Root Privileges

Category: Uncategorized

  • Curiosity as a public good

    India has won 22 Ig Nobel prizes to date. These awards, given annually at Harvard University by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, honour studies that “first make people laugh, and then make them think” — a description that can suggest the prizes are little more than jokes whereas the research they reward is genuine.

    Many of the Indian wins are in the sciences and they highlight an oft unacknowledged truth: even if the country hasn’t produced a Nobel laureate in science since C.V. Raman in 1930, Indian labs continue to generate knowledge of consequence by pursuing questions that appear odd at first sight. In 2004, for example, IIT Kanpur researchers won an Ig Nobel prize for studying why people spill coffee when they walk. They analysed oscillations and resonance in liquid-filled containers, thus expanding the principles of fluid dynamics into daily life.

    Eleven years later, another team won a prize for measuring the friction coefficients of banana skins, showing why people who step on them are likely to fall. In 2019, doctors in Chennai were feted for documenting how cockroaches can survive inside human skulls, a subject of study drawn from real instances where medical workers had to respond to such challenges in emergency rooms. In 2022, biologists examined how scorpion stings are treated in rural India and compared traditional remedies against science-based pharmacology. More recently, researchers were honoured for describing the role of nasal hair in filtering air and pathogens.

    The wins thus demonstrate core scientific virtues as well as reflect the particular conditions in which research often happens in India. Most of the work also wasn’t supported by lavish grants nor was it published in élite journals with high citation counts. Instead, the work emerged from scientists choosing to follow curiosity rather than institutional incentives. In this sense, the Ig Nobel prizes are less a distraction and more an index of how ‘serious’ science might actually begin.

    Of course it’s also important to acknowledge that India’s research landscape is crowded with work of indifferent quality. A large share of papers are produced to satisfy promotion requirements, with little attention to design or originality, and many find their way into predatory journals where peer review is nonexistent or a joke. Such publications seldom advance knowledge, whether in curiosity-driven or application-oriented paradigms, and they dilute the credibility of the system as a whole.

    Then again whimsy isn’t foreign to the Nobel Prizes themselves, which are generally quite sombre. For example, in 2016, the chemistry prize was awarded to researchers who designed molecular rotors and elevators constructed from just a handful of atoms. The achievement was profound but it also carried the air of play. The prize-giving committee compared the laureates’ work to the invention of the electric motor in the 1830s, noting that even if practical applications (may or may not) come later, the first step remains the act of imagining, not unlike a child. If the Nobel Committee can reward such imaginative departures, India’s Ig Nobel prize wins should be seen as more evidence that playful research is a legitimate part of the scientific enterprise.

    The larger question is whether curiosity-driven research has a place in national science policy. Some experts have argued that in a country like India, with pressing social and economic needs and allegedly insufficient funding to support research, scientists must focus on topics that’re immediately useful: better crops, cheaper drugs, new energy sources, etc. But this is too narrow a view. Science doesn’t have to be useful in the short term to be valuable. The history of discovery is filled with examples that seemed obscure at the time but later transformed technology and society, including X-rays, lasers, and the structure of DNA. Equally importantly, the finitude of resources to which science administrators and lawmakers have often appealed is likely a red herring set up to make excuses for diverting funds away from scientific research.

    What arguments against the ‘next LHC’ say about funding Big Physics

    Measuring why banana skins are slippery didn’t solve a crisis but it advanced scientists’ understanding of biomechanics. Analysing why coffee spills while walking generated models in fluid mechanics that researchers could apply to a range of fluid systems. Together with documenting cockroaches inside skulls and studying scorpion sting therapies, none of this research was wasteful or should be seen that way but more importantly the freedom to pursue such questions is vital. If nothing else, winning a Nobel Prize can’t be engineered by restricting scientists to specific questions. They prizes often go to scientists who are well connected, work in well-funded laboratories, and who publish in highly visible journals — yet bias and visibility explain only part of the pattern. Doing good science depends on an openness to ideas that its exponents can’t be expected to plan in advance.

    This is a broader reason the Ig Nobel prizes are really reminders that curiosity remains alive among Indian scientists, even in a system that often discourages it. They also reveal what we stand to lose when research freedom is curtailed. The point isn’t that every odd question will lead to a breakthrough but that no one can predict in advance which questions will. We don’t know what we don’t know and the only way to find out is to explore.

    India’s 22 Ig Nobel wins in this sense are indicators of a culture of inquiry that deserves more institutional support. If the country wants to achieve scientific recognition of the highest order — the Indian government has in fact been aspiring to “science superpower” status — it must learn to value curiosity as a public good. What may appear whimsical today could prove indispensable tomorrow.

  • A cricket beyond politics

    On September 11, the Supreme Court was asked to urgently hear a petition that sought to cancel the Asia Cup T20 match between India and Pakistan scheduled for September 14 in the UAE. The petition, filed by four law students, claimed that playing the match so soon after the Pahalgam terror attack and Operation Sindoor would demean the sacrifices of armed personnel and was “against national interest”.

    The Court declined to intervene. “It’s a match, let it be,” Justice J.K. Maheshwari remarked, refusing to elevate the petition into a question of constitutional urgency. That refusal, however, doesn’t end the matter: the call to stop the match points to the fraught place cricket occupies in India today, where the sport is no longer just a sport but an annex of politics itself.

    The petitioners also argued that the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) must be brought under the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, in line with the new National Sports Governance Act 2025. For many decades the BCCI has prided itself on being a private body, formally outside government control, yet informally intertwined with it through patronage, appointments, and access to resources. Over the years, this hybrid arrangement has allowed political parties to capture the administration of Indian cricket without subjecting it to the mechanisms of accountability under public law. The outcome is an entity that’s a chimaera: neither purely autonomous nor transparently regulated.

    This political capture has contributed to a situation in which the sport has become indistinguishable from political theatre. If the BCCI were more genuinely independent and if its leadership were less frequently a stepping-stone for politicians, (men’s) cricket in India may still have had the ability to separate itself from the ebbs and flows of diplomatic posturing. Instead, the BCCI has invited politics onto the field by making itself an extension of political patronage.

    To be sure, cricket has always been more than a game. Since the colonial era, it has carried the weight of identity and nationalism. In The Tao of Cricket, Ashis Nandy argued that cricket in India became a way of playing with colonial inheritance rather than rejecting it. Matches against England in the mid-20th century were arenas where newly independent Indians performed parity with their former rulers. With Pakistan, the sport inherited and refracted the trauma of Partition. Every bilateral series has carried more baggage than bat and ball.

