This year, an Indian American is part of the trio which has bagged the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The Indian is Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, who has shared the Prize with fellow American Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath for mapping ribosomes, the protein producing factories within cells at the atomic level.
I did not understand what this research is all about. But I do understand a message that comes loud and clear year after year. Indian researchers shine outside the country. Scientists, economists, litterateurs there are so many Indian-origin experts. But most of them have been seen shining from foreign soil. Why is it that the Indian brain functions better when it is in American laboratories? What is it in Indian laboratories that do not fuel that same brain to become Nobel achievers?
The answer clearly lies in the Indian government’s apathy towards indigenous research and development. In fact, last year, Kapil Sibal as Science and technology minister admitted in Parliament that the number of core researchers was 1.5 lakh as compared to 8-10 lakh in China. He said in Scandinavian countries, there were 7,000 researchers per million people, in the US, there were 4,700 researchers per million people, while in India, there were 156 researchers per million people. (Source: The Financial Express, 2008).
Many Indian brains leave the country to pursue higher studies abroad, especially to the US. We Indians keep complaining about this drain of brain. But we never seem to stop and think that these brains dump our country because of its underprivileged and undernourished universities, and, instead, choose to enrich the research laboratories of the West.
Take the case of the 2009 Nobel winner, Mr Venkatraman Ramakrishnan. His place of birth is Chidambaram, a town in Tamil Nadu. His hall of fame: the US.
But we Indians excel in gushing about the Indian connections of these achievers, without contributing towards their success. In fact, the media has already started brazenly gloating about this “Indian” who won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Soon, there will be sound bytes and print columns dedicated to this “Indian” who “battled all odds to bag this prestigious prize”. The government will probably honour him, and even host him for a Rashtrapati Bhavan dinner.
Drawing an analogy, this attitude is like a mother who has no time for the baby, and gets a nanny to do a proxy. Bu the mother conveniently walks away with the credit when the child becomes an achiever, without having contributed her time, effort and patience.
Will the Indian government ever wake up to recognize and tap local research talent stemming from local universities to produce an indigenous Nobel achiever? Can our mother take care of us? Or is India happy with one C.V. Raman, an indigenous Nobel laureate?
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I was wondering if China Media (and government) went gaga over Hongkong born Charles Kuen Kao who won this years Physics Nobel
ReplyDeleteNN
I think there's a problem with the very basis of celebrating the nobel as the most significant recognition. For, if you notice, none who went against the grain have received the nobel. Is this not an issue. For, inventions/discoveries that changed the course of history were, invariably, those which went against the grain. Take Marx for instance; the core of the Marxian approach was to stress the inevitability of change and that such a change is brought about by those oppressed by the given order and in that sense towards liberation. Has someone thought of why Marx was not thought of for something like the nobel??? And contrast that with the nobel for Amartya Sen: His idea of capitalism with a human face was esentially a desperate attempt to presecribe a model for capitalism sustaining itself; and none cared to even wait to test whether that will work at all before awarding the nobel to Sen.
ReplyDeleteWonder if this makes sense!!!!!