The Hindu Lit for Life 2019 | Venki Ramakrishnan on problems faced by science in India

[Music] we're ready to begin the next session what ails Indian science and what can be done about it Nobel Prize winner dr. Venki Ramakrishnan in conversation with professor dr. kay Vijay Raghavan Venki Ramakrishnan grew up in India before moving to the u.s. in 1971 following a PhD in physics he studied biology for two years before he began his studies on the ribosome the large molecular complex in all cells that translates genetic information into protein he moved to in 1999 to Cambridge England and for his role on the atomic structure of the ribosome and it's complex with antibiotics he shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry he is also the current president of the Royal Society and the author of gene machine a candid memoir that describes both the quest for the ribosome structure and the human side of science professor cave Ajay Raghavan is the principal scientific adviser to the Government of India and the chairperson of prime minister's science technology and innovation Advisory Council he was secretary Department of Biotechnology Government of India from January 2013 to 2018 he's a fellow of the Indian science academics the Royal Society the the Academy of Medical Sciences you key and a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences he was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2013 what is what is Indian science and what can be done about it and now invite dr. Venki Ramakrishnan and professor which are given to the stage [Applause] morning everybody and thank you for having us here I should say where both of us have some problems in terms of you know having a discussion on what ails Indian science I because I left at the age of 19 and have really not done science in India ever in my life I've only visited India since about 2002 so you can think of me as somebody who's an affectionate observer of Indian science from abroad my friend and colleague Vijay here has his own problem because he's the chief scientific advisor to the government of India which you know will put a limit on what he can possibly say even though he may secretly agree with me but you know Wilson will see how open it'll be so I do so I wanted to start off with just a few thoughts one is we often talk about you know where India is going where China is going and so on and this is a very yeah so this is a very important reminder of where things stand historically so for all but the last two or three hundred years China and India had the largest GDP in the world and in fact even if you calculated GDP per capita China and India were among the richest countries in the world for all but the last few hundred years and if you look at this chart what you see is a sudden decline in the relative strength of China and India around 1700 1750 and you see that accompanied by a rise in the GDP of Europe so that by about 1800 Europe had the largest GDP in the world now why was that it wasn't because the GDP of China or India decreased but rather science and the innovation and the Industrial Revolution made Europe much much more productive and much wealthier now you can also see that the United States lagged behind Europe by about a hundred years and then overtook Europe the fraction of youth the u.s. - the world economy is now declining you can see at the very right extreme of the curve that the Chinese GDP is rapidly ascending again and there seems to be a more modest ascent in the Indian GDP accompanied by a decline in the relative fraction of Europe and the United States so it shows you the power of of science and innovation and technology and this is the same graph but shown slightly different just to show you the relative contributions of these different countries to the world economy and you can see 300 years ago it was all almost all India and China and then became mostly Europe than mostly America and now there's a resurgence in Asia and the important thing is to realize that natural resources are not as important as knowledge and technology even today Africa has extremely rich in national natural resources so as the Middle East so as Russia but these countries are not as rich as Switzerland or Singapore per capita and because Switzerland and Singapore have heavily invested in a knowledge-based economy now apart from wealth we don't live I mean money isn't useful just by itself but here's another interesting graph if you looked about say 1800 or even 1850 life expectancy was wasn't that different in much of the world and it had not changed for about 2,000 years so if you lived at the time of Buddha or Christ you would have had the same life expectancy as about 1800 but suddenly with the advent of modern science modern medicine the discovery of bacteria etc you could see life expectancy gradually climbed in the last hundred years alone life expectancy has doubled in almost every country including India okay so today if you look at spending on research in R&D as a percent of GDP what you see is here's I'm afraid this graph you know they this isn't really showing the full slide because there there there's an axis on the left which shows you know what the percentages are but you can see here what the relative investment are and you can see that India does very poorly in terms of fraction of GDP invested in science and moreover the trend is in the wrong direction virtually every country has increased its investment in GDP in in science and technology as a fraction of GDP and in India it's actually gone down slightly between 2005 and 2015 and if you ask what is the real problem in India the real problem is that in most countries private spending on R&D is usually about two to three times public spending so whereas in India private spending is actually less than a third of overall spending so if you have to really blame one section of India it should be why aren't corporations in India investing much much more in R&D than they should be so that's sort of the sets the stage I hope I've convinced you that a lot of the growth in the world's economy our wealth our health has been as a result of science and innovation and investment in it and India's investment in science and technology far lags behind other countries including China Thank You van key the point about our science investment that needs to grow both I should say in the public sector as well as corporations investing for their own research is unexceptionable and we must parse out two components there for the first part how would publish