    Yet the history of India-Pakistan matches is also one of conviviality. For every moment when politicians have sought to cancel tours, there have been times when cricketing exchanges have thawed frozen relations. India’s tours of Pakistan in 2004 and Pakistan’s participation in the 1996 World Cup hosted in India were moments when ordinary spectators could cheer a cover drive irrespective of the batsman’s passport. The very fact that governments have sometimes chosen to use cricket as a tool of rapprochement suggests that the sport holds a special capacity to transcend political divides.

    Sport itself has always sat at the junction of rivalry and fellowship. Aristotle saw games as part of leisure, necessary for the cultivation of civic virtue. The Olympic Truce of ancient Greece, revived in modern times, embodied the idea that contests on the field could suspend contests off of it. The South African example after apartheid, when Nelson Mandela donned a Springbok jersey at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, showed how sport could heal a wounded polity.

    Against this backdrop, the call to cancel the India-Pakistan match risks impoverishing cricket of its potential to build bridges. To say that playing Pakistan dishonours Indian soldiers is to treat sport as a mere extension of politics. Sport is not reducible to politics: it’s also a space where citizens can experience one another as competitors, not enemies. That distinction matters. A good game of cricket can remind people that beyond the rhetoric of national security, there are human beings bowling yorkers and lofting sixes, acts that spectators from both sides can cheer, grumble about, and analyse over endless replays.

    This isn’t to deny that politics already suffuses cricket. The selection of venues, the sponsorship deals, the choreography of opening ceremonies — all carry political weight. Nor can one ignore that militant groups have sometimes targeted cricket precisely because of its symbolic importance. But to cancel matches on the grounds that politics exists is to double down on cynicism. It is to concede that no space can remain where ordinary citizens of India and Pakistan might encounter each other beyond the logic of hostility.

    The BCCI’s long entanglement with political elites makes it harder to resist such calls. When cricket administrators behave like political courtiers, it becomes easier for petitioners to argue that cricket is an extension of the state and must therefore obey the same dictates of foreign policy. But precisely because the BCCI has failed to safeguard cricket’s autonomy, the rest of us must insist that the game not be reduced to a political pawn.

    The petitioners invoked “national interest” and “national dignity” yet the Constitution of India doesn’t enshrine dignity in the form of cancelling sports fixtures. It enshrines dignity through the protection of rights, the pursuit of fraternity, and the preservation of liberty. Article 51 even enjoins the state to foster respect for international law and promote peace. Seen in that light, playing cricket with Pakistan is not an affront to dignity but an affirmation of the constitutional aspiration to fraternity across borders.

    If anything undermines dignity, it’s the reduction of sport to a theatre of grievance. It’s the refusal to allow people an arena where they can cheer together, even if for rival teams. National interest is not served by foreclosing every possible space of conviviality: it’s served by demonstrating that India is confident enough in its own constitutional foundations to play, to lose, to win, and to play again.

    The Supreme Court was right to dismiss the petition with a simple phrase: “It’s a match, let it be.” That lightness is what cricket needs in India today. To insist that every over bowled is a statement of geopolitics is to impoverish both politics and cricket.

  • A tribute to rubidium

    Rubidium isn’t respectable. It isn’t iron, whose strength built railways and bridges and it isn’t silicon, whose valley became a dubious shrine to progress. Rubidium explodes in water. It tarnishes in air. It’s awkward, soft, and unfit for the neat categories by which schoolteachers tell their students how the world is made. And yet, precisely because of this unruly character, it insinuates itself into the deepest places of science, where precision, control, and prediction are supposed to reign.

    For centuries astronomers counted the stars, then engineers counted pendulums and springs — all good and respectable. But when humankind’s machines demanded nanosecond accuracy, it was rubidium, a soft metal that no practical mind would have chosen, that became the metronome of the world. In its hyperfine transitions, coaxed by lasers and microwave cavities, the second is carved more finely than human senses can comprehend. Without rubidium’s unstable grace, GPS collapses, financial markets fall into confusion, trains and planes drift out of sync. The fragile and the explosive have become the custodians of order.

    What does this say about the hierarchies of knowledge? Textbooks present a suspiciously orderly picture: noble gases are inert, alkali metals are reactive, and their properties can be arranged neatly in columns of the periodic table, they say. Thus rubidium is placed there like a botanical specimen. But in practice, scientists turned to it not because of its box in a table but because of accidents, conveniences, and contingencies. Its resonance lines happen to fall where lasers can reach them easily. Its isotopes are abundant enough to trap, cool, and measure. The entire edifice of atomic clocks and exotic Bose-Einstein condensates rests not on an inevitable logic of discovery but on this convenient accident. Had rubidium’s levels been slightly different, perhaps caesium or potassium would have played the starring role. Rational reconstruction will never admit this. It prefers tidy sequences and noble inevitabilities. Rubidium, however, laughs at such tidiness.

    Take condensed matter. In the 1990s and 2000s, solar researchers sought efficiency in perovskite crystals. These crystals were fragile, prone to decomposition, but again rubidium slipped in: a small ion among larger ones, it stabilised the lattice. A substitution here, a tweak there, and suddenly the efficiency curve rose. Was this progress inevitable? No; it was bricolage: chemists trying one ion after another until the thing worked. And the journals now describe rubidium as if it were always destined to “enhance stability”. But destiny is hindsight dressed as foresight. What actually happened was messy. Rubidium’s success was contingent, not planned.

    Then there’s the theatre of optics. Rubidium’s spectral lines at 780 nm and 795 nm became the experimentalist’s playground. When lasers cooled atoms to microkelvin temperatures and clouds of rubidium atoms became motionless, they merged into collective wavefunctions and formed the first Bose-Einstein condensates. The textbooks now call this a triumph of theory, the “inevitable” confirmation of quantum statistics. Nonsense! The condensates weren’t predicted as practical realities — they were curiosities, dismissed by many as impossible in the laboratory. What made them possible was a melange of techniques: magnetic traps, optical molasses, sympathetic cooling. And rubidium, again, happened to be convenient, its transitions accessible, its abundance generous, its behaviour forgiving. Out of this messiness came a Nobel Prize and an entire field. Rubidium teaches us that progress comes not from the logical unfolding of ideas but from playing with elements that allegedly don’t belong.

    Rubidium rebukes dogma. It’s neither grand nor noble, yet it controls time, stabilises matter, and demonstrates the strangest predictions of quantum theory. It shows science doesn’t march forward by method alone. It stumbles, it improvises, it tries what happens to be at hand. Philosophers of science prefer to speak of method and rigour yet their laboratories tell a story of messy rooms where equipment is tuned until something works, where grad students swap parts until the resonance reveals itself, where fragile metals are pressed into service because they happen to fit the laser’s reach.

