Swarnajayanti Fellowships

One count on which I almost always find myself to be an outlier in India is my opinion that the Nobel Prizes and their derivatives belong in the gutter. But while many people in other countries share this opinion of the Nobel Prizes, and often put their weight behind advancing this view, there are very few people who focus on similar issues with Indian prizes.

For example, I just sent my colleagues at The Wire a note suggesting that we desist where and when possible to play up notions like eminence, vis-à-vis scientists, and not associate anything but the quality of one’s work with their success. My concern had been prompted by a PTI copy advertising the fact that scientists, “including from MIT, Stanford University and Harvard University in the US”, had been awarded the 2020 Infosys Prizes.

My congratulations to the laureates for doing good work, irrespective of what they’ve won for it – but let’s consider what we’re celebrating here, really. We’re talking about a jury of well-known scholars coming together to consider a list of 200+ nominations and somehow picking only a half-dozen ‘winners’, and to those winners awarding a pure gold medal, a certificate and $100,000, or around Rs 74 lakh.

Most mediapersons pay attention to the Infosys Prizes because of the substantial purse, and when we do pay attention, what are we looking at? We’re looking at a lot of money going to a group of people who already have a good job and access to funds, especially in the name of a job well done that quite likely happened in the first place by virtue of having a good job and access to funds. The Infosys Prizes are in effect heaping more privilege on already privileged scientists.

Consider this year’s laureates, for example. Three of them – Hari Balakrishnan, Sourav Chatterjee and Raj Chetty – have full-time jobs at three of the world’s most well-endowed universities. Rajan Sankaranarayanan is a chief scientist at CCMB Hyderabad and runs his own lab. The sole female laureate this year, historian Prachi Deshpande, is at CSSS Kolkata and used to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. Arindam Ghosh is an associate professor at IISc Bangalore, again with his own lab. I can’t comment on the relative fortunes of Sankaranarayanan, Deshpande and Ghosh (although at least one other person from CCMB and six others from IISc have won Infosys Prizes, speaking to the localisation of resources and opportunities). But these are all scholars who have, as some might say, settled – scholars who have been able to sidestep or surmount, as the case may be, the numerous barriers to finding success and renown as an Indian scientist.

The case of Balakrishnan seems particularly curious (vis-à-vis the prize-giving entity, not Balakrishnan or any of the other laureates): he is a chair professor at MIT and the CTO at a six-person startup with $500 million in funding.

As an offshoot of what I said earlier, it is not unjust to reward people who have done good work – but too often we do so to the exclusion of those who lack the opportunities to begin doing good work in the first place. For example, instead of Balakrishnan, Chatterjee and Chetty, the prizes could have been awarded to three accomplished scientists working in India. And I argue that we need to reapply this criterion and select even other laureates who are yet to settle, so that we may ultimately expand the possibility of there being more successful scientists in future. Ultimately, we do need more successful scientists, not more laureates.

Of course, it isn’t implicitly wrong for any individual or entity to gift a large sum of money to anyone or any other entity (but perhaps it is bad in some cases). The wrongness arises when the money becomes part of a deleterious idea – such as that excellent scientists are men and/or that they succeeded by working alone. Thanks to their reputation, the Nobel Prizes are the foremost examples of this problem. As I wrote in The Wire recently:

That the prizes’ prestige is a construct, and not an innate attribute, matters because constructs represent intent. The construct of prestige or reputation surrounding the Nobel Prizes exists by reinforcing the beliefs and myths that some experts (in the relevant topics) held in order to maintain their privileges, to secrete away their power and perpetuate the status quo. That is, their intention here was to preserve the idea, and even glamourise it by attaching a purse of SEK 10 million (Rs 8.24 crore) with each Nobel Prize (no strings attached), that individuals make inventions and discoveries, and that men were always better at science than women, and more so than people of other genders.

The Infosys Prizes, as also the S.S. Bhatnagar Prize and the Swarnajayanti Fellowships in India, are different only in scale, not in spirit. They seem disinterested in addressing any of the issues, and seem keener on getting media attention. (By making this point, I hope I’m being clear that the media’s attitude towards the constitution of ‘news’ is also part of the problem.)

This year’s Infosys Prize laureates include only one woman; in all, 22% of laureates are women, fewer still if the social sciences are left out. And the prizes have only ever been awarded to individuals. This is disappointing because the prizes can do so much more by virtue, again, of the amount of money in play.

For example, the prize-giving foundation could give ‘senior’ laureates a citation, a certificate, etc., and split the purse into smaller chunks and award each one to promising young scientists, or those who are likely to have a hard time breaching science’s ‘in’ groups without good fortune. This could help separate the prizes’ extant wealth- and virtue-signalling from the distinction-signalling – as well as greatly expand some of the foundation’s other initiatives that directly help students.

I recently wrote with regard to the announcement of this year’s Swarnajayanti Fellowships, in mid-November, that resource constraints encourage us to think that only a few people can be selected for an award every time that award is given out. This in turn leads to the question about which candidates should be left out from the final pool of winners. And this question is to begin with singly misguided, becoming doubly misguided when it is used as a defence against questions about why so few women are awarded important recognitions, and triply misguided when the resource constraints are made-up, a fiction of funders and administrators to retain power.

Instead, we must demand more material wealth and supply it at the springboards of where young and/or struggling scientists take off. These scientists plus some other groups (incl. those from marginalised sections of society, those who need to learn the English language, even those who promise to stay in India for a decade, etc.) are in my view the only ‘segments’ that have justifiable need for not-insubstantial sums of money. Beyond this point, we can be generous with immaterial rewards for those who do good work and may no longer need the money.

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.

Tag: Swarnajayanti Fellowships

On resource constraints and merit