India’s Nobel Prize drought

We are happy, and justifiably so, to learn that physicist Roger Penrose, has won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics (jointly with Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez) for the discovery related to Black Holes that stands on the shoulders of Indian physicist Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri. Since the Raychaudhuri Equation in General Relativity, derived by Raychaudhuri, has come into the spotlight, the India connection to the Nobel Prize cheered us, though it occasions an unavoidable question: Why can’t India produce a Noble-class scientist? In view of the fact that there have only been a handful of Nobel laureates in a country of over 1.3 billion, it calls for a time-worn self-introspection.

C V Raman is the only Indian to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for work he did in India, and that was in 1930. There are others of Indian origin like Venkataraman Ramakrishnan, Har Gobind Khorana and Subrahmanyan Chandrashekar (Raman’s nephew), who occasioned India’s pride but all of them did their prize-winning work outside India or were naturalised citizens of America at the time of winning the prize. Raman once said that although scientists "are claimed as nationals by one or another of many different countries, yet in the truest sense, they belong to the whole world.” It is true that since the Second World War, there has been a steady migration of scientists responding to the pull of better research and economic opportunities offered primarily in the United States and Western Europe which might also account for the migrations of scientists, mostly Jewish, from Germany and other countries in Central Europe, to Great Britain and the US. But what accounts for the abysmally low count of Indian Nobel laureates in science?

Leon Lederman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, asked the question, “How many Amazon kids, how many African kids, how many children in some remote village in China and India get lost and could be a Newton or an Einstein?” Indeed, lack of opportunities is a major reason why brilliant students go abroad or are waylaid. Chandra K Mittal observed that Indian scientists lack political, cultural, and social capital in the Western world, as a result of which they lack visibility and peer recognition and thus the ownership and credit for the discoveries made by them are denied them. Scientists like E C G Sudarshan and Homi Bhabha, nominated more than once for Nobel recognition, did not receive the honour. The discovery of the synthesis of the nitric oxide signalling system, based on the work done by two scientists, Chandra K Mittal and Ferid Murad, brought a Nobel Prize for Medicine for Murad and two others in 1998; Mittal’s name did not figure in the list.

Mittal is not alone. In an illuminating book titled The Road to Stockholm: Nobel Prizes, Science, and Scientists by István Hargittai (Oxford University Press, 2002), there are clear instances of oversight. Hargittai describes two groups in this chapter – people who did work that was clearly "Nobel class" but never received the award, and people who could reasonably have shared an award but did not. A sulphuric debate ensued as the second category cited Raman, who in 1930 was the first ‘non-white’, Asian and Indian to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the scattering of light and discovery of the Raman Effect. Several questions have been asked about Raman not sharing the prize with his student and main researcher Krishnan.

When Hauptmann got Nobel for X-ray crystallography in the 1960s, he said the work that fetched him the Nobel was first begun by Kedareswar Banerjee, formerly director of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science and a pupil of Raman. Satyen Bose did not get a Nobel for Bose-Einstein Statistics, but quite a few got the Nobel based on his work. Saha's Thermal Ionisation was the stepping-stone for several Nobel prizes, though not for himself. Biresh Guha was a pioneer in Vitamin C breakthrough (the Nobel was bagged by a Hungarian). Guha was imprisoned for his participation in the freedom struggle in India.

But politics does not alone explain the fundamental crisis of India’s inability to produce Nobel-class scientists. Our nationalistic government that makes a mockery of Indian science by passing off myths as scientific facts must remember that the best universities with inspiring teachers seem to be a prerequisite for winning a Nobel in the science categories. Proof that we can’t produce world-class scientists and lack innovation lies in the fact that six months into the pandemic, millions of children studying in vernacular medium schools in India remain deprived of education in the public education system, with no low-cost technology solution or scientific intervention emerging to facilitate distance learning for them.

Why so? A joint study of industry body Assocham and Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Social Sciences five years ago took the IITs to task for having failed to produce a single Nobel laureate. It noted rightly that since Indian universities have little money for research and innovation, India ranks low when it comes to new patents and start-ups in technology and innovation. Our scientists note that in countries like the US, with a consistent Nobel-winning streak, universities which support basic research, collaborative work, inter-disciplinary thinking and innovation have flourished. In India, too, our universities have to be nurtured as centres of research and open learning, and scientific research has to be revived in universities. Serious fund crunch, or if granted, slow delivery of funds from funding agencies, and a below-par research infrastructure, combined with confinement of quality research in a few top institutes (like Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and Defence Research and Development Organisation labs and the Department of Atomic Energy) might account for the crisis. The systemic rot has to be soul-searched and addressed.