    Rubidium teaches us that knowledge is anarchic. It isn’t carved from the heavens by pure reason but coaxed from matter through accidents, failures, and improvised victories. Explosive in one setting, stabilising in another; useless in industry, indispensable in physics — the properties of rubidium are contradictory and it’s precisely this contradiction that makes it valuable. To force it into the straitjacket of predictable science is to rewrite history as propaganda. The truth is less comfortable: rubidium has triumphed where theory has faltered.

    And yet, here we are. Our planes and phones rely on rubidium clocks. Our visions of renewable futures lean on rubidium’s quiet strengthening of perovskite cells. Our quantum dreams — of condensates, simulations, computers, and entanglement — are staged with rubidium atoms as actors. An element kings never counted and merchants never valued has become the silent arbiter of our age. Science itself couldn’t have planned it better; indeed, it didn’t plan at all.

    Rubidium is the fragment in the mosaic that refuses to fit yet holds the pattern together. It’s the soft yet explosive, fragile yet enduring accident that becomes indispensable. Its lesson is simple: science also needs disorder, risk, and the unruliness of matter to thrive.

    Featured image: A sample of rubidium metal. Credit: Dnn87 (CC BY).

  • The news exists to inform, not to educate

    I’d like to highlight a letter published in Science on January 2. I have many points of disagreement with it but I’d also like others to read and reflect on it, especially if they’re (you’re) also going to disagree with my reading. The letter is entitled ‘Beyond misalignment of science in the news and in schools’.

    What scientists want to get out of science journalism is not the same as what journalists want to get out of journalism. One symptom of this confusion — which is also what I’m disagreeing with the letter about — is that the authors of the letter use the terms “science journalism”, “science writing”, and “science communication” interchangeably. They’re really three distinct enterprises with distinct purposes. Science writing is a subset of science communication and science communication isn’t science journalism.

    Science communication is concerned with faithfully communicating the structures and practices of science and their outcomes. Science journalism on the other hand is a branch of journalism focusing on science, which is as much about scientific ideas as the social, political, economic, demographic, etc. dimensions of science as well.

    Importantly, science isn’t at the centre of the universe of science journalism: as with the other branches of journalism, public interest is. This means the object of science journalism is the public understanding of science — including its demands of governments, place in society, effect on public welfare, and so on, read together with our constitutional ideals, principles of justice and humanitarianism, the law of the land, and so on. It also includes scientific ideas but I think it’d be more useful if scientists understood the clear elucidation of those ideas is the beginning, not the end, of science journalism’s practice.

    Saying we have a problem because the practice of science journalism somewhere by specific people hasn’t conveyed what scientists would like to have conveyed on that topic — as the authors of the letter write — is like complaining a film journalist didn’t review a film exactly how the director would have liked or a business journalist didn’t assess the prospects of a company in line with its shareholders’ expectations. Here’s a particularly disagreeable expression of this notion from the letter:

    Stakeholders of science communication and education can learn from each other and address the misalignment of science in the news and in schools.

    The news exists to inform, not to educate. I find the conflation so disagreeable because, considered cumulatively, news determines whether the education we’re providing/receiving is adequate or if it leaves students out of step with the way the world works. To belabour the point: education is the controlled dissemination of knowledge synchronised with the psychological and political development of society’s members while journalism, whose product is news, is a “history of now”*, capable of surprising us by virtue of being a record of the world’s shared-lived reality, i.e. something we don’t control as much as effect together.

    On a somewhat related note, the letter begins by invoking Carl Sagan’s comment 40 years ago that newspapers ought to have science columns as often as they have astrology columns — which strikes me as a very convenient example that says nothing about what the study described in the letter is concerned with: how the press covers science. As the excerpt from the letter below indicates, Sagan’s problem is currently outdated: the press, mainstream or otherwise, covers science today to a much greater degree than it did in his time. It also covers a greater variety of topics. Thanks to the lower costs of publishing on the internet (as opposed to newspapers, which the letter is particularly concerned with), many magazines focused on specific topics have survived for longer than they would have if they were restricted to the printed medium.

    … how newspapers projected the nature of science to the public during the [COVID-19] pandemic and on what aspects of science did they focus remain questions. To address such questions, we investigated 1520 news articles from four national newspapers in the United Kingdom for their coverage of different aspects of science during the omicron variant phase. Our analysis was guided by a broad account of science that includes the cognitive (i.e., thinking and reasoning), the epistemic (i.e., knowledge and methods), the social (i.e., values and norms), and the institutional (i.e., organizations, politics, and economics) aspects. An underlying assumption of our analysis was that public understanding of science would be better served through a holistic coverage of science that does not miss out on vital elements of the scientific enterprise. For example, although scientific knowledge is important to understand, it is often difficult to make sense of such knowledge if there is no context that unpacks why such knowledge is important in the first place, where such knowledge is developed, by whom, and under what circumstances.

    This said, the conceptual framework the researchers developed to analyse the scientific contents of the four newspapers and their 1,520 articles — especially once it’s shorn of its relationship with science education — could be useful for science journalists to understand how their priorities may have ‘drifted’ during the pandemic, the consequences of their time-varying access to experts and/or expertise in different areas, and the place and value of the (free) press during public crises.

    The overall findings from our study showed that the social and institutional aspects of science were emphasized to a greater extent than the cognitive and the epistemic aspects in all the newspapers. When we unpacked each aspect to examine the details, different patterns emerged. For example, within the institutional aspects, the political dynamics of science were covered to a greater extent in all newspapers than any other aspect. Some of the social aspects were downplayed in all newspapers. There was hardly any coverage of scientific ethos that would capture scientific norms. … Likewise, social aspects of science that involve peer review processes in the validation of scientific knowledge were mentioned to a limited extent in all newspapers. When we examined the cognitive and epistemic aspects, we observed that there was hardly any reference to scientific methods.

    … in a related study in which we used the same sample of newspapers and focused on nonpharmaceutical interventions, our findings suggested that it was neither the number of COVID-19 news articles nor the actual number of cases and deaths, but the treatment in newspapers of specific aspects of science, particularly scientific knowledge and methods, that was associated with mobility change during the pandemic. The way that newspapers discuss epidemics may potentially influence changes in human mobility, a key factor in containing the spread of infectious diseases.

