ISRO – Close Read

Infinity in 15 kilograms

While space is hard, there are also different kinds of hardness. For example, on April 15, ISRO issued a press release saying it had successfully tested nozzles made of a carbon-carbon composite that would replace those made of Columbium alloy in the PSLV rocket’s fourth stage and thus increase the rocket’s payload capacity by 15 kg. Just 15 kg!

The successful testing of the C-C nozzle divergent marked a major milestone for ISRO. On March 19, 2024, a 60-second hot test was conducted at the High-Altitude Test (HAT) facility in ISRO Propulsion Complex (IPRC), Mahendragiri, confirming the system’s performance and hardware integrity. Subsequent tests, including a 200-second hot test on April 2, 2024, further validated the nozzle’s capabilities, with temperatures reaching 1216K, matching predictions.

Granted, the PSLV’s cost of launching a single kilogram to low-earth orbit is more than 8 lakh rupees (a very conservative estimate, I reckon) – meaning an additional 15 kg means at least an additional Rs 1.2 crore per launch. But finances alone are not a useful way to evaluate this addition: more payload mass could mean, say, one additional instrument onboard an indigenous spacecraft instead of waiting for a larger rocket to become available or postponing that instrument’s launch to a future mission.

But equally fascinating, and pride- and notice-worthy, to me is the fact that ISRO’s scientists and engineers were able to fine-tune the PSLV to this extent. This isn’t to say I’m surprised they were able to do it at all; on the contrary, it means the feat is as much about the benefits accruing to the rocket, and the Indian space programme by extension, as about R&D advances on the materials science front. It speaks to the oft-underestimated importance of the foundations on which a space programme is built.

Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre … has leveraged advanced materials like Carbon-Carbon (C-C) Composites to create a nozzle divergent that offers exceptional properties. By utilizing processes such as carbonization of green composites, Chemical Vapor Infiltration, and High-Temperature Treatment, it has produced a nozzle with low density, high specific strength, and excellent stiffness, capable of retaining mechanical properties even at elevated temperatures.

A key feature of the C-C nozzle is its special anti-oxidation coating of Silicon Carbide, which extends its operational limits in oxidizing environments. This innovation not only reduces thermally induced stresses but also enhances corrosion resistance, allowing for extended operational temperature limits in hostile environments.

The advances here draw from insights into metallurgy, crystallography, ceramic engineering, composite materials, numerical methods, etc., which in turn stand on the shoulders of people trained well enough in these areas, the educational institutions (and their teachers) that did so, and the schooling system and socio-economic support structures that brought them there. A country needs a lot to go right for achievements like squeezing an extra 15 kg into the payload capacity of an already highly fine-tuned machine to be possible. It’s a bummer that such advances are currently largely vertically restricted, except in the case of the Indian space programme, rather than diffusing freely across sectors.

Other enterprises ought to have these particular advantages ISRO enjoys. Even should one or two rockets fail, a test not work out or a spacecraft go kaput sooner than designed, the PSLV’s new carbon-carbon-composite nozzles stand for the idea that we have everything we need to keep trying, including the opportunity to do better next time. They represent the idea of how advances in one field of research can lead to advances in another, such that each field is no longer held back by the limitations of its starting conditions.

Will ‘Surya’ launch bombs or satellites?

From Times of India, March 14, 2024:

ISRO chairman S. Somanath confirmed to TOI in an exclusive interview that the NGLV project, internally named “SOORYA”, will be headed by (Project Director/PD) S. Sivakumar, currrently the programme director (space transportation systems) at VSSC…

ISRO and DRDO really need to systematise their naming scheme here. The next iteration of ‘Agni’ ballistic missiles DRDO is working on has widely been called ‘Surya’. For ISRO to follow by calling its newfangled launch vehicle ‘Soorya’ – even if internally – complicates communications on this topic (not that it’s otherwise great).

‘Soorya’ and ‘Surya’ may have different spellings but they refer to the same Sanskrit word and meaning (‘Sun’). The typical aloofness of Indians vis-a-vis transliterating words between English and Indian languages will inevitably feed confusion over the technology to which a given instance of ‘Surya’ refers.

Another source of confusion is the existing overlap between the civilian and the military applications of suborbital and orbital flight technologies in India. This has its pros and cons and I’m not judging that now, but here we have a next-generation launch vehicle being called ‘Soorya’ and a next-generation missile being called ‘Surya’. Not helping.

Others have noticed this issue with other projects ISRO is working on and have suggested the organisation stick to its original, de facto naming scheming – e.g. one where the name of a next-generation launch vehicle is Next-generation Launch Vehicle. It’s boring, yes, but there will be no confusion.

A request to ISRO about Chandrayaan 3

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has said its launch window for the Chandrayaan 3 mission is July 12-19. For now, the mission is expected to lift off on July 14 (at 2.35 pm IST). Chandrayaan 3’s mission is the same as that of its predecessor, Chandrayaan 2, with some marginal additions.

It has the same hardware configuration, including a lander named ‘Vikram’ containing a rover named ‘Pragyan’, attached to a propulsion module. The surface lunar mission has a planned lifetime of 14 days. The lander has four scientific payloads and the rover, two. The propulsion module itself has one. The biggest difference between the two missions, it would seem, are changes to reduce the chances of another crash-landing. As Jatan Mehta wrote in his ‘Moon Monday’ newsletter:

To increase the chances of sticking the landing this time around, ISRO has made several upgrades to the Chandrayaan-2-like lander, such as software improvements to accommodate failure, strengthened legs, a couple of new sensors for enhanced and redundant navigation-related measurements, and better power and communication systems.

Chandrayaan 3’s success will strengthen India’s position within the Artemis Accords, which it signed just last month, because it will make the country one of only four to have landed and operated a rover on the Moon. But as much as ISRO has a good reason to aim for success, it may have an opportunity if the mission fails as well – an opportunity to show that it has matured as an organisation.

The Chandrayaan 2 mission experienced a partial, but significant, failure on September 7, 2019, when its lander, bearing the rover, crashed on the lunar surface instead of gently touching down. ISRO researchers later traced the problem to a glitch in the onboard computer that lowered the amount by which the lander had to decelerate as it descended and an issue in the propulsion system. But a few months passed between the crash and the crash report, and in this time, the public conversation surrounding the accident was a cesspool of hyper-nationalist narratives and counterproductive statements by senior ISRO members.

As soon as news of the lander’s crash became public, ISRO stopped communicating updates, and refused to admit – despite all the evidence pointing that way – it had happened for a full week. In keeping with the national BJP government’s mission until then to make the Indian space programme a matter of national pride by couching its feats in a nationalist narrative, social media platforms were inundated with claims from the usual corners that the part of the mission that had failed was a “technology demonstrator” that made up a minor part of Chandrayaan 2.

Around this time, then ISRO chief K. Sivan also told journalists that the Chandrayaan 2 mission was a “98% success” – a stunningly disingenuous attempt to downplay what had been, until the mission’s launch, the basis of many of ISRO’s claims to greatness as well as which had occupied hundreds of scientists and engineers for several years. Technology demonstrators are important, but ‘Vikram’ and ‘Pragyan’ weren’t just that; more importantly, no way they were just 2% of the mission. Yet Sivan had been the one to say such a thing, even if he later palmed the blame off to a review committee, even as the organisation he helmed made Herculean efforts to reestablish contact with ‘Vikram’. All of this vitiated the narrative of the incident.

