Irony has become the cartographer of modern India. We put Chandrayaan on the moon and reached Mars on a budget so low that it mystified Hollywood. The current debate: does cow urine cure disease? Warning. Do not reduce IIT Madras director V Kamakoti’s remarks on the medicinal value of cow urine to a Left-Right shouting match. Kamakoti is not a nutcase. He is an accomplished computer scientist. But when the head of one of India’s premier scientific institutions endorses medical claims lacking rigorous clinical evidence, personal belief defines scientific knowledge. True, many modern drugs originated in traditional medicine: aspirin from willow bark, and artemisinin from Chinese herbs. But only after undergoing rigorous and controlled experiments, peer review, reproducibility and clinical trials. The current temptation to mistake cultural confidence for scientific proof that anything ancient is true, is dangerous. Or worse, declaring scientific evidence as an insult to Indian civilisation. Evidence is civilisation’s foundation. Every bridge that doesn’t collapse, every aircraft that lands safely, and every vaccine that saves millions succeeds because proof is validation.
India reportedly has an R&D crisis: its spend on research is just 0.6-0.7 per cent of the GDP. China invests over 2 per cent, the US around 3.5 per cent. Israel’s and South Korea’s exceed 5 per cent. But current government data shows that for every Rs 100 spent on R&D, the government chips in Rs 48 and industry Rs 45. The remaining Rs 7 comes from scientific and industrial research organisations, and private higher education institutions. A crisis of scientific human capital flight surfaced when large numbers of ISRO scientists left for better career opportunities because of relatively poor salaries by private industry standards, red tape, limited research autonomy, and ideological interference. Once Indian scientists were considered demi gods. Homi Bhabha imagined atomic India before India could afford it. Vikram Sarabhai fathered our space programme against global scepticism about why a poor nation needed rockets. Yash Pal transformed science communication. Their authority came not from invoking ancient wisdom, but by pushing the frontier of established knowledge. Why has no Indian scientist won a Nobel Prize in science since CV Raman in 1930? Indian-origin scientists Hargobind Khorana, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan did prize-winning work abroad and were not Indian citizens at the time of the award. Which Indian laboratory has the equivalent of CRISPR gene editing, the Higgs boson, graphene, AlphaFold, mRNA vaccine technology, and AI breakthroughs? This is why the Kamakoti episode is larger than just one speech. Every great scientific revolution from Darwin to Einstein, from Raman to Higgs, began by challenging accepted wisdom, not validating it. AI is redefining economics, and quantum computing is rewriting cybersecurity. Synthetic biology is transforming medicine and fusion energy by transforming fantasy to engineering. Semiconductor manufacturing has become geopolitical because nations want military power, economic dominance, and strategic independence. China—which took years for a Science Nobel—is building research universities at extraordinary speed while American laboratories continue to attract global talent. Even smaller Singapore and South Korea, which are yet to get a Nobel, treat scientific research as national infrastructure. Meanwhile, India is trapped in symbolic debates. Its Academic Freedom Index fell from around 0.58-0.6 in the mid-2010s to 0.16-0.22 by 2024-2025, placing it in the bottom 15 per cent of 179 countries in the “severely curtailed” or “completely restricted” category. Reports describe government enquiries directed at the heads of autonomous institutions such as the IITs, even as subjects like reincarnation, the afterlife, and astrology were discussed at a conference hosted by IIT Mandi. Critics allege textbook and curriculum changes downplay evolution or elevate ancient claims lacking rigorous evidence. Multiple scientists from Homi Bhabha Centre say scientists who do not share the establishment’s ideological line, keep silent to protect careers. Core scientific work in physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, and AI continues at elite institutions with more operational independence; and whose funding exceeds government grants.
India’s science future cannot be decided by insisting ancient traditions contain hidden truths. Some do, indeed. But truth, wherever it comes from, must earn its place through evidence. The world’s past is a repository of prejudices. Galileo was under house arrest for defending the Copernican view of Earth revolving around the Sun. It wasn’t simply “science versus religion”; but politics, because the Church authority played a role. Physician Michael Servetus, who correctly described of pulmonary circulation, was executed for heresy. Semmelweis was admitted to a lunatic asylum where he died for proving doctors must wash their hands: the germ theory had not yet been accepted. Stalin, who wanted ideology to overrule evidence, ordered the great Soviet scientist Nikolai Vavilov imprisoned: he starved to death, thus setting back Soviet genetics by decades. The Chinese Cultural Revolution persecuted thousands of scientists, academics and physicians as “bourgeois intellectuals”. There is no such brutality in India. However, the deeper lesson is that the enemy of science is not religion; it is dogma. Whenever a society prohibits questioning, it becomes harder for science to do what it does best: Test, Revise, and Discover evolving truth.
