On October 17, the National Council for Education Research and Training (NCERT) introduced a reading module for middle-school students called “Chandrayaan Utsav”. It was released by Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan in the presence of S. Somanath, Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation, and claims that the Chandrayaan-3 achievement was great but not the first, that “literature tells us that it can be traced back [to the] Vymaanika Shaastra: Science of Aeronautics, which reveals that our country had the knowledge of flying vehicles” in ancient times.
ISRO is currently flying high on the back of completing the first uncrewed test flight of the Gaganyaan mission, the launch of Aditya-L1 to study the sun, and the success of the Chandrayaan-3 mission. Yet in May, Somanath had said at another event in Ujjain that many mathematical concepts as well as those of time, architecture, materials, aviation, and cosmology were first described in the Vedas, and that “Sanskrit suits the language of computers”.
Such pseudoscientific claims are familiar to us because many political leaders have made them, but when they are issued by the leaders of institutions showing the country what good science can achieve, they set up more than a contradiction: they raise the question of responsible scientific leadership. Obviously, the first cost of such claims is that they do unto the Vedas what the claimants claim the liberals are doing unto the Vedas: forgetting them by obscuring what they really say. Who knows what the Vedas really say? Very few, I reckon – and the path to knowing more is now rendered tougher because the claims also cast any other effort to study the Vedas – and for that matter any other fields of study in ancient India – suspect.
But the second, and greater, cost of such pseudoscientific claims relates to the need for such leadership. For example, why don’t the claimants display confidence in the science being done today? (We’ve seen this before with the Higgs boson Nobel Prize and S.N. Bose as well.) I would have liked Somanath to speak up and refute Pradhan on October 17 but he didn’t. But what I would have liked even more is for Pradhan to have held forth on the various features of the Chandrayaan-3 lander and the challenges of developing them. There is a lot of good science being done in India today and it is sickening that our politicians can’t see beyond something that happened 7,000 years ago, leave alone understand the transformative new technologies currently on the anvil that will define India’s ability to be any kind of power in the coming centuries.
A friend of mine and a scholar of history recently told me that Homi Bhabha chaired the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva in 1955 – when India didn’t have nuclear power. That kind of leadership is conspicuous by absence today.
For all the hoopla over indigeneity – from ISRO chairman S. Somanath exalting the vast wisdom of ancient Indians to political and ideological efforts to cast modern India as the world’s ‘vishwaguru’ – the pressure vessel of the crew module that will one day carry the first Indian astronauts to space won’t be made in India. Somanath said as much in an interview to T.S. Subramanian for The Hindu:
There is another element called the crew module and the crew escape system. The new crew module is under development. It is being tested. There is no capability in India to manufacture it. We have to get it from outside. That work is currently going on.
Personally, I don’t care that this element of the ‘Gaganyaan’ mission will be brought from abroad. It will be one of several thousand components of such provenance in the mission. The only thing that matters is we know how to do it: combine the ingredients using the right recipe and make it taste good. That we can’t locally make this or that ingredient is amply secondary. ‘Gaganyaan’ is not a mission to improve India’s manufacturing capabilities. It is a mission to send Indians to space using an Indian launch vehicle. This refers to the recipe, rather than the ingredient.
But indigeneity matters to a section of people who like to thump their chests because, to them, ‘Gaganyaan’ is about showing the world – or at least the West – that India is just as good as them, if not better. Their misplaced sentiments have spilled over into popular culture, where at least two mainstream movies and one TV show (all starring A-list actors) have made villains out of foreign spaceflight agencies or officials. Thinking like this is the reason a lack of complete indigeneity has become a problem. Otherwise, again, it is quite irrelevant, and sometimes even a distraction.
Somanath himself implies as much (almost as if he wishes to separate his comments on the Vedas, etc. from his thinking on ‘Gaganyaan’, etc.):
It depends on our confidence at that point of time… Only when we are very sure of ourselves, we will send human beings into space. Otherwise, we will not do that. In my opinion, it will take more time than we really thought of. We are not worried about it. What we are worried about is that we should do it right the first time. The schedule is secondary here. … Some claims I made last year are not important. I am focusing on capability development.
Featured image: The nose cone bearing the spacecraft of the Chandrayaan-3 mission ahead of being fit to the launch vehicle. Credit: ISRO.