To make matters worse, after the lander’s crash on the day, journalists gathered at the ISRO HQ in Bengaluru were treated to a scene as Pallava Bagla shouted demanding Sivan address them. When ISRO members other than Sivan did turn up, he was rude. Bagla later apologised for his behaviour – but not before a senior Congress leader, Abhishek Singhvi, called Bagla “insane” and asked for him to be sacked. It seemed for a time that no one was interested in letting the dust settle.

For those who were plainly curious about the mission’s technical specifics as they existed, the specifics in which ISRO’s lessons for future missions, including Chandrayaan 3, would take root, the sole resource (in my limited experience) was the ISRO forum on Reddit, where independent spaceflight enthusiasts were putting together and combing through photos captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to find the lander’s resting place and clues to the cause of the accident.

The Indian government has a penchant for cutting access to information after major accidents and disasters. It did so after the Joshimath landslip, when ISRO reported that the town had slid by 5.4 cm in 12 days. It did so after it supposedly liberated Jammu and Kashmir by abrogating Article 370 of the Constitution. It did so after the Manipur riots and is yet to restore connections in the state, going so far as to brook long-winded arguments about access to VPNs in the process.

Even before Chandrayaan 2, there were some signs that ISRO had become part of the fold, including – but not limited to – the BJP government’s narratives of ISRO’s feats, the organisation’s increasing opacity, and pettiness in the face of criticism. In 2018, its then chief Sivan said that ISRO would like to lead international efforts to mine helium-3 on the Moon and transport it to the earth, disregarding the unhelpful hype and pseudoscience surrounding the isotope’s potential as a nuclear fuel.

More recently, Sivan’s successor and current chief S. Somanath claimed that India has had a “knowledge society” since “Vedic times”, that Indians’ accomplishments were appropriated by Western scholars who then regurgitated it as their own findings, and that “those working in the fields of artificial intelligence [and] machine learning love Sanskrit”.

These signs aren’t encouraging, but it’s possible to hope that these individuals and their advisors will put ISRO above themselves and their opinions. I sincerely wish that Chandrayaan 3 succeeds to the tune of 100%. At the same time, space is hard, as they say (especially for less-well-funded and less-well-technologically supplied organisations like ISRO).

And in the event of a failure, I hope ISRO will respond by sharing regular and timely updates, answer journalists’ queries, think before speaking, and, overall, conduct itself with the grace of being the premier space-faring body of the Global South.

Note: This article was updated at 5.10 pm on July 7, 2023, to include an issue with the propulsion system among the reasons Chandrayaan 2’s surface mission failed. Featured image: The LVM 3 launch vehicle lifts off bearing Chandrayaan 2 from Sriharikota, July 22, 2019. Credit: ISRO.

Something more foolish than completing phase 3 trials in 1.5 months?

That the Union government and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had entered into a more intimate, but not necessarily more beneficial, relationship became evident in 2019 when then ISRO chairman K. Sivan trotted out a series of dubious claims to massage the fate of the Chandrayaan 2 mission, whose lunar surface component had obviously failed. Anyone who follows Indian spaceflight news is familiar with the adage ‘space is hard’ and all of them abide by it (there’s an argument that we shouldn’t extend the same courtesy to more mature space programmes). Yet Sivan was determined to salvage even more, going so far at one point to call the whole mission (orbiter + lander) a “98% success”.

Shortly after news of the lander’s fate became clear to ground control, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was present as the chief guest, consoled Sivan with his customary hug even as ISRO at large withdrew into a shell of silence, offering only the occasional scrap of what it knew had happened to the lander. The vacuum of information allowed a trickle of speculation, but which was soon overwhelmed by a swell of conspiracies and, as is inevitable these days, a virtual barrier erected by right-wing commentators and bots that suppressed all questions asking for more information in the public domain. This ISRO, and the attendant public experience of India’s spaceflight programme, was markedly different from the ISRO of before – a feeling that Sivan deepened with other claims about the amount of time ISRO would need to realise its ‘Gaganyaan’ human spaceflight mission, which has already been delayed by three years. Sivan had unknowingly underestimated the amount, had deliberately communicated a shorter duration, had communicated the actual time but to which government officials couldn’t agree, or something else happened. The first possibility would’ve been unlikely were it not for the COVID-19 pandemic – but then it would seem that even if Sivan’s successor, S. Somanath, were to push back and ask for more time, the government has made up its mind: New Indian Express reported on December 8 that ISRO had received “instructions from the government” to send Indian astronauts to space on its GSLV Mk III rocket before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections! This has to be the second most unintelligent decision the government has made in the limited context of large-scale undertakings involving science and the lives of people, after Balram Bhargava’s subsequently rescinded threat in mid-2020 for researchers to complete the Covaxin phase 3 clinical trial in time for Prime Minister Modi’s Independence Day address less than two months away. It’s not clear if the government will rescind its demand of ISRO; the report itself is brief and doesn’t mention any resistance from the spaceflight mission team. But how this squares with minister Jitendra Singh’s statement in parliament last week, that the first crewed mission will only liftoff in late 2024 and that “crew safety is paramount”, is unclear. Assuming that the government will continue to push ISRO to launch in the first half of 2024, a flight based on a schedule modified to accommodate the demand may surpass the foolishness of Bhargava’s ask.

Every human spaceflight mission is inordinately complex. ISRO will have to design and test every component of the launch vehicle, crew capsule, mission profile, ground systems and crew management beforehand, in different conditions. It has to anticipate all possible failure scenarios and arrange for both failure-avoidance systems and failsafes. The timeline may have been more flexible in the early days of the undertaking, when the systems being tested were less composite, but not so today. When the government “instructs” ISRO to launch the ‘Gaganyaan’ crewed flight before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections (which are around 18 months away), it’s practically asking ISRO to devise a testing schedule that will be completed – irrespective of the tests’ outcomes – in this period all so it can use the mission’s outcomes (developed with government funds) as part of its election campaign. It’s effectively asking ISRO to sideline science, safety standards and good sense. Imagine one safety test going awry, and which ISRO might in other circumstances have liked to fix and redo. With “instructions” like those of the government, it won’t be able to – jeopardising the mission itself as well as the lives of the astronauts and the reputation of the Indian space programme in the international arena. The government simply shouldn’t make such a frighteningly asinine demand, and instead allow ISRO to take all the time it needs (within reasonable limits) to successfully complete its first human spaceflight mission.

ISRO has of late also embarked on programmes to increase its commercial revenue, even though it’s a “space research organisation”. If a crewed mission fails because the organisation let itself be cowed by the national government into trimming its testing process, all so a political party could use the launch as part of its poll propaganda, all of the organisation’s other rockets will confront doubts about their safety and whether they won’t threaten satellites worth hundreds of millions of dollars. A lot of ISRO’s work on ‘Gaganyaan’ has also happened to the exclusion of other launch vehicles and scientific missions, including (but not limited to) the reusable launch vehicle, the semi-cryogenic engine and the Aditya L1 space-probe. Its low rate of production of new rockets recently forced it to postpone the Chandrayaan 3 mission to accommodate the OneWeb satellites (in a commercial contract) in its launch manifest. Setting aside questions of ISRO’s relatively low funding and internal priorities, even if ‘Gaganyaan’ succeeds out of luck, the prospects of all of these adversely affected projects will suffer at least further reputational consequences. If ‘Gaganyaan’ fails, the future will be a lot worse.