investment growth where would that extra or the increase in investment go to and for the industry investing why are they not investing and how should they invest and the quick answers to both before I come to a more general question about why we need more money in science today the first part is that over the period since independence central government investment in science has concentrated on Central Universities central institutions such as the IITs now more recently other new institutions the All India Institute's and rather substantially research laboratories of the CSI are the Department of Science and Technology the DRDO the Dae and so on so forth all of this numerically constitutes about 5% of the student population who have access to these in other words 95 percent of our students who go to state universities don't really get access or do research substantially there are some notable extensions exceptions over this period but we need a dramatically increased investment and an engagement with States to address research this group now for industry our conversations with industry bodies over the last couple of years the CII the ficky they're so Cham and so on have resulted in two kinds of developments one is they all agree that research is needed investment by them and research is needed otherwise the carpet will be pulled from under their feet as technologies change as it's happening now but they are averse they have capital but they're averse to risking that capital through research big corporations elsewhere for example Google's investment in R&D is more than the US National Science Foundation's investment Indian corporation some sectors are doing reasonably well only because others are not farmers better than others slightly but other areas are not so the idea which is getting some traction is they increase investment but they partner with laboratory networks such as the CSI are so that that risk is mitigated somewhat I'd like to end this my views on this part we'll come back to Venki or a more general deep concern I have about why we need science today investment in science and why we need science and technology to be effective the fundamental perception about science over the last several decades last couple of centuries really is about science as the engine as as the discoverer of technologies which are useful for people in doing that we have forgotten what has happening to the planet as a whole and that the engines of development the Industrial Revolution and so on have always had an other to feed into so iron ore and the steam engine allow the Industrial Revolution in Britain but that meant further raw materials needed to come from elsewhere including the iron ore and similarly you know exploitation of people of resources characterized multiple industrial revolutions today as the world's largest democracy we have a big challenge have to be socially inclusive we don't want to exploit internally for our development we don't want to exploit externally in terms of you know going to continents like Africa and mining rapaciously how does one develop today in that context and that context is an important context because that's the context of what we now call the Anthropocene where humans have transformed the planet into a perilously dangerous situation and therefore we have to take into account climate change and global warming and the rise of you know tools such as artificial intelligence while we develop so this is a really complicated challenge also when we look at investment to see how we can deal with this situation as we invest more thank you yeah so you did point to the fact that only about 5% of students benefit from these central institutions about 95 percent study in state universities I should say I did my undergraduate studies at one of those state universities in Gujarat and the the there is there is a more fundamental problem about increasing investment in science and technology and that is you cannot just simply start increasing the science budget because you need people to absorb it it's not simply a question of building new buildings and building new labs you have to train a sufficient number of people who can actually use the money efficiently use it in an intelligent way and not wasted so I think this if there's going to be an increase in Science and Technology investment it has to be coupled with an investment in education and that leads to the point of what do you do about the 95 percent rather than the 5 percent and that again leads to another problem you know we're sitting here at this very somewhat elite festival everybody here speaks English all the sessions are in English but I should say only a few percent of Indians actually know English we forget them you know where this thin slice and we sort of are in our own echo chamber but 90 to 95 percent of Indians don't speak English at all and you know they need education they need your textbooks they need good textbooks and vernacular languages and so on if you look at a country like Poland or Germany what you find is that although English is the international language of science when they're young they're not learning science in English they're learning it in Polish or in German or Danish or whatever okay and then when they become scientists you know they have to learn English in order to be successful internationally but when you're young it's much easier to absorb concepts in your own native language and if that native language is some other language whatever it is that's the language in which you should try to absorb concepts so this is a real challenge for India how do you train instead of selecting scientists from 5% of the population you need to select for talent from a hundred percent of the population and so how do you do that and and how do you get to that place that is that's a very big challenge it's a bigger challenge than simply building new buildings and buying equipment now this business of encouraging R&D in industry that is a problem many countries including Britain grapple with Britain's private R&D is significantly higher than India's but it still lags behind countries like Germany for example or Korea South Korea so there are a number of ways you can do this you can have tax incentives you can have sometimes direct collaborations between government and RT as you said with CSIR so that's another area that you have to grapple with you also mentioned science as a as a tool for improving people's lives and of course this is the reason why governments fund science I often say the only reason