In The Hindu today, lawyers Archana Vaidya and Vikram Hegde have written an article asking for a separate environment impact assessment (EIA) process for the Indian Himalayan region. The article begins with a brief history of the EIA, its origins in 1976 in the need to assess river-valley power projects from an “environmental point of view”, the environment ministry’s first EIA notification in 1994, the second notification that followed after 11 years and 12 amendments, and finally the 2020 notification that shifted the burden of proof of impact from industry to the environment. So far so good, especially to indicate that the Indian Himalayan region wasn’t ever on the ministry’s mind as it shaped and reshaped EIA protocols.
Unfortunately, the threshold limits beyond which EIA is warranted for all these projects [mining, extraction of natural resources, power generation, physical infrastructure] is the same across the country. Despite all levels of government being acutely aware of the special needs of the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR), the region’s vulnerabilities and fragility have not been considered separately.
Then begins a section called “Flaws in the graded approach”, followed by the authors’ contention that the EIA’s graded approach – to change the stringency of the project requirements based on the value of the habitat that the project will affect – is unmindful of the special needs of the Indian Himalayan region.
Despite its special needs and as an area of immense ecological importance to the entire country (it serves as a water tower and the provider of ecosystem services), this region is treated like any other part of the country. … Despite [an] understanding of the fragility and vulnerability of the Himalayas, there is no mention of a different set of environmental standards needed if the project is located in the IHR.
This is strange. The article was written in the aftermath of the Sikkim floods (rather, the Sikkim dam-failure) and against the broader backdrop of the Indian government’s dam-building spree over Himalayan and sub-Himalayan rivers rivers as well as work on the Char Dham highway and other road-transport projects. But such systematic degradation isn’t happening only in the Himalaya: across India, both the national and state governments have embarked on projects that will see large tracts of forests, wetlands, and shoreline lose their environmental features, if they haven’t lost them already. Why single out the Himalayan region for special treatment? In fact, it’s trivially easy to argue that every geologic province in the country is different, endangered, and in need of more effective environmental government. So it might be better to modify the EIA to introduce different thresholds for projects situated in different ecosystems – in effect extending the protection the authors are asking for the Indian Himalaya to all the various environmental provinces in the country.
(This is only on paper, of course. Just yesterday, for example, the environment ministry, the Rayagada district administration, and the Odisha State Pollution Control Board organised a public hearing for the Vedanta bauxite-mining project in Rayagada and Kalahandi – a crucial step before the company receives its environmental clearance. But before the meeting, according to social activists and members of tribal communities in the area, the police physically assaulted people in the area and arrested several. District and ministry officials later stated that the public hearing – or a mockery of it? – went smoothly.)
Second, despite the section title, the authors don’t spell out any specific flaws in the EIA’s graded approach that pertains to the Indian Himalaya. So again, it should be easy to see that the Indian Himalayan region doesn’t pose particularly unique problems to the EIA process that other domains don’t; instead, they all pose the same single problem to the process: the EIA overlooks their diversity. The authors write that the Indian Himalayan region “serves as a water tower and [is] the provider of ecosystem services”. The latter can be retained as is and the first feature can be changed to, say, drainage for wetlands, carbon storage for old forests, sustenance for bird and insect species for younger ones, protection against erosion and salinity for coasts, etc. and we’d still be speaking the truth.
That said, the triviality of the alternatives to the authors’ suggestion highlights an important problem with the article’s thrust: that there ought to be a new EIA process for the Indian Himalaya when in fact the existing process has been so diluted, is routinely misapplied, and often has the environment ministry rushing to make excuses for industry actors. In other words, the authors have contended that the existing EIA fails the Indian Himalayan region. This is not true: it fails all Indian regions. And we need to admit that. The reason for failure also matters – that the national government simply isn’t interested in letting an EIA’s requirements get in the way of industrial expansion and ‘development’. If we don’t address this rot, any ‘new EIA’ created to address the needs of a specific region will suffer the same political capture and become worthless.
The Hindu publishes a column called ‘Notebook’ every Friday, in which journalists in the organisation open windows big or small into their work, providing glimpses into their process and thinking – things that otherwise remain out of view in news articles, analyses, op-eds, etc. Quite a few of them are very insightful. A recent example was Maitri Porecha’s column about looking for closure in the aftermath of the Balasore train accident.
I’ve written twice for the section thus far, both times about a matter that has stayed with me for a decade, manifesting at different times in different ways. The first edition was about being able to tell whether a given article or claim is real or phony irrespective of whether you have a science background. I had proposed the following eight-point checklist that readers could follow (quoted verbatim):
If the article talks about effects on people, was the study conducted with people or with mice?
How many people participated in a study? Fewer than a hundred is always worthy of scepticism.
