Freshly mutilated by the partition, plundered by colonial rule, with more than half our people dependent on their harvest and even more living below the poverty line; despite fitting the status quo of the Third World country, India dared to establish ISRO and decided to go to space very well knowing that it served neither its economy, nor its people. This was an open revelation and it suffices to say that India’s strides in science have more than just turned heads. Here, we meditate on what happens when science meets a developing nation.
A credible start is the SKA which stands for Square Kilometer array, a staggering next generation radio telescope that can scan the sky in unprecedented detail of which the applications will be phenomenal. India is an associate member of the SKA observatory that aims to study cosmology, gravitational waves, dark matter, galaxy evolution, extra-terrestrial life and other such parlance that certainly could put the USA out of work. Another such initiative that comes to mind is the SWAN- Sky Watch Array Network which is a homegrown version of the SKA and the proposed network’s objective is to study Radio Transients which are rapidly spinning neutron stars which are moderately bright and emit short radio pulses. The objective of SWAN was to woo students and researchers into radio astronomy, a vast and vastly unexplored field which quite literally widens our range of observations where visible light fails to show us the whole picture and SWAN spearheaded in doing so.
While we are at it, it would be a sin not to mention INDIGO, short for Indian Initiative in Gravitational-wave Observations, it is the body that has taken up the LIGO-India project. The bottom line is, India is building a gravitational wave detector. A mega-project like this requires minds from various fields to collaborate; lasers, vacuums, optics, computers and of course physics.
Other than these, several Indian science and engineering institutes have their own observatories and bring a sort of “telescope-culture”. The Indian Astronomical Observatory in Hanle, Ladakh, is one of the highest sites of a telescope placement, The Devsthal Optical Telescope in Nainital being one of the largest reflecting telescopes in India, IIT Kanpur and IIT Hyderabad setting up their own tremendous telescopes that are swarmed by ardent students, the The National Centre for Radio Astrophysics with the largest telescope operating at meter wavelengths, The InterUniversity Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune churning startling results and operating the Giant Metre-wave Radio Telescope, and several hubs of erudite output all over the map.
Having stated these facts, it is fair to say that India is headed toward a strong foundation and culture of research. The country’s research might just prove to be of a different flavour; unlike most countries that are well-funded in areas of research, India seems to have its financial constraints. However, that seems to encourage improvising and optimizing instead of cutting corners. It is not uncommon for universities in India to set up incubation programmes and research of significance is always aided. A big part of this buzzing scenario is owed to visionaries like Kalam who believed that the critical thinking that science gives to humans is the way forward for a country like India.
In the future, India could be at the centre of technology like reusable rockets which could be both manned and unmanned, an extensive deep space network, a space station of its own, an underground neutrino and/or Cherenkov radiation detector and air taxis. India, since it’s a developing nation, could and must root its technology in the principle of sustainability by improvising instead of flamboyantly spending on materials which could otherwise have substitutes. India could possibly have harnessed the technology of lab-grown organ transplants, and artificial intelligence could be put into use for the caring and personal assistance of patients. Technology like high-rise forests, with buildings loaded with flora imitating hundreds of acres of forests could be built and vehicles could turn completely electric. By 2047, satellites could be almost entirely solar powered and dependence on fossil fuels could be drastically reduced.
However, there are certain things that could bog India down. The initiation of a child into science happens through an arduous and taxing 16 years of schooling where many are circumstantially forced into STEM specializations which they may eventually despise. Besides this, the quality of science and math education in India is sub-par in many regions and rote-learning is a roadblock. The recent National Education Policy could turn things around yet there are several problems that could arise in its implementation. That being said, the statistics are encouraging. The population of India is youthful so change is inevitable and prompt. Hundred years post-independence, India could really emerge as an intellectual savant as it has a say in the leading projects of futuristic science and has an impending explosion in areas of research and education.