Just as the Covaxin incident opened a window into how the Indian government was thinking about the COVID-19 vaccination drive and the role of science in shaping it, a demand of ISRO to launch realise its human spaceflight mission with a hard deadline opens a window into the Indian government’s considerations on ‘Gaganyaan’. The BJP government revived ISRO’s proposal for a human spaceflight mission in 2014, approved it in 2017 and allocated Rs 10,000 crore in 2018. Did it do so only because of how the mission’s success, should it come to pass, would help the party win elections? It’s desirable for a party’s goals and the country’s goals to be aligned – until the former crimps the latter. But more importantly, should we be concerned about the government’s heuristic for selecting and rejecting which spaceflight missions to fund? And should we be concerned about which publicly funded projects it will seek more accountability on?

There have been standing committee and audit reports calling ISRO out for slow work on this or that matter but the government at large, especially the incumbent one since 2019, has taken pains to maintain a front of amicability. It might be mildly amusing if a political party promises in its pre-poll manifesto to get ISRO in shape, and then in line, by readying a reusable launch vehicle for commercial missions by 2025 or launching five scientific missions in the next four years – but standing in the way of that is more than a knack to translate between public sentiment and technological achievement. It requires breaking a longstanding tradition of cosying up to ISRO as much as granting it autonomy while simultaneously underfunding it. We need the national government, most of all, to pay more attention to all ISRO projects on which there is evidence of dilly-dallying, and grapple honestly with the underlying issues, rather than poke its nose in the necessarily arduous safety-rating process of a crewed mission.

Featured image: A GSLV Mk III rocket lifts off on its first orbital flight, July 2017. Credit: ISRO.

How much of a milestone is AzaadiSAT?

At 9.18 am today, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched the first developmental flight of its new Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV), a three-stage modular launch vehicle designed to carry a payload of up to 500 kg to the low-Earth orbit and to go from assembly to launch readiness in six days. The existence of such a vehicle in the ISRO stable at this time is a milestone in and of itself but it’d be naïve to assume that Prime Minister Narendra would allow that to be the only one so close to Independence Day, that too the country’s 75th. So the SSLV-D1 mission will fly a satellite called AzaadiSAT in addition to the primary payload, an optical remote-sensing satellite.

As many news reports have been touting for a week (News18, CNBC TV18, Times Now, Hindustan Times, Economic Times, WION, She The People and PTI), AzaadiSAT has been “built” by 750 girls from 75 schools around the country. I put “built” in double-quotes because while the word appears in all these reports, it’s been misused. A company named SpaceKidz India (SKI) and NITI Aayog together conceived of the project. According to News18, SKI developed and tested “the main systems, including the onboard computer, flight software, electrical power system, telemetry and tele-command”. According to the SKI website, the company also “developed basic and simple experiments that students can learn and assemble with the simultaneous support of their science teachers and our SKI team’s online coaching”.

So what the students did was take existing payloads and learn how their software components fit together, using – according to Times of India – the Arduino IDE. Let’s be clear: this is a far, far cry from saying the students built the satellite! They did no such thing. “It’s just language,” you say, but that’s the problem, no? We’re claiming a feat that we haven’t accomplished. And by believing we’ve accomplished it, we have a higher estimation of what our students are capable of, what a national programme like AzaadiSAT is capable of, that is increasingly removed from reality. These 750 students have no idea what it’s like to build a satellite. In fact what they’ve done is much closer to what the likes of White Hat, Jr. purport to do – to teach school students to code different types of apps (and even then it’s hard to say if they learn the philosophy of computer science in the process).

This is Gaganyaan and the Bose hologram all over again: we don’t know what whatever we’ve done now means for whatever comes next. To be clear, the answer to this question is ‘undetermined’ in every case. ISRO is launching Indian astronauts to space on an Indian launch vehicle but the organisation’s officials don’t have a roadmap (at least in the public domain) for what Gaganyaan will gainfully do for the Indian space programme, most likely because there’s no plan for the Indian space programme itself that far ahead. Prime Minister Modi inaugurated a hologram of Subhash Chandra Bose in New Delhi except it is completely stationary, works only at night and for which the projector alone cost Rs 15 lakh (other capital costs and operational expenses separate). As a result, it utilised none of the affordances of hologram technology, was a costlier and flashier but also emptier substitute for a straightforward sculpture or metal cast, and only put Prime Minister Modi in the limelight.

Now, we have AzaadiSAT: a device with a six-month lifespan and not built by girl students but more like introduced to them after most of it was ready. In fact, according to SKI, it was “conceptualised” expressly “to pay our tribute to mark the 75th anniversary of Independence”. And why only 75 schools, 75 payloads and 750 students? The tokenism is bloody well cringe-inducing – more so if you consider the fact that “this is a first of its kind space mission with an ‘all women concept’ to promote Women in STEM as this year’s UN theme is ‘Women in Space’,” per SKI, while the control room and the adjacent viewing gallery were one big sausage fest.

SKI CEO also told News18 “that AzaadiSAT will also carry a recorded version of the national anthem sung by Rabindranath Tagore which they plan to play in space to pay tribute to the country”. If any song is played in space, it will be inaudible – the vacuum of space can’t transmit sound – so how will that pay tribute to the country? And if this song being played in low-Earth orbit is ‘heard’ via data receivers on the ground, it will be only because the song is transmitted to the receivers, and not because it was played on speakers. So is the point here that radio-scanner operators will be able to receive the national anthem transmission as a fun exercise? How would that amount to paying tribute to the country? (Of course, I don’t understand what “paying tribute to the country” itself even means.)

We seem to believe that simply exposing these students to certain concepts and/or environments that they might not encounter in the regular course of their schooling will somehow have a transformative impact on their academic and professional trajectories. This belief has been pervasive in institute-mediated scicomm at least, but there have been very few attempts to actually measure the extent to which this belief is justified. The SKI CEO even told WION that “AzaadiSAT is going to motivate more girls into the space industry or to take up STEM subjects”. We don’t know this.

It’s also often dangerously the case that the institutes, or even entities like the SKI, that make this ‘exposure’ argument also get away with superficial scicomm efforts that lack any continuous engagement or follow-ups. School students are exposed once to, for example, high-brow concepts like particle physics, gene-editing or remote-sensing, none of which has any relevance to what they’re learning in school at that time or what they need to pass their exams.

Many institutes are often eager to have their scientists speak to students enrolled in poorly funded schools often run by the local government in order to maximise the ‘impact’ of their efforts, but unmindful of the facts that a) they’re effectively talking down to these students with a view to “lifting them up” and b) they’re being ignorant of the conditions in which these students are studying and what they actually need over some scientist talking at them about why her work is important.

Why, these outreach efforts don’t even bother to check if all of the students shipped in from a local school are even interested in science or want to become scientists (which SKI sidesteps by picking only 10 students from each school). These efforts may be exercises in broadening one’s horizons but, as I said, that requires sustained engagement, not a one-off flash-bang event. On a related note, it’s curious why none of these students were present in the viewing gallery adjacent to the control room, where they could’ve seen launch operations in action, and were seated in the outdoor viewing area instead.