Does the article claim that a study has made exact predictions? Few studies actually can.
Does the article include a comment from an independent expert? This is a formidable check against poorly-done studies.
Does the article link to the paper it is discussing? If not, please pull on this thread.
If the article invokes the ‘prestige’ of a university and/or the journal, be doubly sceptical.
Does the article mention the source of funds for a study? A study about wine should not be funded by a vineyard.
Use simple statistical concepts, like conditional probabilities and Benford’s law, and common sense together to identify extraordinary claims, and then check if they are accompanied by extraordinary evidence.
The second was about whether science journalists are scientists – which is related to the first on the small matter of faith: i.e. that science journalists are purveyors of information that we expect readers to ‘take up’ on trust and faith, and that an article that teaches readers any science needs to set this foundation carefully.
After having published the second edition, I came across a ‘Policy Forum’ article published in October 2022 in Science entitled ‘Science, misinformation, and the role of education’. Among other things, it presents a “‘fast and frugal’ heuristic” – a three-step algorithm with which competent outsiders [can] evaluate scientific information”. I was glad to see that this heuristic included many points in my eight-point checklist, but it also went a step ahead and discussed two things that perhaps more engaged readers would find helpful. One of them however requires an important disclaimer, in my opinion.
DOI: 10.1126/science.abq80
The additions are about consensus, expressed through the questions (numbering mine):
“Is there a consensus among the relevant scientific experts?”
“What is the nature of any disagreement/what do the experts agree on?”
“What do the most highly regarded experts think?”
“What range of findings are deemed plausible?”, and
“What are the risks of being wrong?”
No. 3 is interesting because “regard” is of course subjective as well as cultural. For example, well-regarded scientists could be those that have published in glamorous journals like Nature, Science, Cell, etc. But as the recent hoopla about Ranga Dias having three papers about near-room-temperature superconductivity retracted in one year – with two published in Nature – showed us, this is no safeguard against bad science. In fact, even winning a Nobel Prize isn’t a guarantee of good science (see e.g. reports about Gregg Semenza and Luc Montagnier). As the ‘Policy Forum’ article also states:
“Undoubtedly, there is still more that the competent outsider needs to know. Peer-reviewed publication is often regarded as a threshold for scientific trust. Yet while peer review is a valuable step, it is not designed to catch every logical or methodological error, let alone detect deliberate fraud. A single peer-reviewed article, even in a leading journal, is just that—a single finding—and cannot substitute for a deliberative consensus. Even published work is subject to further vetting in the community, which helps expose errors and biases in interpretation. Again, competent outsiders need to know both the strengths and limits of scientific publications. In short, there is more to teach about science than the content of science itself.”
Yet “regard” matters because the people at large pay attention to notions like “well-regarded”, which is as much a comment about societal preferences as what scientists themselves have aspired to over the years. This said, on technical matters, this particular heuristic would fail only a small part of time (based on my experience).
It would fail a lot more if it is applied in the middle of a cultural shift, e.g. regarding expectations of the amount of effort a good scientist is expected to dedicate to their work. Here, “well-regarded” scientists – typically people who started doing science decades ago, have persisted in their respective fields, and have finally risen to positions of prominence, and are thus likely to be white and male, and who seldom had to bother with running a household and raising children – will have an answer that reflects the result of these privileges, but which would be at odds with the direction of the shift (i.e. towards better work-life balance, less time than before devoted to research, and contracts amended to accommodate these demands).
In fact, even if the “well-regarded” heuristic might suffice to judge a particular scientific claim, it still carries the risk of hewing in favour of the opinions of people with the aforementioned privileges. These concerns also apply to the three conditions listed under #2 in the heuristic graphic above: “Reputation among peers”, “credentials and institutional context”, “relevant professional experience”, all of which have historically been more difficult for non-cis-het male scientists to acquire. But we must work with what we have.
In this sense, the last question is less subjective and more telling: “What are the risks of being wrong?” If a scientist avoids a view and simultaneously also avoids an adverse outcome for themselves, then it’s possible they avoided the view in order to avoid the outcome and not because the view is implicitly disagreeable.
The authors of the article, Jonathan Osborne and Daniel Pimentel, both of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, have grounded their heuristic in the “social nature of science” and the “social mechanisms and practices that science has for resolving disagreement and attaining consensus”. This is obviously more robust (than my checklist grounded in my limited experiences), but I think it could also have discussed the intersection of the social facets of science with gender and class. Otherwise, the risk is that, while the heuristic will help “competent outsiders” better judge scientific claims, it will do as little as its predecessor to uncover the effects of intersectional biases that persist in the “social mechanisms” of science.