governments find science there are only two reasons one is we're afraid of dying and the other is we're afraid of our enemies and so sorry you know so we we fund medical and biological research so that we can understand things like cancer and heart disease and so on and live forever or and we fund physical and you know electronic science etc so we can build better weapons so that we're stronger than our enemies you know better aircrafts and so on and and so cynically those are two reasons why you might think governments fund science but reality the reality is curiosity-driven science has had a much bigger impact on our lives than any directed science so if you look at you know any device like this iPhone that I have or any smartphone there are about a dozen Nobel prizes that have gone into this iPhone including I should say something that didn't get the Nobel Prize but the special and general theory of relativity that Einstein had without which time correction couldn't be accurate enough so that GPS wouldn't work so it gives you an idea almost anything you'd think of today as technology had its roots and some fundamental scientific idea that was curiosity driven one example is electricity you know Faraday was asked by the prime minister of the time you know what good is this and he said well one day sir you may tax it you know he said about electricity and you know if you imagine what the worldwide tax on electricity is today you know it's probably in the trillions of dollars so you know that just goes to show you that fundamental science can transform society and come lately unprecedented and unpredictable ways so we must always set aside a core of our investment for basic science for several reasons first that's where unexpected breakthroughs may come from the second is without that basic science and without a pool of basic scientists you won't even be able to take advantage of discoveries made elsewhere in order to apply them you need a foundation of basic science even to understand how to exploit discoveries made elsewhere for technology so those are some thoughts but I want to now challenge Vijay with another thought which is I've come to India almost every year since about 2006 and I find that the standard of Science in India has improved say from the 1970s when I left it but there is a difference and that is I see very few examples of Indian scientists breaking original ground and really being you know the leaders in their particular field rather there there's too much too many examples of what I call me to science me too used to be a word before it became a word recently and in science me to science meant you know imitative or sort of second derivative science and you know CNR Rao once told me that you know he had done a lot to sort of encourage scientists to come back from abroad and and tried to get them facilities and he said many of them come back and they do sort of minor extensions of what they did as a postdoc and they keep doing that for the rest of their lives this is a cultural problem and it affects the next generation of scientists because scientists learn from their mentors on how to think about science you know how to go about choosing a problem how to go about working on it how to how to know how long to stick to it and when to quit and if they don't get you know if their mentor is simply interested in doing the next experiment getting the next paper out then they're not really learning how to do you know high level science now video works in one of the top institutions in India which is I would say somewhat something of an exception to the rule so I want to hear his thoughts on well my serious problem with Venki is that I agree with almost all he says all he says so now the core problem for the expansion of our scientific effort here and for language is a and and you know in terms of quality is what he touched upon which is language language is not only important because it makes science inclusive and equalizes opportunity but fundamentally for original thinking you have to be rooted through your language through cultures and through society you cannot learn something which is disconnected with that and be anything but imitative the median population will be imitative if it tries to do that there are exceptions you'll always find exceptions and you'll find extraordinary people who have overcome barriers and done and being original but they would be exceptions so the language issue for learning needs to be done but language is a one aspect of it the other is what I call the salt and pepper mix of Indian society you have sorry you have a salt and pepper mix in Indian society of the elites and the rest of the country and this disconnect causes a real serious problem in policy making a policy making often therefore tends to be again imitative and again decisions being taken which serve a small set and not content with a more complex larger sphere which is very difficult now the problem about imitate earnest goes even further beyond that and this is because of our entire scientific workforce for all the reasons Frankie said I completely agree with him is not ambitious I asked another Nobel laureate David gross a string theorist who works a lot in India building in helping build institutions and in China and asked him what characterizes the difference between China and India and leave aside you know money resources management and so on so forth and he said very simply its ambition that India at the individual level at the institutional level at mission levels of certain larger kinds needs to be much much more ambitious and that requires a collective connect with a broader purpose and that again is absent so these are certainly serious issues so I want to touch on a topic that's been controversial recently which is this whole business about culture and science and what I'd like to say so you know about a year and a half ago I was asked by the Science Museum in London whether I would serve on an advisory panel for an exhibition called 5000 years of Indian science and I said I'd be delighted to do this and one reason was that I thought this was a useful corrective to some of the nonsense we've been hearing lately now this nonsense is limited to a very small but vocal minority it's not representative of Indian scientists it's certainly probably not even representative of the Indian public but they are a small vocal minority who have misinterpreted what science is about and sort of read into Indian scriptures various sort of scientific discovery and so on and the reality is