There is already some awareness that simply getting students to meet Nobel Prize winners is far less useful on multiple levels than having a smart and empathetic teacher. In much the same way, the AzaadiSAT seems like a lot of tokenism bundled into a project that serves nationalistic pride but leaves behind many open questions about whether the girls who all these news articles and press releases proudly claim built the satellite will regularly use the payloads they ideated over, and in a meaningful way – by which I mean both controlling the devices over time using code they wrote on their laptops or phones, receiving and processing the data from these payloads, and using them in a constructive way going into the future.

The question of access to the relevant devices is significant because, according to SKI, “Niti Aayog has partnered for this project to bring this opportunity to the Government school Girl children across India” – the same government schools that, in general, struggled to adopt virtual classrooms during the pandemic. An SKI video description also claims that the company picked students from “economically weak backgrounds”.

Building a satellite is no small feat but as I said before, these girls didn’t build the satellite. Our students should build satellites – it’s just that efforts like AzaadiSAT don’t represent this milestone. I remember when I was in college that an American professional organisation (can’t recall the name now) would provide some funds and raw materials to two groups of students – picked from the engineering streams – who’d then have to built rudimentary cars out of them with their professors’ help in two years and race them to win. A similarly long-term engagement with school students, involving all satellite components instead of just the data acquisition system, will surely be better than what SpaceKidz and NITI Aayog are currently doing.

And because ISRO actually launches satellites built by students for free into low-Earth orbit, we must ask what these satellites do. It’s been a decade of India launching student-built satellites and it’s been the same decade of our student-built satellites doing very little, if anything (surrounded often by deliberately misleading narratives) – other than making for press releases with a shelf-life overlapping with some nationalist occasion.

Review of a review: ‘Rocket Boys’ (2022)

Tanul Thakur has reviewed a series on SonyLIV called Rocket Boys for The Wire. I haven’t watched the show and don’t plan to, for want of time as well as because, reading Thakur’s review, I think I know enough about how the series depicts the work of Vikram Sarabhai and Homi Jehangir Bhabha vis-à-vis transforming India into a “scientific superpower” (Thakur’s words).

This said, I found some of the statements in Thakur’s review worth additional comments in their own right. For example, Thakur, and presumably Rocket Boys itself, says this duo’s goal was “scientific superpower” status, but this is not true. Neither man was interested in science and the goal of their work was never scientific. They pursued the use of technology for India’s betterment, in line with Nehru’s vision, but neither man aspired to technological superpower status per se either; more importantly, conflating their work with scientific work is detrimental to the public perception of science, especially what the people at large believe constitutes progress towards becoming a scientific superpower. Launching rockets and building nuclear reactors will never get us there – only the non-glamorous work of better funding and administering research and not expecting immediate results can. This distinction, rarefied though it may seem, leads to the second part of Thakur’s review that I’d like to address:

Even though the biopic has exploded as a sub-genre in Hindi cinema over the last decade, profiling a vast range of sportsmen, leaders, even gangsters, it has paid scant attention to Indian scientists. Such depictions are so rare that I remember watching something similar almost eight years ago (a National Award-winning documentary, The Quantum Indians, chronicling the lives of Raman, S.N. Bose and Meghnad Saha). So, Rocket Boys, centred on the personal and professional lives of Bhabha and Sarabhai, is a fresh and long-due departure.

The Quantum Indians, made by Raja Choudhury and released in 2013, had the ridiculous blurb that it concerned the work of three “forgotten” Indian scientists – whereas its subjects were the three most well-known Indian physicists: C.V. Raman, Satyendra Nath Bose and Meghnad Saha. The way we have forgotten these men is often at odds with the way we tend to remember them, which is true with Rocket Boys as well. In 2014, Thakur quoted Choudhury as saying: “In 2012, when the [Higgs] Boson particle was announced, there was no conversation on S.N. Bose in international media at all. That riled me a little.” The reason few invoked Bose in that context was because his work had nothing to do with the Higgs boson!

Now, Thakur’s axis with Rocket Boys is that the biopic genre in India has once again finally visited Indian scientists. But to repeat myself, it hasn’t: Sarabhai’s and Bhabha’s contributions weren’t as scientists but as technologists – but to be more accurate, they are best remembered as fine administrators. Both the Department of Atomic Energy and the institution that became ISRO shortly before Sarabhai’s death were the product of Bhabha’s and Sarabhai’s ability to properly define the problems they needed to solve, build good institutions, staff them with the right people, lead them with integrity and, of course, work with the political establishment to have them funded and supported.

Casting Sarabhai and Bhabha as scientists is to mischaracterise, and ultimately gloss over, the precise nature of their achievements; by extension, to recall them as scientists or their work as scientific at this point of time is to continue to believe technological progress will lead to scientific success. (It’s entirely possible that Rocket Boys paid attention to their work as administrators but, given the givens, I don’t have my hopes up.) And in my view this conflation negates this axis of the review: the Indian biopic genre, at least in Hindi, has yet to concern itself with Indian scientists.

Instead, I’d say (again, without having watched it) that Rocket Boys is of a piece with the heightened valorisation of the Indian spaceflight and nuclear power enterprises since Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister in 2014. Modi has clearly celebrated India’s prowess on these fronts; he has also frequently sought to appropriate spaceflight achievements in particular to make himself and his party look more powerful, smarter, more decisive. In ISRO’s track record, Modi seems to have unfettered access to a slew of accomplishments that he has sought to attach to his own legacy.

As I wrote in my review of Mission Mangal (2019), the film “wouldn’t have been made if not for the nationalism surrounding it – the nationalism bestowed of late upon the Indian space programme by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the profitability bestowed upon nationalism by the business-politics nexus” that his government has fostered. Since 2016, I have also noticed (anecdotally) an uptick in the number of books and articles about the ‘golden’ years of the Indian space programme (which could have been a direct fallout of the prime minister’s view, which influences industry and culture). In the same period, and in a more thoroughly documented trend, ISRO has become more opaque, more petty and averse to failure in a way reminiscent of the Modi government itself. In 2019, ISRO also introduced a Vikram Sarabhai Award with a cash prize of Rs 5 lakh for articles that cast ISRO in positive light.

Taken together, it might be more useful to understand Rocket Boys as yet another manifestation of the “hamara ISRO mahaan” sentiment, especially since Thakur also writes that the series ultimately descends into a hagiography of Sarabhai and Bhabha (and Abdul Kalam) – than to consider it as a subject of the more-storied biopic genre.

Featured image: A still from ‘Rocket Boys’ (2022). Source: SonyLIV.

On resource constraints and merit

In the face of complaints about how so few women have been awarded this year’s Swarnajayanti Fellowships in India, some scientists pushed back asking which of the male laureates who had been selected should have been left out instead.

This is a version of the merit argument commonly applied to demands for reservation and quota in higher education – and it’s also a form of an argument that often raises its head in seemingly resource-constrained environments.

India is often referred to as a country with ‘finite’ resources, often when people are discussing how best to put these resources to use. There are even romantic ideals associated with working in such environments, such as doing more with less – as ISRO has been for many decades – and the popular concept of jugaad.

But while fixing one variable while altering the other would make any problem more solvable, it’s almost always the resource variable that is presumed to be fixed in India. For example, a common refrain is that ISRO’s allocation is nowhere near that of NASA, so ISRO must figure how best to use its limited funds – and can’t afford luxuries like a full-fledged outreach team.

There are two problems in the context of resource availability here: 1. an outreach team proper is implied to be the product of a much higher allocation than has been made, i.e. comparable to that of NASA, and 2. incremental increases in allocation are precluded. Neither of these is right, of course: ISRO doesn’t have to wait for NASA’s volume of resources in order to set up an outreach team.