The alternative, of course, is to leave out “well-regarded” altogether – but the trouble there, I suspect, is we might be lying to ourselves if we pretended a scientist’s regard didn’t or ought not to matter, which is why I didn’t go there…
The Bharatiya Janata Party in power in India knows that the process is the punishment, that the amount of punishment imposed depends on the law invoked in the chargesheet, and that no law is as ripe for misuse in this regard as the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) 1967. In fact, simply invoking the law and using the police to intimidate, arrest, and harass may be the state’s goal, rather than the eventual verdict itself, which is also unlikely to be in the state’s favour.
The latest recipients of this form of the state’s justice have been the news organisation NewsClick and its employees, including editor-in-chief Prabir Purkayastha. Even getting bail under (UAPA) is difficult because the Act locks away the conditions that need to be met to secure bail in a cage of vague statements, all of which a committed state can interpret to suit its agenda.
NewsClick has been accused of funding terror and its editor of conspiring to redraw India’s sovereign borders. During the police raids of NewsClick‘s employees and office that preceded the arrests, journalists also said that they were asked if they had covered and/or commented on social media platforms on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 and the three farm laws in 2020-2021.
So using the excuse of the The New York Times article, whose careless journalism opened a big hole for the Indian government to crawl through, the state initiated the raids; using the UAPA’s repurposable provisions, the state arrested NewsClick‘s journalists, seized their phones, laptops, and whatever other records were kept at its office, and kept them in the dark; and using the opportunity to deploy the police as an excuse, the state intimidated the journalists into sharing something – anything – that would allow the police to build even a minimally legitimate case.
This is the same template the police followed after BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya filed cheating and defamation cases against The Wire for its Meta reports, based on which the police raided the houses of people not even named on the FIR and seized The Wire‘s human-resources and financial records and its employees’ personal information.
This is the toolkit: Find a hole, crawl in, seize everything, try to build a case, and extend police custody.
Someone pls clarify, if “sprinkling” news coverage with Chinese talking points (as NYT alleged of Newsclick),& allegedly receiving money for this are terror offences, is India accusing China of fomenting terror in India? Has Goi taken this up with China?
Kavita Krishnan had an insightful article in Scroll yesterday about how the The New York Times wished to quote her on its original story – casting suspicion on the business and political ties of Neville Roy Singham, whose company is NewsClick‘s chief investor – and why she declined, followed by the newspaper quoting her in a story about the raids without sufficient context.
Importantly, Krishnan wrote that The New York Times construed her having written for NewsClick as her having “links to NewsClick” (the sort of clandestine leap we’ve been accustomed to hearing only from establishment devotees in India so far); that it chose to name only NewsClick among all the news organisations it claimed could have been compromised by Singham’s investment; and the fact that it implied that NewsClick could be kowtowing to Chinese interests because it published a video about how China’s working class continues to be inspired by the country’s history.
The frailty of the threads holding together the NewsClick parts of the The New York Times report became more apparent when Neville’s investing company’s lawyer told The Hindu the following: “The New York Times failed to include PSF’s categorical denial of foreign funding, and instead left readers to believe that the source of PSF’s funding (or Mr. Singham’s for that matter) might have come from China, rather than from the sale of ThoughtWorks.”
Whatever the merits of the rest of the article, the parts that affected NewsClick show parachute journalism at its worst. That the BJP weaponised the article is not the The New York Times‘s fault; it was that the report was weaponisable at all. And it’s the latest in a line of objectionable work by the newspaper, including during the pandemic and vis-à-vis ISRO: see here, here, here, here, here, and here, among others.
For all their flaws, the science Nobel Prizes – at the time they’re announced, in the first week of October every year – provide a good opportunity to learn about some obscure part of the scientific endeavour with far-reaching consequences for humankind. This year, for example, we learnt about attosecond physics, quantum dots, and in–vitro transcribed mRNA. The respective laureates had roots in Austria, France, Hungary, Russia, Tunisia, and the U.S. Among the many readers that consume articles about these individuals’ work with any zest, the science Nobel Prizes’ announcement is also occasion for a recurring question: how come no scientist from India – such a large country, of so many people with diverse skills, and such heavy investments in research – has won a prize? I thought I’d jot down my version of the answer in this post. There are four factors:
1. Missing the forest for the trees – To believe that there’s a legitimate question in “why has no Indian won a science Nobel Prize of late?” is to suggest that we don’t consider what we read in the news everyday to be connected to our scientific enterprise. Pseudoscience and misinformation are almost everywhere you look. We’re underfunding education, most schools are short-staffed, and teachers are underpaid. R&D allocations by the national government have stagnated. Academic freedom is often stifled in the name of “national interest”. Students and teachers from the so-called ‘non-upper-castes’ are harassed even in higher education centres. Procedural inefficiencies and red tape constantly delay funding to young scholars. Pettiness and politicking rule many universities’ roosts. There are ill-conceived limits on the use, import, and export of biological specimens (and uncertainty about the state’s attitude to it). Political leaders frequently mock scientific literacy. In this milieu, it’s as much about having the resources to do good science as being able to prioritise science.