India has much to be proud of that's actually real rather than mythological for example the number system that the entire West uses came out of India India was very advanced in metallurgy in many areas of mathematics and you know so a lot of these discoveries were actually adopted by the West now the West is not ashamed to say that oh we took the number system from the Arabs who got it from India they think that's perfectly fine and similarly we should not be embarrassed to say well we've learned about Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics from the West we are our airplanes think this is what knowledge is about knowledge has no boundaries and if you want India to be a great scientific nation the idea is not to harp on some you know mythological 2,000 year old you know ideas but to say we're going to use the whole fount of knowledge that we have today which is really a product of entire humanity not of any one country or any one civilization and so we're going to simply absorb everything we know today and we're going to build on that and everybody else is building on it and we are going to continue to build our part and thus contribute to the advance of human knowledge I think that's the way to look at it and I sense that some of these people's suffer from some sort of inferiority complex and this is their this is their way of sort of boosting themselves and but it's the wrong way to go about it I think really if you want to have national pride then you know learn as much as you can and and and contribute to advancing human knowledge that's the way to really be proud [Applause] again I think you know this is absolutely on the spot I would add something to that just yesterday you know reading a article written about seven or eight years ago by rodham narsimha who's one of our famous scientists he's a fluid mechanics fellow of the Royal Society the US National Academy of Science a really brilliant person and he had pretty much in his article on the history of Indian science from ancient times to now capture the beginning of what you said but also went on to point out the current situation and and there's a fundamental issue which comes up in the way we have structured our centers of learning they have again for the reasons we discussed before being disconnected we have deep expertise but disconnected with conveying to people at large what science is about the value of science music for example in the standing music of Carnatic music is appreciated naturally science is not appreciated naturally except in the wrong garb of technology or applications by people at large so unless people at large want science has a quest for knowledge this disconnect will be amplified if this disconnect is amplified and you have people who don't have expertise trying to you know assert themselves as as being their self-esteem or their you know being equals on the table then you have these kinds of statements coming out if the response to that is that you know you must learn better then this amplifies the difference even more of course one must learn better of course what is being said is nonsense but that means that we must have a way by which this salt and pepper combination needs to engage even more that is the principal challenge how does one do that and that requires I think a empathy with a larger subset to have expertise widening in the population has distinct from solid strong criticism of you know statements which are completely egregious right and I think that goes back to the thing we discussed before which is how do you engage the ninety-five percent instead of the just the five percent you know if you start teaching science in India in regional languages as well as English and you engage a much bigger fraction of the population and what science is about and the and how science is fundamentally a skeptical discipline and always questions Authority questions facts demands evidence so if we inculcate that sort of thinking among the the majority of the population then I think they will you know naturally be skeptical of statements like this and moreover they will Minh is important to communicate to the broad majority of the Indian public some of the great triumphs of science you know this is part of our common heritage as human beings not necessarily as Indians or Americans or Europeans or whatever but as human beings this is part of something that we have achieved together over several thousand years we've come to a state of understanding and it doesn't mean we this there's a huge amount that we don't know but it's it's an ongoing journey but we need to understand the journey and what is happening today so there's a this is a very important point if people have to look at science as something which is part of their lives then they must do it for something which they sense as you know either logical or share a purpose and today's crisis due to climate change and other examples I gave you transcends like science national boundaries and these kinds of crises require people across countries and countries to work together and there's no escape from that and therefore my feeling is just that at times of crises people came together as humans working together for some common cause that happens rarely in human history this is a time where this is absolutely urgent for us to do I'm it have gosh the Indian writer in English who recently got the Ganpat award a very strong critic of the establishment talks about climate change as something which is a runaway train my worry is that if it's a runaway train then it's time to party there's nothing one can do but it's there is a possibility that we can reverse or stop that runaway train and that comes only by working internationally across together and taking the best of science to do that both for discovery and for application how are we doing for time thinking but because this we talked about a third component about not just about what needs to be done but how to do it and maybe we can segue into that so one thing we we discussed is okay so will we have 10 minutes for questions right so so so will will wrap it up with some ideas so let's start by telling you an instant about an institution that works which is where I actually happen to be employed it is not a very big institution it has about 400 scientists it started with about 40 scientists and when it had 40 scientists in its first year at won four Nobel prizes and it won its 15th and 16th Nobel prizes in the last two years and this is the MRC lab of molecular biology in Cambridge now why does