Science in India

Vandana Shiva is an Indian physicist and social activist. Shiva founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy (RFSTN), an organization devoted to developing sustainable methods of agriculture, in 1982. Shiva worked to prevent clear-cut logging and the construction of large dams. She was perhaps best known, however, as a critic of…

Shiv Vishwanathan is an anthropologist and Human Rights researcher his work has explored the question of alternatives as a dialogue between the West and India. Closely linked to his current work is the attempt to demystify the modern science and social knowledge as legitimising categories of organised violence and exploitation. His writings have explored the…

The Chipko movement was a non-violent agitation in 1973 that was aimed at protection and conservation of trees, but, perhaps, it is best remembered for the collective mobilisation of women for the cause of preserving forests, which also brought about a change in attitude regarding their own status in society. The uprising against the felling…

Perhaps the most authentic advocate of a ‘Gandhian science’ in contemporary India is the Garhwali social worker Chandi Prasad Bhatt. As a pioneering environmentalist—it was he who started the ‘Chipko’ movement—Bhatt has critiqued the ways in which science has both centralized power and led to environmental degradation. He has been in the forefront of the…

Jagadis Chandra Bose- started his career as a brilliant physicist, changed his discipline to become an even more influential plant physiologist, and died a lapsed scientist and half forgotten mystic. In his heyday, his admirers such as Albert Einstein, Bernard Shaw, Henri Bergson, Aldous Huxley, and Romain Rolland found in him the personification of a…

Within India, by far the best-known critic of modern science is the sociologist Ashis Nandy. Nandy worries that science ‘is threatening to take over all of human life, including every insterstice of culture and every form of individuality’. He believes that scientists are amoral and opportunistic, prone to claim credit for the good done in…

Meghnad Saha  was an Indian astrophysicist famously known for his development of Thermal Ionization Equation, Which was further perfected by British astrophysicist Edward A. Milne. Saha was the scientist-architect of the planning and industrialisation model in independent India. Saha’s caricature of Gandhi’s views on science in important historically for the role he played in formulating the…

Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda is known as “The father of India’s communication revolution”. He introduced microprocessors in telephone switches leading to digital switching and invented the Electronic Diary in 1975.In 1987, he became advisor to the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and was responsible for revolutionizing India’s foreign and domestic telecommunications policies. He is widely known…

Gandhi’s critique of science emanates from his dissatisfaction with the divorce of science and progress from morality. He often quoted the scientist Alfred Wallace to argue that people’s moral sense had in no way improved as a result of scientific discoveries. The advance of science had added “not an inch to the moral stature of…