    I’m also gladdened by scientists’ interest in such exercises and hope they engage directly with journalists to develop conceptual frameworks that aren’t susceptible to misunderstandings of what science as well as journalists are or aren’t capable of. For example, here’s a short excerpt from a conversation I’d had last year with IISER Bhopal philosopher Varun Bhatta about the problems with invoking ideas from philosophy in a journalistic article, which I think is also implicated in the letter’s authors’ argument that while “scientific knowledge is important to understand, it is often difficult to make sense of such knowledge if there is no context that unpacks why such knowledge is important in the first place, where such knowledge is developed, by whom, and under what circumstances.”

    … all journalism needs to be in the public interest, and I’ve no idea what a philosophy in the public interest sounds like, which is because I don’t know what constitutes philosophy news, that could lend itself to news reports, news analyses, and news features. Is there a community, collective or organisation of philosophers in India that’s trying to reach out to more people? Where can I engage with an articulation of what I’m missing out on when I skip a comment from a philosopher for a news article? On a related note, many of us in journalism have studied journalism, which is its own field – just like philosophy – with its own tools to develop ways to frame the world, to make sense of it. I have no idea where philosophy is situated here, if at all. …

    We also need to be clear there are differences between newspapers and magazines, their sizes, remits, and frequencies of publication. Publications that take it slower and with more pages than a newspaper – or, more generally, articles that are composed over a longer time (much longer than news reports, of course) and are also lengthier (more than a few hundred words at least) are also likelier to have the time and the room to include philosophical deliberations. This is the sort of room we need … to lay the groundwork first. Otherwise, such ideas just vanish under the unforgiving demands of the inverted pyramid.

    Now … If I have to pay a writer Rs 5,000 to write a 1,000-word article about some idea or event that’s of interest in philosophical circles, and I expect (based on historical data) that 10,000 people will engage sincerely with the article, I need each one of those people to be able to readily contribute 50 paise to the publication for me to break even – and this is hard. The size of the engaged audience will actually be more like 1,000, requiring each one of those people to contribute Rs 5. And this is extraordinarily difficult given the prevailing ratios of the sizes of the overall audience, the engaged audience, and the paying audience. Similarly, if I add another page in the newspaper so I can accommodate more philosophy-centred material and charge readers Re 1 extra to pay for it (assuming here that advertisers won’t be interested in advertising on this page), will I have enough new readers to offset those who will stop buying the paper because of the higher cover price? I doubt it.

    Against this background, in fact, it will be useful if scientists’ efforts to improve science education — by examining what students are taught and how that relates to the “public understanding of how science works” and its effects on people’s choices — focused instead on the genesis, constitution, and evolution of public interest. This is because the public interest, apart from railroading what narratives ought (or ought not) to be present in the news, has a strong influence on which combination of business models and ideologies a news publisher can adopt in order to have both a persistent readership and a sustainable revenue stream.

    * As a professor of journalism once put to me.

  • Getting rid of the GRE

    An investigation by Science has found that, today, just 3% of “PhD programs in eight disciplines at 50 top-ranked US universities” require applicants’ GRE scores, “compared with 84% four years ago”. This is good news about a test whose purpose I could never understand: first as a student who had to take it to apply to journalism programmes, then as a journalist who couldn’t unsee the barriers the test imposed on students from poorer countries with localy tailored learning systems and, yes, not fantastic English. (Before the test’s format was changed in 2011, taking the test required takers to memorise long lists of obscure English words, an exercise that was devoid of purpose because takers would never remember most of those words.) Obviously many institutes still require prospective students to take the GRE, but the fact that many others are alive to questions about the utility of standardised tests and the barriers they impose on students from different socioeconomic backgrounds is heartening. The Science article also briefly explored what proponents of the GRE have to say, and I’m sure you’ll see (below) as I did that the reasons are flimsy – either because this is the strength of the arguments on offer or because Science hasn’t sampled all the available arguments in favour, which seems to me to be more likely. This said, the reason offered by a senior member of the company that devises and administers the GRE is instructive.

    “I think it’s a mistake to remove GRE altogether,” says Sang Eun Woo, a professor of psychology at Purdue University. Woo is quick to acknowledge the GRE isn’t perfect and doesn’t think test scores should be used to rank and disqualify prospective students – an approach many programs have used in the past. But she and some others think the GRE can be a useful element for holistic reviews, considered alongside qualitative elements such as recommendation letters, personal statements, and CVs. “We’re not saying that the test is the only thing that graduate programs should care about,” she says. “This is more about, why not keep the information in there because more information is better than less information, right?”

    Removing test scores from consideration could also hurt students, argues Alberto Acereda, associate vice president of global higher education at the Educational Testing Service, the company that runs the GRE. “Many students from underprivileged backgrounds so often don’t have the advantage of attending prestigious programs or taking on unpaid internships, so using their GRE scores serves [as a] way to supplement their application, making them more competitive compared to their peers.”

    Both arguments come across as reasonable – but they’re both undermined by the result of an exercise that the department of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University conducted in 2020: A group evaluated prospective students’ applications for MS and PhD programmes while keeping the GRE scores hidden. When the scores were revealed, the evaluations weren’t “materially affected”. Obviously the department’s findings are not generalisable – but they indicate the GRE’s redundancy, with the added benefit for evaluators to not have to consider the test’s exorbitant fee on the pool of applicants (around Rs 8,000 in 2014 and $160 internationally, up to $220 today) and the other pitfalls of using the GRE to ‘rank’ students’ suitability for a PhD programme. Some others quoted in the Science article vouched for “rubric-based holistic reviews”. The meaning of “rubric” in context isn’t clear from the article itself but the term as a whole seems to mean considering students on a variety of fronts, one of which is their performance on the GRE. This also seems reasonable, but it’s not clear what GRE brings to the table. One 2019 study found that GRE scores couldn’t usefully predict PhD outcomes in biomedical sciences. In this context, including the GRE – even as an option – in the application process could disadvantage some students from applying and/or being admitted due to the test’s requirements (including the fee) as well as, and as a counterexample to Acereda’s reasoning, due to their scores on the test not faithfully reflecting their ability to complete a biomedical research degree. But in another context – of admissions to the Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (GSBS) – researchers reported in 2019 that the GRE might be useful to “extract meaning from quantitative metrics” and when employed as part of a “multitiered holistic” admissions process, but which by itself could disproportionately triage Black, Native and Hispanic applicants. Taken together, more information is not necessarily better than less information, especially when there are other barriers to acquiring the ‘more’ bits.