The deeper issue here is not that ISRO doesn’t have the requisite funds but that it doesn’t feel a better outreach unit is necessary. Here, it pays to acknowledge that ISRO has received not inconsiderable allocations over the years, as well as has enjoyed bipartisan support and (relative) freedom from bureaucratic interference, so it cops much of the blame as well. But in the rest of India, the situation is flipped: many institutions, and their members, have fewer resources than they have ideas and that affects research in a way of its own.

For example, in the context of grants and fellowships, there’s the obvious illusory ‘prestige constraint’ at the international level – whereby award-winners and self-proclaimed hotshots wield power by presuming prestige to be tied to a few accomplishments, such as winning a Nobel Prize, publishing papers in The Lancet and Nature or maintaining an h-index of 150. These journals and award-giving committees in turn boast of their selectiveness and elitism. (Note: don’t underestimate the influence of these journals.)

Then there’s the financial constraint for Big Science projects. Some of them may be necessary to keep, say, enthusiastic particle physicists from being carried away. But more broadly, a gross mismatch between the availability of resources and the scale of expectations may ultimately be detrimental to science itself.

These markers of prestige and power are all essentially instruments of control – and there is no reason this equation should be different in India. Funding for science in India is only resource-constrained to the extent to which the government, which is the principal funder, deems it to be.

The Indian government’s revised expenditure on ‘scientific departments’ in 2019-2020 was Rs 27,694 crore. The corresponding figure for defence was Rs 3,16,296 crore. If Rs 1,000 crore were moved from the latter to the former, the defence spend would have dropped only by 0.3% but the science spend would have increased by 3.6%. Why, if the money spent on the Statue of Unity had instead been diverted to R&D, the hike would have nearly tripled.

Effectively, the argument that ‘India’s resources are limited’ is tenable only when resources are constrained on all fronts, or specific fronts as determined by circumstances – and not when it seems to be gaslighting an entire sector. The determination of these circumstances in turn should be completely transparent; keeping them opaque will simply create more ground for arbitrary decisions.

Of course, in a pragmatic sense, it’s best to use one’s resources wisely – but this position can’t be generalised to the point where optimising for what’s available becomes morally superior to demanding more (even as we must maintain the moral justification of being allowed to ask how much money is being given to whom). That is, constantly making the system work more efficiently is a sensible aspiration, but it shouldn’t come – as it often does at the moment, perhaps most prominently in the case of CSIR – at the cost of more resources. If people are discontented because they don’t have enough, their ire should be directed at the total allocation itself more than how a part of it is being apportioned.

In a different context, a physicist had pointed out a few years ago that when the US government finally scrapped the proposed Superconducting Supercollider in the early 1990s, the freed-up funds weren’t directed back into other areas of science, as scientists thought they would be. (I couldn’t find the link to this comment nor recall the originator – but I think it was either Sabine Hossenfelder or Sean Carroll; I’ll update this post when I do.) I suspect that if the group of people that had argued thus had known this would happen, it might have argued differently.

I don’t know if a similar story has played out in India; I certainly don’t know if any Big Science projects have been commissioned and then scrapped. In fact, the opposite has happened more often: whereby projects have done more with less by repurposing an existing resource (examples here, here and here). (Having to fight so hard to realise such mega-projects in India could be motivating those who undertake one to not give up!)

In the non-Big-Science and more general sense, an efficiency problem raises its head. One variant of this is about research v. teaching: what does India need more of, or what’s a more efficient expense, to achieve scientific progress – institutions where researchers are free to conduct experiments without being saddled with teaching responsibilities or institutions where teaching is just as important as research? This question has often been in the news in India in the last few years, given the erstwhile HRD Ministry’s flip-flops on whether teachers should conduct research. I personally agree that we need to ‘let teachers teach’.

The other variant is concerned with blue-sky research: when are scientists more productive – when the government allows a “free play of free intellects” or if it railroads them on which problems to tackle? Given the fabled shortage of teachers at many teaching institutions, it’s easy to conclude that a combination of economic and policy decisions have funnelled India’s scholars into neglecting their teaching responsibilities. In turn, rejigging the fraction of teaching or teaching-cum-research versus research-only institutions in India in favour of the former, which are less resource-intensive, could free up some funds.

But this is also more about pragmatism than anything else – somewhat like untangling a bundle of wires before straightening them out instead of vice versa, or trying to do both at once. As things stand, India’s teaching institutions also need more money. Some reasons there is a shortage of teachers include the fact that they are often not paid well or on time, especially if they are employed at state-funded colleges; the institutions’ teaching facilities are subpar (or non-existent); if jobs are located in remote places and the institutions haven’t had the leeway to consider upgrading recreational facilities; etc.

Teaching at the higher-education level in India is also harder because of the poor state of government schools, especially outside tier I cities. This brings with it a separate raft of problems, including money.

Finally, a more ‘local’ example of prestige as well as financial constraints that also illustrates the importance of this PoV is the question of why the Swarnajayanti Fellowships have been awarded to so few women, and how this problem can be ‘fixed’.

If the query about which men should be excluded to accommodate women sounds like a reasonable question – you’re probably assuming that the number of fellows has to be limited to a certain number, dictated in turn by the amount of money the government has said can be awarded through these fellowships. But if the government allocated more money, we could appreciate all the current laureates as well as many others, and arguably without diluting the ‘quality’ of the competition (given just how many scholars there are).

Resource constraints obviously can’t explain or resolve everything that stands in the way of more women, trans-people, gender-non-binary and gender-non-conforming scholars receiving scholarships, fellowships, awards and prominent positions within academia. But axiomatically, it’s important to see that ‘fixing’ this problem requires action on two fronts, instead of just one – make academia less sexist and misogynistic and secure more funds. The constraints are certainly part of the problem, particularly when they are wielded as an excuse to concentrate more resources, and more power, in the hands of the already privileged, even as the constraints may not be real themselves.

In the final analysis, science doesn’t have to be a powerplay, and we don’t have to honour anyone at the expense of another. But deferring to such wisdom could let the fundamental causes of this issue off the hook.

A great discussion on the history of India’s tech.

On February 27, the Bangalore International Centre and Carnegie India hosted a panel discussion around Midnight Machines, the new book by Arun Mohan Sukumar that traces the interplay of technology and politics in independent India (read The Wire Science‘s review here). The panelists were Arun (my friend and former colleague at The Hindu), space entrepreneur Susmita Mohanty, Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Gowda, historian of science Jahnavi Phalkey, and Anu Singh of Carnegie India.

The whole discussion was about 90 minutes long, and picked up steam after the first 15 minutes or so. If you’re at all interested in the history of science and technology in India, I recommend you watch the whole thing on YouTube. If not, I’d like to draw your attention to two a few interesting (to me) passages of discussion and which I’ve also transcribed below. The parts where Arun and Phalkey directly debated each other, Arun emerged with only minor bruises, which I shouldn’t have to tell you is a considerable feat and may not have been the case in a full-on, two-person debate!

Jahnavi Phalkey, 32:00 – The political ambition of a state is now technological ambition. That’s why the technological story of the latter half of the 20th century is a political one, and is therefore also political in India. The other aspect of this is centralisation. While we in India have argued that the Indian state centralised research funding through the CSIR, DAE, the space programme, etc. with all money going into a few facilities, look at Europe. The European answer was CERN, with countries coming together to build facilities. Apart from the UN, there was no economy then that could conduct scientific research at the scale the tone for which was set during the Second World War.