it work and why has it sustained a very high level of science over now three generations and the reason is that it does several things the first is people are forced to ask why are they doing this you know you always ask your colleagues what's the point what's the point of this experiment or what's the point of this project of yours what are you trying to actually achieve and that forces you to think about what the actual problem is not what your next experiment is going to be etc you can think of it as if you want to climb Everest you can't get to Everest in one step but what you have to do is you have to have a goal of getting up on top of Everest and then you have to sort of say it well to get over there this is the sort of next step that I'm going to have to take and after that is going to be the next step after that and pretty soon you've sort of charted away towards the goal now if you don't have a goal you'll be wandering around sort of like a drunk in a parking lot you you know you won't have a direction and you won't actually accomplish anything at the end of give your career so that's one aspect the other aspect is we provide stable funding but it's also judged very rigorously so every five years or so we're judged by an international review panel that asks not what we published or how much we published but asked is what you were doing sensible and are we making progress even if it's not publishable a third thing is we have complete collegiality between us within the Institute and a fourth thing which I think is very important is we don't have large groups our group size is typically about five or six and what this does is it forces you to pick what the most important problems are and it in other words I don't think anybody has more than one or two good ideas and if you have a very large group what you end up doing is giving lots of people your sort of second and third rate ideas and then you they take up time and it and they're a distraction away from the things you really want to accomplish so these are some of the things that were now there isn't a one-size-fits-all method for science for example this would not apply to something like the Human Genome Project or the discovery of the Higgs boson so you have to realize that there are multiple ways of doing science but some of these principles the idea that there should be a goal that the idea there should be high standards the idea that review bodies should be both competent and rigorous these are things that need to be I think more strictly enforced this is important and I'll add some aspects to that there's a challenge in our context about whether you're going to nurture excellence or to develop the spread of foundations which can nurture excellence because of a huge size and a population both are needed and we conflate you know one against the other quite often when we support excellence along the lines of what Weinke says there's a demand for you know spreading it with lowering standards because you know you have to compromise to start things off and when you try to demand excellence in those contexts it doesn't work this this dichotomy needs to be cleared in a manner so we can both nurture specific centers of excellence but also allow spread so how does one do that first of all I'd like to say that you know we shouldn't from this discussion take home that nothing is happening of consequence in Indian science there's some extraordinary things happening and let's take you know the context of Chennai itself in IIT Madras over the last decade or so the entire science and technology on data transmission and analysis has resulted in really great impact in wireless telephony that's been very valuable that's had impact very rapidly in applications in multiple ways electric vehicles and batteries and and cells again IIT Madras has excelled and IIT Madras has done really well in some other areas partnering with the RER Cancer Center in new ways of looking at data and cancer this is just one example but why do I bring this example up you look next door you have on our University you have the idea Cancer Center you have the central leather Research Institute you have the Institute for math sciences and you know you have a network of colleges all over Chennai iit madras is not owned by chile and here is a tremendous opportunity if iit madras can't connect without compromising its independence its isolation to some extent which is needed for expertise and interact with the ecosystem in broadening excellence while nurturing it and I'm firing it inside then this hub-and-spoke system with the similar structures in Bangalore Hyderabad Pune Delhi Kolkata and so on can allow the strength and investment of our phenomenal foundations over decades to spread and that needs to be to spread but again it's not the spread of investment alone which is needed of more quality laboratories which are needed but as manky says the culture of doing science in a non hierarchical hierarchical way which questions Authority that culture also needs to spread and that's the principal challenge that requires the you know the development of leadership and that's never easy just putting the plumbing in but not having the right kind of water supply would be a problem I just want to I want to quickly talk about this business of excellence so there is a slight misunderstanding when I say excellence I don't mean the sort of huge groundbreaking discoveries that you know change science and so on but rather any science ought to be done in an in a way that ensures excellence in the sense it should be rigorous it should have a clear goal when you do the experiment you should be able to tell what you've achieved and what the next steps are and so on so I think you know that sort of excellence ought to be very widely cultivated it's it's not about you know being at the frontiers of cancer research or or physics etc so so I think excellence can be and should be really very widely dispersed and you know we need to define what that excellence is and and and ensure and nurture it I think maybe we're sort of which should we open the floor to questions the dangerous thing is that we can go on and on but we should I think open the floor to questions here yeah the second row yeah what we'll do is we'll quickly take three questions you so that then we can you know answer those yeah together and thank thank you very much for the interesting debate Mike I'm nursing Malou one of the faculty in biomedical engineering my question is there are sophisticated instrument facilities at the public