    Finally, while evaluators might enjoy the marginal utility of redundancy, as a way to ‘confirm’ their decisions, it’s an additional and significant source of stress and consumer of time to all test-takers. This is in addition to a seemingly inescapable diversity-performance tradeoff, which strikes beyond the limited question of whether one standardised test is a valid predictor of students’ future performance and at the heart of what the purpose of a higher-education course is. That is, should institutes consider diversity at the expense of students’ performance? The answer depends on the way each institute is structured, what its goal is and what it measures to that end. One that is focused on its members publishing papers in ‘high IF’ journals, securing high-value research grants, developing high h-indices and maintaining the institute’s own glamourous reputation is likely to see a ‘downside’ to increasing diversity. An institute focused on engendering curiosity, adherence to critical thinking and research methods, and developing blue-sky ideas is likely to not. But while the latter sounds great (strictly in the interests of science), it may be impractical from the point of view of helping tackle society’s problems and of fostering accountability on the scientific enterprise at large. The ideal institute lies somewhere in between these extremes: its admission process will need to assume a little more work – work that the GRE currently abstracts off into a single score – in exchange for the liberty to decouple from university rankings, impact factors, ‘prestige’ and other such preoccupations.

  • A question about India’s new science prizes

    really deserving candidates

    In a meeting chaired by Union home secretary Ajay Bhalla on September 16 and attended by senior members of the various science departments of the national government (DST, DBT, etc.), the Union government eliminated hundreds of awards given to the country’s scientists for achievements on various fronts and fields. Governing a country the size of India is bound to result in bloat, so it wouldn’t be possible to dismiss this move by the government out of hand. However, the three words above make an appearance among Bhalla’s many utterances in the meeting and they are worthy of suspicion.

    The Indian government under Narendra Modi has regularly used vague adjectives to accommodate a diversity of possibilities instead of committing to one course of action over another. Perhaps the best known example is its use of the “national security” excuse to refuse answers to questions under the RTI Act, such as what the scientific payloads of the Chandrayaan 2 and 3 missions were or why the FCR Act was amended. Other examples include any assurance made by Prime Minister Modi, such as on the occasion he was forced to repeal the regrettable farm laws.

    In December 2019, physicist Brian Skinner uploaded a preprint paper to the arXiV server in which he quantified the effect of a “prestige bias” on the professional trajectories of scientists who are subjected to multiple rounds of evaluation. I’ve had occasion to return to this analysis on multiple occasions because, to me, it arrives at an essential, irreducible truth of the world: that keeping the conditions of entry to some space vague doesn’t just allow for arbitrary decision-making but inevitably causes such decision-making. As Skinner wrote:

    For example, two applicants for graduate school may have similar grades and exam scores, but if one candidate comes from a more prestigious university then their application will, in general, be evaluated more highly. This ‘prestige bias’ arises naturally, since metrics like grades and exam scores are imprecise measures of a student’s ability, and thus the evaluator looks for any other information available to help with their decision. Belonging to a prestigious group suggests that the candidate was ranked highly by some other evaluator in the past, and this provides a prior expectation (like a second opinion) that biases the decision in their favor.

    Vagueness when the stakes are high can’t be innocent, especially once it has been identified, because the more powerful can and will use the resulting uncertainty to their advantage. Here as well, when Bhalla has determined that a small number of new prizes should replace the plethora of the now-extinct prizes and that they ought to be given to “really deserving candidates”, it brings to mind the “really deserving” corporations that are winning contracts for mines, ports and defence manufacturing, the “really deserving” businessmen whose wealth has increased disproportionately to that of their peers, and the “really deserving” ministries and departments that are receiving an increasing fraction of the Union government’s budgetary allocations.

    Granted, drafting and holding a fixed definition of the term ‘deserving’ can only be bad for the people and the government both. But when any doubts or uncertainties about its ambit are likely to be abused by the government – awarding India’s top honour for scientific work to, say, Appa Rao Podile or M. Jagadesh Kumar over Gagandeep Kang or Rakesh Mishra – our options are limited to a meaningless science prize that represents, above all else, the BJP’s successful subversion of another science-related space (after the IITs) for the nationalist project versus a prize that is much more meaningful but whose terms are rigid and unresponsive to the times.

  • The Merge

    Earlier this month, a major event happened in the cryptocurrency space called the ‘Merge’. In this event, the ethereum blockchain changed the way it achieves consensus – from using a proof-of-work mechanism to a proof-of-stake mechanism.

    A blockchain is a spreadsheet that maintains a record of all the transactions between users using the same blockchain. Every user on a blockchain basically possesses an up-to-date copy of that spreadsheet and helps validate others’ transactions on the blockchain. The rewards that the blockchain produces for desirable user behaviour are called its tokens. For example, tokens on the ethereum blockchain are called ether and those on the bitcoin blockchain are called… well, bitcoins. This is what the users also transact with on the blockchain.

    (See here for a more thorough yet accessible intro to blockchains and NFTs.)

    As a result of the ‘Merge’, according to the foundation that manages the cryptocurrency, the blockchain’s energy consumption dropped by 99.95%.

    The blockchain on which users transact ethereum tokens plus the network is called the ethereum mainnet. During the ‘Merge’, the existing mainnet was replaced with another called the Beacon Chain.

    Imagine the blockchain to be a bridge that moves traffic across a river. Ahead of the ‘Merge’, operators erected a parallel bridge and allowed traffic over it as well. Then, on September 15, 2022, they merged traffic from the first bridge with the traffic on the new one. Once all the vehicles were off the old bridge, it was destroyed.

    Source: ethereum.org

    Each of the vehicles here was an ethereum transaction. During the ‘Merge’, the operators had to ensure that all the vehicles continued to move, none got hijacked and none of them broke down.

    (Sharding – which is expected to roll out in 2023 – is the act of splitting the blockchain up into multiple pieces that different parts of the network use. This way, each part will require fewer resources to use the blockchain even as the network as a whole will be using the blockchain as a whole.)

    Blockchains like those of bitcoin and ethereum need a ‘proof of x’ because they are decentralised: they have no central authority that decides whether a transaction is legitimate. Instead, the validation mechanisms are baked into the processes by which users mine and exchange the coins. Proof-of-work and proof-of-stake are two flavours of one such mechanism. To understand what it does, let’s consider one of the problems it protects a blockchain against: double-spending.

    Say Selvi wants to send 100 rupees to Gokul. Double-spending is the threat of sending the same 100 rupees to Gokul twice, thus converting 100 rupees to 200 rupees. When Selvi uses a bank: she logs into her netbanking account and transfers the funds or she withdraws some cash from the ATM and gives Gokul the notes. Either way, once she’s withdrawn the money from her account, the bank records it and she can’t withdraw the same funds again.