Therefore, the centralisation solution adopted (also) in India was no different from what was happening globally. So what was happening in India was not anomalous. It’s a part of the larger story. To add a footnote to the Nehru story: Nehru spoke science, he said “scientific temper”, but look at the institutions he established: the IITs (when it was 60 years before India setup the IISERs) and the CSIR (he didn’t go for the Max Planck Institutes model, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes model or the Harnack principle but focused on industrial research); the IISc came 50 years before independence. So the accusation that Nehru spoke science, did science but didn’t do technology is not held out.

[At one point, Arun also talks about how India needed a Nehru to navigate the Non-Aligned Movement to still secure favours form different governments without upsetting the precarious balance of powers (so to speak) to help set up some of India’s preeminent IITs. I skimmed through the video twice but couldn’t find the exact timestamp.]

Arun Mohan Sukumar, 43:50 – A CSIR scientist said the failure of the solar cooker project basically ensured that all the scientists [who worked on it] retreated into the comfort of their labs and put them off “applied science”.

Here’s a project commenced almost immediately after independence meant to create technology by Indians for Indians, and after it failed for various reasons, the political spotlight that had been put on the project was counterproductive. Nehru himself investing this kind of capital exposed him and the scientific establishment to criticism that they were perhaps not used to. These were venerated men in their respective fields and they were perhaps unused to being accountable in this visceral way. India offered a prototype of the solar cooker to Egypt and, I believe, Rhodesia or South Africa, and the joke goes that the order was never repeated. D.D. Kosambi says in an opinion piece at the time that the only person who made any profit out of the solar cooker affair is the contractor who sold it for scraps.

This is the kind of criticism confronted by the scientific establishment and it is a consequence of politics. I agree with Prof Phalkey when she says it was a consequence of the political establishment not insulating the scientific establishment from the sort of criticism which may or may not informed but you know how the press is. That led to a gradual breaking of ranks between the CSIR and the political vision for India where you’d have these mass technologies that [Phalkey] mentioned, and you can see the best evidence for that is Nehru’s pursuit of massive industrialisation in the second Five Year Plan, from 1956 to 1961.

This isn’t to say that Nehru was surrounded by advisers who all believed in the same thing; there was of course [P.C.] Mahalanobis who believed in a more aggressive form of industrialisation. But at various points of time one constituency was trumping another, within even the establishment. But it needs to be said that the PM was not in favour of introducing tractors in agriculture… Again, this is all criticism with the wisdom of hindsight.

Jahnavi Phalkey, 53:16 – In the 1970s, look at the number of democratic regimes that fell due to hot wars fought during the Cold War in the rest of the world. You’ll start to see why the need for control was felt.

Arun Mohan Sukumar [following after Rajeev Gowda’s comments], 55:05 – Another dimension is the presence of universities in the US, which incubated the military-industrial complex. Harvard and MIT in Boston and Stanford in the Silicon Valley were the nuclei for research. In India, some of these are truly unfortunate circumstances that the government has no control over. When the first batch of graduates passed out of IIT Kanpur in 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Immigration and Naturalisation Act giving Indians, and people of other nationalities, an automatic path to citizenship. So the best minds of our country were prompted by the fact that there aren’t enough jobs or enough well-paying jobs in India [to enter] a feeder line created between India and the US, from which it is very difficult to come back. Those circumstances too must be acknowledged.

Susmita Mohanty, 56:20 – Even brain drain is hugely exaggerated. I’ve lived in four different countries. The talent pool we have in India today is as big or bigger. There are people leaving the country but not everyone is the best coder in town.

Arun Mohan Sukumar, 57:24 – The appropriate technology movement that started in the late 1960s and early 1970s was this philosophy that grew out of Western Europe and the US which called for lesser consumption of natural resources and labour-intensive jobs with a view to conserving resources for the planet, a lot of which was precipitated by a report called ‘Limits to Growth’, which essentially predicted this catastrophe that would befall humanity by 2000.

And then economist [E.F.] Schumacher writes this book called ‘Small is Beautiful’ [in 1973] and creates a revolution incidentally not just in advanced societies but also in developing countries, where leaders like Indira Gandhi coopted the movement to say to the people that you should consume less, conserve your natural resources and deploy labour-intensive technologies that will essentially be beneficial to you and your way of life. Seminar after seminar was organised by top institutes of the time to talk about how you can create fuel out of biogas, how you can mechanise bullock carts – technologies that are not scalable but nevertheless are quick-fixes, and this is where ‘jugaad’ has its historical origin: in the valorisation of frugal innovation.

[Phalkey shakes her head in disagreement.]

This would’ve been acceptable had it not been for the fact that investments in the space and nuclear programmes continued unabated. … So on the one hand the state was promoting big science and it wasn’t as if they had an ideological or political compulsion against Big Machine and big technologies. There was just factors such as financial considerations and the government’s own inability to develop technology at home which, I argue, led Indira Gandhi to co-opt the appropriate technology movement. … In India, perhaps it’s harsh to say that we moved backwards, but the objective was not to redefine technology but to shun it altogether. [Phalkey is quite in disagreement at this point.] That unfortunately is I feel a byproduct of the legacy of the 1970s.

Jahnavi Phalkey, 1:01:14 – I have to disagree because there’s been only one science plan in the country in its history, and that was done in the 1970s under Mrs Gandhi’s regime. Eighteen-hundred people from user ministries, the Planning Commission, scientific institutions and industry sat together over 18-24 months and came up with a comprehensive plan as to how to take research happening in the institutions and in the CSIR through Planning Commission allocation of money to the user ministries. We haven’t seen anything on this scale before or since.

Problem was as soon as Mrs Gandhi implemented the plan, she also implemented the Emergency. When the Emergency was pulled back, the Morarji Desai regime decided that India did not need [the science plan]. So the argument you’re making [addressing Arun] of scaling back on technology or technology as a solution to the social, political and other problems that India had was more due to the Janata regime and not Mrs Gandhi’s. One needs to make this small distinction because this was simply not true at the time.

Arun Mohan Sukumar, 1:06:09 – What was remarkable to me while writing this book was this factoid that comes from this book on the history of computing in India by C.R. Subramanian: he says the import of computers to India tripled during the years of the Emergency. For my life, I can’t imagine why! But it goes to show that despite the anti-automation protests of the 1970s and 1970s, and remember that 1978 is the year when IBM quit India for whatever reasons, there was beginning to be this gradual embrace of technology and which really takes off from the 1980s. And from the moment of liberalisation in 1991, it’s a different story altogether.

Some of these legacies continue to haunt us, whether it is popular protests against nuclear plants, which really came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, not just in India but also in other parts of the world. Some of that really bore on India as well, and I believe continued into the debate on genetically modified crops. If you ask a person who really has a strong opinion on these subjects, I wonder whether he or she would have a clear idea of what the technology is. But they evoke such strong views, and perhaps some of it is due to the constant politicisation of the virtues and vices of the technology.