hundred institutions it is invested and this should be also open on the time-based manner to other institution which is also is a IAA city approved institutions okay this should happen that's what you are telling because network of institutions but that is not happening over the years if you we see Hawaii IIT Powai there are several investments which are lying and absolute also the equipment's and these equipments can be thrown open to the other institution in their calculus that is a big investment but the point I take kindly yeah first second row here thank you so you both my query to Professor Venky is that in your comparative genealogy of growth after 1800 along with development of science and technology in Europe what also contributed is European colonization of the world yes so let let me complete my question here therefore the challenge is not just investment now along with Newtonian mechanics what is the challenge for colonialism not only in terms of practice of science but epistemology of science and my query to dr. beter okay that's fine okay thank you so I want to get to your query just before we get to yours I completely disagree with your premise okay and the reason is the reason is if you look at Europe and you ask which were the richest countries around 1900 in Europe they were Germany Switzerland and Sweden the three countries which had almost no colonies if you ask which were the countries in Europe that were the poorest they were Portugal and Spain which had the most colonies per capita so the that the wealth of Europe did not come from colonization colonization is a separate historical thing which led to exploitation of other countries but the wealth came from exploitation of human knowledge and the industry already won this question is for dr. BJ will solid the woman at the back and then you yeah go ahead we can't hear you yeah sir Department of Atomic Energy has proposed for India based neutrino Observatory in Taney porta Purim but there is a huge opposition in this state you know citing environmental degradation so what would be your piece of science sorry advice so so is this is certainly a curiosity based science right so a curiosity driven design so what what is your piece of advice but we had answered right after the first question which we asked which we haven't yet answered which was I've forgotten the question yeah yeah okay okay so there are lots of efforts on sharing those happening I think it's good but I think as importantly as Venky pointed out while that's critical and important to have access to equipment and share it the critical point is also to have an ecosystem with shares discussion debate and curiosity that fundamentally is absent and as a consequence of that equipment sharing will also become much easier if you amplify that but but I do agree I think yeah sorry so Vijay I have a question for you let me finish the neutrino neutrino question neutrino question so the neutrino Indian neutrino Observatory project is a very old proposal dating back if I am not mistaken to over a decade ago it had many points raised from the Environment Ministry and the local environment bodies which have been addressed and they've been addressed repeatedly and right now the situation is that the Ministry of Environment has given its clearance to the project and the state government environment agencies have to accept that and go forward that's the technical situation Vijay actually dr. Venky made a very right point that you know while the resources we are allocating for research and development they are limited at the same time we need to develop the capacity this capacity institutional capacity or to be able to use it properly I'll give an example in one of our universe G which is Oaxaca like when they were celebrating hundred fifty years of existence or then Government of India gave them hundred crores to develop a national institute for nanoscience and technology and now it is almost 1213 years and we find that because of this lack of admission of capacity they have not been able to develop this excellence Center so my suggestion to you is that as a policy maker you need to focus on developing this administrative capacity also in our researchers and academicians and second point is when you say that 95 percent of the students they are studying in State Universities one problem is the way we are recruiting our faculty in these state universities we have these wrong incentives of number of papers you publish and then you know like how many RSS scholars you guide and all that actually we have to give the right incentives also for the right development of science and research in our country so can I both these points I should say that point is it's a worldwide recruiting and the criteria for recruiting faculty that's a worldwide problem and I think you know there's an ongoing discussion everywhere in the West about what is the proper criteria well how should we judge papers versus other qualities and so on that's a very difficult problem certain development in fundamental says at basic levels oh sorry sorry sorry sorry why can't our country develop research and development in fundamental size at basic levels you know India is one of the few perhaps the only post-colonial country which is invested in basic science and in science in general post-independence most other countries didn't invest on the scale so we have indeed invested in fundamental science over decades hugely my own lab has grown because of the government's investment in completely unproductive useless science right and and this is the government of india which is invested in this its curiosity-driven science so I think India's investor problem is something more is are we using that investment is that investment sufficient are we using it to ask questions which are interesting or are we using it to chase specific metrics the secondary or tertiary derivatives or not and that's the challenge so both investment needs to go up but also you know we should stop this global trend of chasing metrics rather than questions I'm afraid we have to stop here I've been told to finish up and and this is in any case this is not a problem that's going to be solved even we spoke for the rest of you you know the session the rest of the day but I hope it's given you some flavor of the issues involved they're complex and they'll take time to solve thank you very much

Channel: The Hindu

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Length: 50min 58sec (3058 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2019