Tag: caste system

Scientific fact? Not good enough to be true.

Last week in India: Two scientists who coauthored two papers, along with many others from India as well as abroad, have spoken out against the conclusions of those papers even as they refused to distance themselves from their findings. As bizarre as this sounds, it may have happened because the two scientists were not prepared to weather the government’s potential backlash towards the paper’s conclusions, or they wish to ingratiate themselves to the ruling dispensation. Either way, their obeisance to the official party line is fascinating proof that the scientific enterprise – for all its promises of benevolence as well as objectivity – doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally determine how its discoveries will be digested by society at large.

As C.P. Rajendran wrote, ethical obligations demand that the duo have their names removed from the papers, but how would ethics matter to someone prepared to publicly dispute the conclusions of studies that he has painstakingly helped construct? These men, particularly Vasant Shinde, have more than sullied the people’s impression of science itself; they have lent their authority to news publications that have wrongly reported (examples here, here, here and here) the papers’ findings to feed a political narrative whose triumphalism has already rendered many other tenets and conclusions of scientific research unreliable.

The scientists haven’t only contravened the truth-value of an idea they helped move closer to the truth, but have, in the process, handed a dozen more bricks to the nationalist mason as he builds his theatre of the absurd. Now what prevents a person from anticipating two truths in the future pertaining to, say, the ability of homeopathic medicines to cure cancer or an archaeological quest for the mythical river Saraswati – one delivered by the paper and its robust methods designed to negate the influence of cognitive biases and the other by the paper’s authors at a press conference, in the presence of journalists who simply don’t know to expect better?

Curious Bends – Lack of scientific temper, Sikkim’s gamble, disappearing rare fauna and more

1. Will the most advanced Indian state’s gamble payoff?

“Sikkim’s own energy needs of 409 megawatts (MW) were met by 2012, and Chamling already sells 175 MW of extra power to India’s power-starved northern grid. If all 26 hydel projects come on stream, Sikkim should generate 4,190 MW of electricity. But there are a few problems.” (7 min read, indiaspend.com)

2. India has the cheapest flights in the world

“India’s airline industry is a mess. Taxes are sky-high, infrastructure is poor and profit margins are razor thin. A string of carriers have gone out of business, and many others are struggling to stay afloat. Yet the big winners might be price-conscious consumers — and any carrier strong enough to survive the price wars that have made India the cheapest place to fly on Earth.” (3 min read, cnn.com)

3. Scientific temper? No, thanks.

“I persuaded Professor Nurul Hasan, then Education Minister, to have the following clause included in Article 51A in the 42nd Amendment of the Constitution in 1976: “It shall be the duty of every citizen of Indian “to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of enquiry and reform.” But India has not produced any Nobel Prize winner in science in the last 85 years – largely because of the lack of a scientific environment in the country, of which scientific temper would be an important component.” (5 min read, thehindu.com)

+ The author, Puspha Bhargava, is the founder-director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology at Hyderabad, and chairman of the Southern Regional Centre of Council for Social Development.

4. Why India’s healthcare remains abysmal

“The reason India’s healthcare indicators remain abysmal is not just a question of money (after all, ours is one of the fastest growing economies). The problem is a persistent rash of doublespeak that denies the people a coherent healthcare system. While successive governments have committed to various goals, no government programme has yet focused on the three most important problems facing India’s health at once: a mismanaged regulatory climate, corruption, and the caste system.” (5 min read, scroll.in)

5. India’s rare faunas are disappearing faster than scientists can discover them

“At the World Parks Congress in Sydney in October, the International Union for Conservation of Nature said their information on the biodiversity that the Western Ghats contained was “deficient” and cautioned that the region was under tremendous pressure from population within and without, from untrammelled resource extraction, residential and recreational development and large-scale hydroelectric projects. “We must know all that exists there before it goes extinct,” says Vasudevan. “Not that we’re not we’re doing much to prevent that.”” (4 min read, qz.com)

Chart of the week

“The 2014 general elections were estimated to be India’s most expensive—and the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) broke the bank on the way to its biggest ever election victory. In all, the BJP spent Rs 714.28 crore ($115 million) on the 2014 general election campaign. But its worth remembering that this is only what the parties declare before the Election Commission—and that India’s election campaigns are awash with black money, booze and other persuasive items.” More on Quartz.

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