern that financial support to even premier institutions like IITs, NITs, and IISERs has been slashed. Universities are facing shortage of funds to adequately support scientific research. Research funding agencies like DST, DBT and CSIR are reportedly impacted by reduced governmental support. Scientists in government laboratories are being asked to generate a part of their salary by selling their inventions and from other sources.
While we can justly be inspired by the great achievements in science and technology in ancient India, we see that non-scientific ideas lacking in evidence are being propagated as science by persons in high positions, fueling a confrontational chauvinism in lieu of true patriotism that we cherish. Promoting scientific bent of mind can certainly help improve the social health of our country where incidents of witch hunting, honour killing and mob lynching are reported regularly.
We feel that the situation demands the members of scientific community to stand in defence of science and scientific attitude in an open and visible manner as done by scientists and science enthusiasts worldwide. We appeal to scientists, researchers, teachers, students, as well as all concerned citizens to organize 'India March for Science' events throughout the country, particularly in the state capitals, on 9th August 2017, with the following demands:
1) Allocate at least 3% of GDP to scientific and technological research and 10% towards education
2) Stop propagation of unscientific, obscurantist ideas and religious intolerance, and develop scientific temper, human values and spirit of inquiry in conformance with Article 51A of the Constitution.
3) Ensure that the education system imparts only ideas that are supported by scientific evidence.
4) Enact policies based on evidence-based science.”
The Twitter handle @IndiSciComm has been live-tweeting images and videos from the #MarchForScience rallies across the 12 cities.
Prof Dipankar Chatterji making the point for the need for a #marchforscience pic.twitter.com/mIpfBuXRr5
— IndSciComm (@IndSciComm) August 9, 2017
The assault on science is the assault on the very foundations of civilisation, on the pursuit of truth/s, on the spirit of inquiry, on the integral doubt and critical interrogation needed for any advancement whatsoever, any progress of the human mind and kind. The global spread of obscurantism, however, has a pernicious counterpart in India, insofar as the current government itself is hell bent to destroy the very institutions that have given us the ability and scope to celebrate 70 years of Independence.
As put forward by the bunch of concerned scientists, who join hands with the academics, military veterans, public intellectuals, and other citizens of a secular, scientific, democratic India, the fallouts of an official culture of obscurantism can be many. For example, the government setting up an AYUSH ministry to promote pseudoscientific areas of interest, which at best should remain in the margins for society for the sake of pluralism, is a glaring instance of lop-sided resource allocation.
Similarly, the paranoid and fascist emphasis on all things cow – from bringing in economically suicidal legislations to stop trade for slaughter, and now floating the idea of a full-fledged cow ministry, to steering the course of research in premier, public-funded technology institutes to carry out research intended for predetermined results enshrining the many imagined uses of cow urine – is typical of our governmental obscurantism.
Moreover, it’s not limited to mindless and embarrassing utterances in the public forums. The RSS-affiliated Garbh Vigyan Sanskar to prescribe tall, customised babies with “Aryan features” is straight out of the Nazi playbook, because there’s Hindutva psychobabble fused with 20th century eugenics that precipitated the Holocaust.
In June this year, the country’s top research and development body, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), put out a warning signal, saying it faces acute financial crunch.
According to this report:
“Its Director General, Girish Sahni, has said that out of Rs 40.63 billion (Rs 4,063 crore) budgetary allocation for the current year (2017-18), after meeting the salaries, pensions, capital and other commitments, "the balance available for laboratory allocations and various new research projects" is only Rs 2.02 billion (Rs 202 crore). Of this, a sum of Rs 1.58 billion (Rs 158 crore) has already been allocated.
‘If we were to release further sums we will be left with no funds to support new research projects,’ he has in a letter informed all the laboratory directors. ‘This is the stark reality.’”
Drying up funds to do blue-skies research, the excessive focus on Sangh-approved pseudoscientific pursuits, the increased warmongering and the overconfidence stemming from technofascism – that’s the hallmark of a society in decline. When the mind erects walls around it, when it rejects borderless love and intellectual inquiry, when it is fettered by dogma and not the spirit of questioning why – then civilisational stalemate sets in rapidly.
Do we really want India to be that pond that cannot sustain a bounty of lifeforms anymore because there’s no oxygen of intellectual autonomy and a scientific temperament? Is this why the mentions of the first prime minister of independent India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the driving force behind India’s industrialisation, the IITs, the nascent space technology, etc, being purged from textbooks in schools run in BJP-ruled states?
Not only in science, the parallels with the crisis in the humanities cannot be stressed more. The arts and the sciences always flourish together, feeding off each other in beautiful and creative symbiosis of culture, intellect and technology. You cannot have one without the other.