2. Historical backlog – This year’s science Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work that was conducted in the 1980s and 1990s. This is partly because the winning work has to have demonstrated that it’s of widespread benefit, which takes time (the medicine prize was a notable exception this year because the pandemic accelerated the work’s adoption), and partly because each prize most often – but not always – recognises one particular topic. Given that there are several thousand instances of excellent scientific work, it’s possible, on paper, for the Nobel Prizes to spend several decades awarding scientific work conducted in the 20th century alone. Recall that this was a boom time for science, with the advent of quantum mechanics and the theories of relativity, considerable war-time investment and government support, followed by revolutions in electronics, materials science, spaceflight, genetics, and pharmaceuticals, and then came the internet. It was also the time when India was finding its feet, especially until economic liberalisation in the early 1990s.
3. Lack of visibility of research – Visibility is a unifying theme of the Nobel laureates and their work. That is, you need to do good work as well as be seen to be doing that work. If you come up with a great idea but publish it in an obscure journal with no international readership, you will lose out to someone who came up with the same idea but later, and published it in one of the most-read journals in the world. Scientists don’t willingly opt for obscure journals, of course: publishing in better-read journals isn’t easy because you’re competing with other papers for space, the journals’ editors often have a preference for more sensational work (or sensationalisable work, such as a paper co-authored by an older Nobel laureate; see here), and publishing fees can be prohibitively high. The story of Meghnad Saha, who was nominated for a Nobel Prize but didn’t win, offers an archetypal example. How journals have affected the composition of the scientific literature is a vast and therefore separate topic, but in short, they’ve played a big part to skew it in favour of some kinds of results over others – even if they’re all equally valuable as scientific contributions – and to favour authors from some parts of the world over others. Journals’ biases sit on top of those of universities and research groups.
4. Award fixation – The Nobel Prizes aren’t interested in interrogating the histories and social circumstances in which science (that it considers to be prize-worthy) happens; they simply fete what is. It’s we who must grapple with the consequences of our histories of science, particularly science’s relationship with colonialism, and make reparations. Fixating on winning a science Nobel Prize could also lock our research enterprise – and the public perception of that enterprise – into a paradigm that prefers individual winners. The large international collaboration is a good example: When physicists working with the LHC found the Higgs boson in 2012, two physicists who predicted the particle’s existence in 1964 won the corresponding Nobel Prize. Similarly, when scientists at the LIGO detectors in the US first observed gravitational waves in 2016, three physicists who conceived of LIGO in the 1970s won the prize. Yet the LHC and the LIGOs, and other similar instruments continue to make important contributions to science – directly, by probing reality, and indirectly by supporting research that can be adapted for other fields. One 2007 paper also found that Nobel Prizes have been awarded to inventions only 23% of the time. Does that mean we should just focus on discoveries? That’s a silly way of doing science.
The Nobel Prizes began as the testament of a wealthy Swedish man who was worried about his legacy. He started a foundation that put together a committee to select winners of some prizes every year, with some cash from the man’s considerable fortunes. Over the years, the committee made a habit of looking for and selecting some of the greatest accomplishments of science (but not all), so much so that the laureates’ standing in the scientific community created an aspiration to win the prize. Many prizes begin like the Nobel Prizes did but become irrelevant because they don’t pay enough attention to the relationship between the laureate-selecting process and the prize’s public reputation (note that the Nobel Prizes acquired their reputation in a different era). The Infosys Prize has elevated itself in this way whereas the Indian Science Congress’s prize has undermined itself. India or any Indian for that matter can institute an award that chooses its winners more carefully, and gives them lots of money (which I’m opposed to vis-à-vis senior scientists) to draw popular attention.
There are many reasons an Indian hasn’t won a science Nobel Prize in a while but it’s not the only prize worth winning. Let’s aspire to other, even better, ones.