    When she takes the cryptocurrency route: Selvi transfers some ethereum tokens to Gokul over the blockchain. Here, the blockchain requires some way to verify and record the transaction so that it doesn’t recur. If it used proof-of-work, it would require users on the network to share their computing power to solve a complex mathematical problem. The operation produces a numeric result that uniquely identifies the transaction as well as appends the transaction’s details to the blockchain. A copy of the updated blockchain is shared with all the users so that they are all on the same page. If Selvi tries to spend the same coins again – to transfer it to someone else, say – she won’t be able to: the blockchain ‘knows’ now that Selvi no longer has the funds in her wallet.

    The demand for computing power to acknowledge a transaction and add it to the blockchain constitutes proof-of-work: when you supply that power, which is used to do work, you have provided that proof. In exchange, the blockchain rewards you with a coin. (If many people provided computing power, they split the coins released by the blockchain.)

    The reason the Ethereum folks claim their post-Merge blockchain consumes 99.95% less energy is because it doesn’t use proof-of-work to verify transactions. Instead, it uses proof-of-stake: users stake their ethereum tokens for each transaction. Put another way, proof-of-work requires users to prove they have computing power to lose; proof-of-stake requires users to prove they have coins – or wealth – to lose.

    Before each transaction, a validator places some coins as collateral in a ‘smart contract’. This is essentially an algorithm that will not return the coins to the validator if they don’t perform their task properly. Right now, aspiring validators need to deposit 32 ethereum tokens to qualify and join a queue. The network limits the rate at which new validators are added to the network.

    Once a validator is admitted, they are allotted blocks (transactions to be verified) at regular intervals. If a block checks out, the validator casts a vote in favour of that block that is transmitted across the network. Once every 12 seconds, the network randomly chooses a group of validators whose votes are used to make a final determination on whether a block is valid.

    Proof-of-stake is less energy-intensive than proof-of-work but it keeps the ethereum blockchain tethered to the same requirement: the proof of preexisting wealth. In the new paradigm, the blockchain releases new coins as reward when transactions are verified, and those who have staked more stand to gain more – i.e. the rich get richer.

    Note that when the blockchain used the proof-of-work consensus mechanism, a big problem was that a very small number of users provided a very large fraction of the computing power (contrary to cryptocurrencies’ promise to decentralise finance). Proof-of-stake is expected to increase this centralisation of validatory power because the blockchain now favours validators who have more to stake, and rewards them more. Over time, as richer validators stake more, the cost of validating a transaction will also go up – and the ‘poorer’ validators will be forced to drop out.

    Second, the proof-of-stake system requires problematic transactions to be flagged when the validators have staked their ethereum. Once they have withdrawn their stakes, they can’t be penalised. This in turn revives the risk of the double-spending problem, as set out in some detail here.

    The energy consumption of cryptocurrency transactions was and remains a major bit of criticism against this newfangled technological solution to a problem that the world doesn’t have – and that’s the point that sticks with me. The ‘Merge’ was laudable to the extent that it reduced the consumption of energy and mining hardware in a time when the wealthy desperately need to reduce all forms of consumption, but while the ‘cons’ column is one row shorter, the ‘pros’ column remains just as empty.

  • Awaiting more info on WP.com’s new pricing

    After my last blog post on WordPress.com’s bizarre paid-plans rejig, which stayed on top of Hacker News for a few hours and eventually caught the attention of the CEOs of WordPress.com and Automattic, the former, Dave Martin, said the company was listening to bloggers’ feedback and would incorporate it into the new options. I also suggested on the same day, Sunday, that they publish a post on the WP.com blog allaying many fears about the new Pro plan’s adjustments for “just there to blog” bloggers and for those in non-Western markets, including India.

    This post appeared on the WP.com blog yesterday but, disappointingly, it only repeated what Dave had said on the HN forum; in fact, 75% of it is advertisement for the new Pro plan, and the remaining 25% rephrases Dave’s words – that the adjustments in question are coming soon.

    Both Dave and Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, which owns WP.com, have said that it’s customary for them to roll out the changes first before issuing any kind of statement formally announcing them, so that they have time to fix any bugs in production. I suppose this makes sense for technological fixes, but it doesn’t for one that will ultimately determine whether a person is able to WP.com at all.

    I like that the statement has increased the free plan’s storage limit to 1 GB and has removed the ill-conceived traffic limit from both the free and the Pro plans. To me these changes also indicate a deeper possibility: if these settings (more storage, no traffic limit) are feasible now, why weren’t they feasible earlier? They must have been. So why weren’t they implemented at that stage? WP.com says in its statement, as Dave Martin did as well, that the Pro plan was the product of listening to users’ feedback. I doubt this bit – or at least, WP.com only incorporated feedback that was in line with its own sensibilities, sensibilities that I suspect continue to ignore the needs of those for whom paying $5-8 a month is more feasible than to pay $180 a year. Second, the post promises: (quoted verbatim)

    • Additional storage will be available for purchase at a very reasonable price, very soon.
    • As-you-need them add-ons for both plans, to give you a la carte upgrades. Coming soon.

    Considering one of the stated reasons for introducing the Pro plan is to reduce the number of options and enable users to make easier descisions, wouldn’t the availability of “a la carte” options reintroduce the same ‘complexity’? I realise these options won’t be available for all features but depending on which ones they are, WP.com might as well retain the personal and premium plans of old (the ones, along with the business plan, that the Pro plan has replaced).

    Second, how will these “a la carte upgrades” be priced? A related issue here is that WP.com recently started allowing users to attach images to their posts without leaving the WP.com editor, through the Pexels and Openverse integrated photo libraries. When you select an image to add to your post, WP.com imports it into your blog’s media gallery. Most of the photos on my blog were imported this way. If WP.com isn’t going to compress these images in any way, then they will hasten the user’s consumption of the 1 GB of free space. If WP.com is going to charge more for storage (it did earlier as well but then the personal and premium plans existed), it should also provide image compression or downsizing measures.

    And third, the post doesn’t even mention if WP.com plans to tweak its prices for the India market. This was and is a big thorn in my side, because the India rates differ significantly from the rates in the US. The business plan, which the new Pro plan is by and large, cost Rs 7,680 a year in India – or 101.80, whereas the Pro plan costs $80, or Rs 6,033, more. These aren’t small sums of money in India. Dave had said in his HN post that his team had missed out on adjusting the Pro rates for India (and Brazil) and would do so. But the statement doesn’t mention anything about this, even as superficially as it has touched on the other issues.

    While Dave’s, and Mullenweg’s, words in response to my blog post seemed reassuring at the time, I’m yet to be convinced that WP.com still cares about its “just there to blog” bloggers. We still need more clarity and information.