Arun Mohan Sukumar, 1:09:04 – One of the reasons why the Indian opposition to the Human Genome Project was so pronounced in the early 1990s, when the hand of invitation was extended to the Indian government, was because the Vaccine Action programme signed by Rajiv Gandhi and Ronald Reagan just a few years ago ran into a great deal of controversy within and without government; defence ministry officials said here is an effort to take DNA materials from Indians to be turned against India as an agent of biological warfare, and all sorts of rubbish.

[How history repeats itself!]

Adding to this, some private institutes in the US were involved in smuggling anti-rabies vaccines into developing countries. All of this spooked the scientific establishment and which, the book argues, led to us staying away from the Human Genome Project.

… And we missed the bus. Today we say we are able to map the genome of some man from Jharkhand at a fraction of the cost – it is at a fraction of the cost because most of the work has already been done. There is some historical legacy there that unfortunately continues to haunt us.

[Susmita Mohanty mentions ISRO’s famous reluctance to share information about components of its civilian space programme.]

Jahnavi Phalkey, 1:12:26 – There’s also a little bit of politics to it. The information that NASA and ESA share is backed by a very, very, very strong politics of sharing. What can and cannot be shared are clearly divided.

Jahnavi Phalkey, 1:13:57 – If you begin with Robert Clive, we have a history of about 300 years of building suspicion. And to dismantle that kind of suspicion is going to take lots of work. I’m not saying to not have participated in the Human Genome Project but that it’s not a good thing to share or that we embark on certain projects. I think we might be erring on the side of caution.

Arun Mohan Sukumar, 1:17:58 – There are different kinds of technocracies, and the three people surveyed in the book [who represented those kinds] are M. Visvesvaraya, Vikram Sarabhai and Nandan Nilekani. They forged three different organisational structures within government (of course Visvesvaraya did so before independence), and they had different views of technology. I wouldn’t say there were all political animals but they certainly had a good appreciation of politics which was crucial to their success.

For example, Visvesvaraya was a very astute navigator of colonial-era politics but then resigned as the diwan of Mysore over what he perceived as anti-Brahmin protests in the Madras presidency and the threat of that spilling over into Mysore. Finally, after independence, his views were totally marginalised by the establishment of the time.

Sarabhai was in currency throughout but also in many respects was able to tell the leadership what it wanted to hear and at the same time insulate his own team from politics to the extent that ISRO today has a separate recruitment process. Some degree of autonomy was built-in.

Nilekani’s work on Aadhaar goes the exact opposite way: he is very clear that he does not want scientists or technologists running the programme beyond the infancy… He was very sure at the beginning that an IAS officer should be running UIDAI. We can debate the merits of the decision but the fact is, in his view and the view of the team, the technocracy could only survive if it was built from within government. Whereas when Sarabhai died, Satish Dhawan was brought from Caltech to run ISRO. It was very clear for the folks behind Aadhaar that that model would not have survived.

fin.

Featured image: The panelists (L-R): Arun Mohan Sukumar, Susmita Mohanty, Rajeev Gowda, Jahnavi Phalkey and Anu Singh.

A meeting with the PSA’s office

The Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) organised a meeting with science communicators from around India on January 27, in New Delhi. Some of my notes from the meeting are displayed below, published with three caveats.

First, my notes are not to be treated as the minutes of the meeting; I only jotted down what I personally found interesting. Some 75% of the words in there are part of suggestions and recommendations advanced by different people; the remainder are, broadly, observations. They appear in no discernible order not because I jumbled them up but because participants offered both kinds of statements throughout. The meeting itself lasted for seven or so hours (including breaks for lunch and tea), so every single statement was also accompanied by extensive discussion. Finally, I have temporarily withheld some portions because I plan to discuss them in additional blog posts.

Second, the meeting followed the Chatham House Rules, which means I am not at liberty to attribute statements uttered during the course of the meeting to their human originators. I have also not identified my own words where possible not because I want to hide but because, by virtue of these ideas appearing on my blog, I take full responsibility (but not authorship) for their publicisation.

Third, though the meeting was organised by the Office of the PSA, its members were not the only ones of the government present at the meeting. Representatives of some other government-affiliated bodies were also in attendance. So statements obviously uttered by a government official – if any do come across that way – are not necessarily attributable to members of the Office of the PSA.

“We invest a lot in science, we don’t use it imaginatively enough.”

Three major science related issues:

Climate change
Dramatic consequences of our growth on biodiversity
B/c of these two, how one issues addresses sustainable development

Different roles for journalists within and without the government
Meeting is about what each one of us can do — but what is that?
Each one of us can say “I could do better if only you could better empathise with what I do”
Need for skill-sharing events for science journalists/communicators
CSIR’s National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources has a centre for science and media relations, and a national science library
Indian Council of Medical Research has a science communication policy but all press releases need to be okayed by health minister!
Knowledge making is wrapped up in identity
Regional language communicators don’t have access to press releases, etc. in regional languages, nor access to translators
Department of Science and Technology and IIT Kanpur working on machine-translations of scientific content of Wikipedia
Netherlands Science Foundation published a book compiling public responses to question ‘what do you think of science?’
In the process of teaching kids science, you can also get them to perform science and use the data (e.g. mapping nematode density in soil using Foldscope)
Slack group for science communicators, channels divided by topic
Leaders of scientific bodies need to be trained on how to deal with journalists, how to respond in interviews, etc.
Indian Space Research Organisation, Defence R&D Organisation and Department of Atomic Energy need to not be so shut off! What are they hiding? If nothing to hide, why aren’t they reachable?
Need structural reforms for institutional research outreach — can’t bank on skills, initiative of individual science communicators at institutes to ensure effective outreach
Need to decentralise PR efforts at institutions
People trained in science communication need to find jobs/employment
Pieces shortlisted for AWSAR award could be put on a CC BY-ND license so news publications can republish them en masse without edits
Please hold meetings like this at periodic intervals, let this not be a one-time thing
Issues with covering science: Lack of investment, few people covering science, not enough training opportunities, not enough science communication research in India
Need local meet-ups between journalists and scientists to get to know each other, facilitated by the government
Outreachers needn’t have to be highly regarded scientists, even grad students can give talks — and kids will come to listen
Twitter is an elite platform — science communicators that need to stay in touch need to do more; most science communicators don’t know each other!
Can we host one edition of the World Conference of Science Journalists in India?
What happened to the Indian Science Writers’ Association?
Today the mind is not without fear! The political climate is dire, people can’t freely speak their minds without fear of reprisal — only obvious that this should affect science journalism also
ISRO is a darling of the media, the government and the masses but has shit outreach! Rs 10,000 crore being spent on Gaganyaan but the amount of info on it in the public domain is poop.
CSIR’s Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology is very open and accessible, director needs to be kept in the loop about some press interaction but that’s it; perhaps the same template can be recreated in other institutes?
Outreach at scientific institutions is a matter of trust: if director doesn’t trust scientists to speak up without permission, and if PR people don’t respond to emails or phone calls, impression is that there is no trust within the institute as well as that the institute would like journalists to not be curious
People trained in science communication (informally also) need a place to practice their newfound skills.
Private sector industry is in the blindspot of journalists
People can more easily relate to lived experiences; aesthetically pleasing (beautiful-looking) stories are important
Most people have not had access to the tools of science, we need to build more affordable and accessible tools
Don’t attribute to malfeasance what can be attributed to not paying attention, incompetence, etc.
Journalistic deep-dives are good but lack of resources to undertake, not many publications do it either, except maybe The Wire and Caravan; can science communicators and the government set up a longform mag together?
Create a national mentorship network where contact details of ‘mentors’ are shared and mentees enrolled in the programme can ask them questions, seek guidance, etc.
Consider setting up a ‘science media centre’ — but can existing and functional models in Australia and the UK be ported to India without facing any issues?
Entities like IndiaBioscience could handle biology research outreach for scientific institutes in, say, the South India region or Bangalore region with some support from the government. That would be better than an SMC-from-scratch.
Consider including science communication in government’s new draft Scientific Social Responsibility policy and other S&T innovation policies
Allocate a fixed portion of funding for research for public outreach and communication (such as 2%)
Need more formal recognition for science communication researchers within scientific institutions; members currently stuck in a limbo between outreach office and scientists, makes it difficult to acquire funds for work
Support individual citizen science initiatives
Need better distinction between outreach groups and press offices — we don’t have a good press office anywhere in the country! Press officers encourage journalistic activity, don’t just promote institute’s virtues but look out for the institute as situated in the country’s overall science and society landscape
Any plans to undertake similar deliberations on philosophy of science (including culture of research, ethics and moral responsibilities)?
Scientific institutions could consider hosting journalists for one day a month to get to know each other
What’s in it for the scientist to speak to a journalist about their work? Need stronger incentives — journalists can provide some of that by establishing trust with the scientist, but can journalists alone provide incentives? Is it even their responsibility?
Consider conducting a ‘scientific temper survey’ to understand science literacy as well as people’s perceptions of science — could help government formulate better policies, and communicators and journalists to better understand what exactly their challenges are
Need to formulate specific guidelines for science communication units at scientific research institutions as well as for funding agencies
Set up fellowships and grants for science communicators, but the government needs to think about attaching as few strings as possible to such assistance
Need for more government support for regional and local newspapers vis-à-vis covering science, especially local science
Need to use multimedia – especially short videos, podcasts illustrations and other aids – to communicate science instead of sticking to writing; visuals in particular could help surmount language barrier right away