  • Intro to NFTs

    First

    I wrote this piece for a friend who wanted to understand what NFTs were. I have considerably simplified many points and omitted many others to keep the explanation below (relatively) short. If you’re interested, you can read the following articles/sites as well as find links to more discussion on this topic from there.

    1. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-versus-gold
    2. https://rpr2.wordpress.com/tag/nft/
    3. https://blog.dshr.org/2022/02/ee380-talk.html (I left out talking about scammers – this post has great explanations and additional learning resources on this front)
    4. https://caesuramag.org/posts/laurie-rojas-why-no-good-nft-yet

    Background info

    What is an NFT?

    To understand NFTs, we need to understand the ‘T’ first: tokens.

    And to understand the Ts, we need to understand the reason they exist: the blockchain.

    The blockchain is widely touted to be a ledger of transactions. But I – a person who has struggled to understand banking and finance terminologies – have found it more useful to understand this technology in terms of the fundamentally new thing it facilitates.

    In ‘conventional’ banking, banks – state-owned and otherwise – validate financial transactions. If I transfer money from my wallet to yours online, the bank knows a) whether money has been deducted from my wallet, b) whether money has been credited to your wallet, and c) whether I, the wallet’s owner, performed the transaction in question.

    The blockchain is a database that, together with a bunch of algorithms, offers a way to perform these tasks without requiring a centralised authority. Instead, it helps the people who are transacting with each other to ensure the security and integrity of their transactions.

    Say 10 people have already been using a blockchain to validate their transactions. Each row in this database is called a block. When one of the 10 performs a new transaction, it is added as a new block in the database along with some data pertaining to the previous block. This bit of data is called a cryptographic hash. Using the hash, all the blocks in the database are linked together: every new block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, all the way back to the very first block. This chain of blocks is called the blockchain.

    Every time a new transaction is performed, and a new block has to be added to the blockchain, some algorithms kick in to validate the transaction. Once it has been validated, the block is added, a timestamp is affixed to the operation, and a copy of the blockchain in that instance is shared with all the 10 people using it.

    This validation process doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You need computing power to perform it, drawn from the machines owned and operated by some or all of the 10 people. To incentivise these people to donate their computing power, the blockchain releases some files at periodic intervals. These files denote value on the blockchain, and the people who get them can use them gainfully. These files are called tokens.

    Different blockchains have different validation incentives. For example, the bitcoin blockchain releases its tokens, the bitcoins, as rewards to those who have provided computing power to validate new transactions.

    The bitcoin protocol states that the number of bitcoins released drops by half for every 210,000 blocks added. In May 2020, this reward stood at 6.25 bitcoins per block. The blockchain will also stop releasing new bitcoins once it has released 21 million of them.

    Technically speaking, both centralised and decentralised validation systems use blockchains. The one that uses a central authority is called a permissioned blockchain. The one without a centralised authority is called a permissionless blockchain.

    This is useful to know if only to understand two things:

    1. The concept of blockchains has existed since the early 1980s in the form of permissioned systems, and
    2. Permissionless blockchains need tokens to incentivise users to share computing power whereas permissioned blockchains don’t need tokens

    The demand for bitcoins has caused the price of each such token to rise to $43,925, or Rs 33.47 lakh, today (March 25, 2022, 9:06 am).

    The tokens on a blockchain can be fungible or non-fungible. An example of a fungible token is bona fide currency: one one-rupee note can be replaced by another (equally legitimate) one-rupee note and not make any difference to a transaction. Bitcoins are also fungible tokens for the same reason. On the other hand, NFTs are tokens that can’t be interchanged. Each NFT is unique – it has to be because this characteristic defines NFTs. They are non-fungible tokens.

    Bitcoins are basically files. You write an article and store it as a docx file. This file contains text. A bitcoin is a file that contains alphanumeric data and is stored in a certain way. You can save a docx file on your laptop’s hard-disk or on Google Drive, and you can only open it with software that can read docx files. Similarly, you can store bitcoins in wallets on the internet, and they can be ‘read’ only by special software that work with blockchains.

    Similarly, NFTs are also files. The alphanumeric code they contain are linked in a unique way to another file. These other files can be pictures, videos, docx files, bits of text, anything at all that can be stored as digital data.

    When one person transfers an NFT to another person over a blockchain, they are basically transferring ownsership of the file to which the NFT is linked. Put another way, NFTs facilitate the trade of goods and value that can’t directly be traded over blockchains by tokenising these goods/value. This is what NFTs fundamentally offer.

    Emergent facts

    This background info leads to some implications:

    • Bitcoins have been exploding in value because a) their supply is limited, b) investors in bitcoins and/or blockchain technology have built hype around this technology, and c) taken together, the rising value of each bitcoin has encouraged the rise of many Ponzi schemes that require more people to get in on cryptocurrencies, forcing demand to rise, which further pushes up the coin value, allowing investors to buy low and sell high.
    • The demand for bitcoins, and other cryptocurrencies more broadly, has obscured the fact that a) permissionless blockchains need tokens to exist, b) these tokens in turn need to be convertable to bona fide currencies, and c) there needs to be speculative valuation of these tokens in order for their value over time to increase. Otherwise, the tokens hold no value – especially to pay for the real-world costs of computing power.
    • This computing power is very costly. It is highly energy-intensive – if it weren’t, anybody could validate any transaction and add it to the blockchain. In fact, one of the purposes of the compute cost is to prevent a hack called the Sybil attack. A copy of the blockchain is shared with all members participating in the chain. Say my copy gets corrupted for some reason; when the system encounters it, it will check it against the copy that exists on the majority of computers on the network. When it doesn’t match, I will have forked out of the blockchain and no longer be a part of it. A Sybil attack happens when multiple users work together to modify their copies of the blockchain (to, say, give themselves more money), confusing the system into believing the corrupted version is the actual version. A high computing power demand would ensure that the cost of mounting a Sybil attack is higher than the benefits it will reap. This power is also what leads to the cryptocurrencies’ enormous carbon footprint.
    • If you provide more computing power to the pool of power available to validate transactions, you have provided the system with proof of work. Another way to validate transactions is through proof of stake: the more value you have transacted using the blockchain, the more stake you are said to have in its proper operation, and therefore the likelier it will be for your transactions to be validated. Proof of stake is less energy-intensive, but its flaw is that it’s a ‘rich get richer’ paradigm. From a social justice point of view, both proof of work and proof of stake have the same outcome: wealth inequality. Indeed, a principal failing of the ethereum and bitcoin blockchains today is that a very small number of individuals around the world own more than half of all the computing power available to these networks – a fact that directly undermines the existential purpose of these networks: decentralisation.
    • NFTs differ in their uniqueness, but other than that, they also require the use of blockchains and thus inherit all of the problems of permissionless blockchains.
    • NFTs also have two problems that are specific to their character: a) they have to be scarce in order to be valuable, and this scarcity is artificially imposed – by investors but more broadly by tech-bros and their capitalist culture, in order to keep NFTs exclusive and valuable; b) the items that NFTs currently tokenise are simple crap made with conventional software. For example, the user named Metakovan purchased last year an NFT associated with a big collage by an artist named Tweeple for 500 ether ($69 million). This collage was just a collage, nothing special, made with Photoshop (or similar). Now, if I uploaded an image on a server and linked it to an NFT, and one day the server goes down, the NFT will exist but it will point to nothing, and thus be useless. This vacuity at the heart of NFTs – that they contain no value of their own and that whatever value they contain is often rooted in conventional systems – is emblematic of a bigger issue with cryptocurrencies: they have no known application. They are a solution in search of a problem.
    • For example, Metakovan said last year that using cryptocurrencies to trade in art was a way to use the anonymity afforded by cryptocurrencies to evade the gatekeepers of the art world, who, in his words, had thus far kept out the non-white, non-rich from owning the masters’ paintings. But many, many art critics have ridiculed this. I like to quote Laurie Rojas: “Even with all the financial speculation around NFTs, the point that Art’s value is determined within the parameters of a society in which commodification is the dominant form of social relations (i.e., capitalism) has too easily been abandoned for poorly defined neologisms. … NFTs are the latest phenomenon to express this.”
    • NFTs’ newfound association with artistic works is something for NFTs to do, otherwise they have no purpose. In addition, small-time and/or indie artists have criticised NFTs because they don’t solve the more fundamental problem of people not funding artists like them or protecting their work from copyright violations in the first place – much less because potential funders don’t have the requisite technologies. This criticism also speaks to the criticism of the bitcoin network itself: to quote Alex De Vries, “One bitcoin transaction requires … several thousands of times more than what’s required by traditional payment systems” to perform a transaction of the same value. Therefore it can’t be a functional substitute for the world’s existing banking system either. And we’ve seen in a previous point that they’re not decentralised either.

    Two last issues – one about a new way in which blockchain tech is trying to find relevance and one about a pernicious justification to allow this technology to persist.

    • The first is what has come to be called “web3”. The current iteration of our web is known as web2, supposed to have begun around the mid-2000s. Web1 was the first iteration, when the web was full of websites that offered content for us to consume. Web2 was about content production – social media, blogs, news sites, etc. Web3 is supposed to be about participation – based on Metakovan’s logic. In this paradigm, web3 is to be powered by blockchains. This is a stupid idea for all the reasons permissionless blockchains and NFTs are stupid ideas, and others besides.
    • Second, some entrepreneurs have started to buy carbon credits from various parts of the world and offer them for a price to blockchain entrepreneurs, to help ‘neutralise’ the carbon footprint of the latter’s efforts. This is wrong and evil because it’s a wasteful use of carbon credits that diverts them away from more socially responsible uses. It’s also evil because, in this paradigm, cryptocurrencies and NFTs foster two paths towards greater inequality. First, as mentioned before, they impose a prohibitive energy cost to use them. Second, developed countries need to cut down on their carbon emissions right away – but many developing countries and most under-developed countries (in the economic sense) still have room to emit some more before they can peak. Carbon credits, the demand for which cryptocurrencies are increasing, reverse these outcomes – allowing the former to keep emitting while purchasing ‘room to emit’ from less developed nations, and thus lowering the latter’s emissions ceiling.
    • Finally, a fundamental flaw of the carbon credits system is that it assumes that emissions over one part of the world can be compensated by supporting forests in another. So carbon credits may in fact make the problem worse by allowing cryptocurrency folks to keep kicking the can down the road.

  • Where the atmanirbharta in spine?

    Truth be told, I didn’t expect CSIR chief Shekhar Mande could be so disingenuous. “India didn’t have to depend on western countries,” he says. What is this abject refusal to thank other countries for help – and preferring instead to take their help and rewriting the past to pretend we didn’t need any?

    Of all those who received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine in India, 88% received Covishield, which was first conceived by scientists in the UK and licensed by a British-Swedish pharmaceutical company to an Indian manufacturer. Even Covaxin, which accounts for the remaining 12% (screw Sputnik V), draws on technologies perfected by scientists in the US, among other places, against the SARS and MERS viruses. And while India’s drug controller approved a glut of drugs to treat severe COVID-19, the rights to the most popular among them and which also demonstrated some efficacy in any well-designed trials and observational studies – remdesivir – belong to a Californian pharmaceutical company.

    Some of the special containers and chemical reagents required to conduct RT-PCR tests are mostly imported. Indian industry adapted in a relatively short span of time to boost local production of masks, PPE kits and syringes, but there’s a lot that it depended on the west for and for which the west depended on India.

    In The Statesman article, ICMR chief Balram Bhargava also says, “The experience of developing Covaxin has instilled self-confidence in us that India is now much more than the pharmacy of the world. It is also a vaccine superpower.” Kind sir, India is no longer the ‘pharmacy of the world’. And we’d have to be a shitty kind of “vaccine superpower”, whatever that means, to a) run low on vaccines and syringes and completely fail to see that coming, b) celebrate 100-crore preordained inoculations, c) go so gung-ho with COVID-19 that we fail to deliver doses of a DTP vaccine to 3 million children in a year (the world’s highest) and d) preferentially award vaccine-making contracts to private companies.

    Of course, BB has been a foregone conclusion for a while. But that Mande can thump his chest like this… Are we to believe, then, that the rumours about why the Manipal Centre for Virus Research was shut, just as the pandemic was beginning, are true? That it was poised to undermine, with its foreign funds, foreign collaborations and foreign-trained scientists, the ‘Make in India’ narrative that the government as much as the government-funded scientific enterprise is wedded to.

    Perhaps the most regrettable thing about Mande’s comment is that – if the head of India’s largest government-funded scientific research establishment is prepared to lie in public, and to himself, that Indian researchers, manufacturers, traders, healthcare workers and patients didn’t want for anything that wasn’t already available in the country in early 2020, he is also prepared to believe there aren’t any problems that need to be fixed or resolved today either. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, but I don’t have my hopes up. Whatever we’re atma-nirbhar with today, it isn’t spine among government scientists, it seems.