My country is burning. Why should I work?

A few days ago, I found asking myself the following question: My country is burning, why should I work? I ended up with some (admittedly inchoate) thoughts, delineated below.

I’m trying to fight off this abject helplessness I’m feeling and edit some science articles, and failing. I’m not able to justify to myself why I shouldn’t drop everything and rush to Delhi (at this time, the violence at Jamia Milia Islamia is about to peak). At the same time, deep in my heart and mind, I know there must be some reason to persevere with what one likes to do and is interested in doing instead of rushing to the frontlines at every sign of trouble.

Somewhere in this maze of thoughts, there is sure to be an illustrative story about duty and country – about the insidious diminishment of one endeavour in favour of another. Yes, we must resist the forces of tyranny and fascism, but there is less and less freedom to choose any forms of resistance other than pouring out on the streets, raising your hands and shouting slogans.

I have nothing against peaceful protest but I have everything against how other forms of protest have been rendered less useful, or entirely meaningless, largely by the same entity whose institutional violence instigated these protests in the first place. This isn’t a question of convenience but of effectiveness: If many of us are out protesting on the street, how many among us are there because other forms of resistance no longer work?

With notable exceptions, the press these days comprises organisations ranging from supine to malicious. Democratic institutions, like many lower courts, various government bodies and even the executive, have been press-ganged into the national government’s majoritarian agenda. The polarisation in many spaces has become so sharp and the political opposition so negligible that it seems nearly impossible to counter India’s extreme-right politics with anything but politics of other extremes.

In such a time, what does it mean to focus on science communication? To be clear: I don’t mean focusing on science communication (or any endeavour not apparently connected to the maintenance of a democracy) instead of protesting. I mean joining a protest in the morning and editing science articles in the evening. That is, where in your work lies the justification to do what you’re doing, simply because you’ve always liked doing it, and which empowers you the same way a resistance movement empowers its participants (at least if you believe you shouldn’t have to protest in order to express your participation and involvement in the country’s wellbeing)?

There is a terribly clichéd example from a previous era: that of starving children in Africa. But in that case, resolution was very easy to access. More recently and closer home, every time ISRO launches satellites to the Moon and Mars, some people in India complain that the country should focus on fixing smaller problems first. Here, too, the road to clarity is evident, if somewhat meandering, taking recourse through economic principles, technological opportunities and a bit of common sense.

However, going from science communication to resisting fascism seems more difficult than usual, although I refuse to admit it’s impossible. There must be a way.

A friend recently told me, “The onslaught on science and reason is part of the fascist agenda, too, and that must be resisted.” Indeed, this is an important perspective… but somehow it also seems insufficient because – again – the tunnel from ‘critical thinking’ to ‘healthy democracy’ has caved in. The one from ‘curious about the world’ to ‘healthy democracy’ is not even on the map, as if we are forgetting that the right to information is one of the foundational principles of a functional democracy, and that science since the early 20th century at least has been one of the dominant ways to obtain such information.

Sharing the ways in which science astonishes us as much as interrogating its practice well would in many ways allow us to explore modern society, its organisational principles, and our relationship(s) with reality.

At a colloquium in August last year, Raghavendra Gadagkar, the noted ecologist at IISc, Bengaluru, described two periods that background the practice of science communication: wartime, when it is deployed with uncommon urgency and specificity of purpose, often to beat back a troublesome claim or belief, and peacetime, when it narrates various kinds of stories united only broadly in theme and often in pedagogic form.

The issue a ‘burning country’, or the world for that matter, brings to the fore is with peacetime science communication and its perceived relevance. In India at least, the simplistic notions that the fascist narrative often reduces more nuanced arguments to present themselves to the typical reader in too many ways for scientists and its communicators to grapple by themselves. When they do, it’s most likely during wartime, and their – our – heightened effectiveness during these episodes of engagement, such as it is, could mislead us into believing science communication is effective and necessary, an impression bolstered by quantitative metrics.

Our effectiveness depends on two things: the circumstances and the culture. The circumstances of communication are in our hands, such as the language, topic, presentation, etc. Subversive, small-minded politics erodes the culture, reducing the extent to which good science journalism is in demand and pushing its place in the public conversation to the margins. Science communication in this scenario becomes an esoteric specialisation treated with special gloves in the newsroom and as an optional extra by the readership.

This in turn is why if science journalism, or journalism of any sort, is to be effective during wartime, it must be kept up during peacetime as well. All science writers, reporters, editors and communicators should help in the fight against rhetoric that would reduce a multifaceted issue into a unidimensional one, that would flatten the necessary features of scientific progress into technological questions.

We need to preserve the value of good science journalism in peacetime as well, but thanks to the unfortunate sensationalist tendencies of journalism, often (but not always) motivated by commerce, such resistance will require more strength and imagination than is apparent.

One battle at a time.

Irrespective of whether you have joined the protests, you must at all other times – through your work, actions and words – keep authoritarian and/or reductive narratives at bay. It’s because this and other similar modes of resistance have been annulled that a physical protest, one of whose strengths lies in numbers, has become the most viable and thus the dominant display of opposition. It needn’t be.

Standing in this moment and looking back at the last few years, some of us (depending on where our ideological, political and moral axes intersect) see a landscape mutilated by the slow violence of right-wing nationalism, and the Citizenship Amendment Act as the absolute last straw. I, a science journalist, am protesting every day – beyond the protests themselves – by reviving the formerly straightforward connections from curiosity and critical thinking to a plural, equitable, just and secular democracy.