When I accompanied Dr APJ Abdul Kalam to Patna in Bihar State in 1999, he was the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India. The Technology Information Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC), which Dr Kalam chaired, had initiated an agriculture project in Paliganj, 55 km from Patna on 2.4 hectares of land. He took me to see what could be done to help assist the healthcare system there, which together with livelihoods, were the two basic problems of the poor.

After becoming the President of India in 2002, Dr Kalam continued his tryst with Bihar, where he thought solutions to all problems of societal transformation can be developed. He made me a part of his entourage in his 3-day visit to Bihar in May 2003. We went to the Jain shrine at Pawapuri, the archaeological site of the ancient Nalanda University, the most sacred of Buddhist shrines – the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya, Takht Harmandir Sahib in Patna, and the Bihar School of Yoga at Munger. We traveled in the “presidential train,” a relic of the British Raj, from Harnaut to Patna. I felt as if I was living one of my past lives. 

President Kalam got entangled in the declaration of President’s Rule in Bihar in May 2005. The Bihar Governor had recommended the dissolution of the Assembly, the Union Cabinet approved it and forwarded it to President Kalam, who was on a visit to Moscow at that time. He signed it there. It was challenged in the Supreme Court and the five-judge Constitution Bench, in a majority verdict, declared the proclamation unconstitutional. President Kalam was penitent saying he should have rejected the Cabinet’s decision and thought of resigning from his office. He was persuaded to continue.  

My bonhomie with Bihar continued. In February 2010, I travelled to Muzaffarpur, pursuing my Don Quixotic mission of connecting all district headquarters on a telemedicine link, which we had restricted to Tele-radiology by that time. My student at Hyderabad Central University, where I was teaching MBA (Healthcare and Hospital Management) in School of Management Studies as Adjunct Professor, Dr Janki Raman, who was a native, escorted me. The picture is from the road trip from Patna to Muzaffarpur clicked by him. 

Bihar continues to struggle with backwardness, which was inherited like any other hinterland of the British-ruled India but then perpetuated by severe form of caste politics and finally, rampant corruption made the best of Bihari youth migrate out of Bihar. Dr Kalam used to say that unless we solve the Bihar development tangle, India can never be a developed country. And who would do the honors? Of course, the people of Bihar. The opportunity is that they are the best of human resources anywhere in the world. The challenge is their political division. 

To put things into the right perspective, Bihar, with more than 120 million people, is the third most populous state in the country after Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. But there is scarcity of land. With so many people and not even 100,000 sq. km., Bihar accounts for 3% of India’s land mass but 9% of its population. This skewed population density, which is three times of the national average, is the root cause of the backwardness. Bihar was ruled from Calcutta by the British. It was already lagging before independence. The difference got exacerbated after liberalization in the mid-1990s. While the other states grew, Bihar languished. Bad became worse. But why?

The creation of Jharkhand in November 2000 to separate out South Bihar took away much of the mineral repository. All the industrialization done in Bihar since independence had gone in a whiff. The problems of persistent poverty, complex social stratification, unsatisfactory infrastructure, and weak governance are well-known, but not well understood. With 80 million people younger than 35 years of age, Bihar needs jobs and that needs investment. Now, investment would need SEZ kind of arrangements, roads, electricity and above all, law and order. It is very easy to blame the government but who elects it? The despair is palpable.

I am not a visionary, but I live by hope. I consider imagination more powerful than knowledge. For me, myths are more potent than history and dreams are more powerful than facts. So, it is time to go a little bold and ask for a medical college in each of the 38 districts of Bihar. It is hard to believe and yet true that half of the 38 districts in the state have no more than three government doctors for every 100,000 people. The situation in Siwan is most acute where there is just one doctor for 100,000 people I am told. To put this into perspective, the national average is 134 doctors for 100,000, a little better than the WHO-prescribed level of 1:1,000. Of course this would also mean a nursing college and a paramedic college in every district. 

Lack of funding is not an excuse for not doing what is needed. The government should show  political will, make a sound proposal, circulate it globally, invite partners and seek investment through bond schemes. The people from Bihar living outside the state themselves would contribute the necessary funds if an honest and transparent scheme is put in place. The same model can be used to create thermal power plants and smart water grids to mitigate the chronic problem of floods, especially in North Bihar. And there should not be any politicking on this. And the best way to do this is to make the system free of political muddling. 

Thomas L. Friedman, in his 1999 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree writes, “You can be a rich person alone. You can be a smart person alone. But you cannot be a complete person alone. For that, you must be part of, and rooted in, an olive grove.” When I asked Dr Raman, currently living in Sydney, Australia, with his family, what would bring him back to Bihar, he said a Neurology & Plastic Surgery Speciality hospital, which he wishes to establish with his younger brothers, Dr Radha Raman and Gopi Raman in Muzaffarpur by 2025. 

And I have no doubt that he is not alone in his dream to return and serve his own people. Dr Kalam used to say that if we forget whom we belong to, and if we forget that there is a God, something profoundly human in us will be lost. And after our return from our 2003 trip, he gave me Bertrand Russell’s 1951 book, New Hopes for a Changing World, highlighting the text that read, “Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.” He indeed knew his country well. 

Tanya visited me on Diwali with her husband, Gopi Reddy. Fresh from a Vipassana retreat of ten days, she radiated joy – face lit with a smile and gait poised in serenity. I am familiar with this form of meditation, but I asked her to narrate her experience, which she articulated brilliantly. For the first four days, she practised concentrating the mind on her breath, at the tip of the nose, pinning her awareness to two square centimeters of the body, feeling the air going in and coming out of the nostrils. This ever-changing flow of breath, as it enters and leaves the nostrils, is the natural reality of everybody. 

The next four days, she used her mind, thus trained for pointed awareness, to scan her body for hidden sensations, during which, multitudes of hot spots, twisted muscles, palpitations, aches, and pains surfaced. During the last three days’ practice, she could see the energy-packets trapped inside her body, which started fizzling out, as bubbles do after the cork of a soda water bottle is opened. 

As loops of electrical current induced within conductors, called eddy current, these ‘formations’ of life energy are called “सङ्खार” in Pali and “संस्कार” in Sanskrit. If not dispersed this energy turns in to various ailments and diseases. What is high blood pressure? How ulcers get formed? Inner layers of blood vessels get inflamed hindering flow of blood into heart, brain, and kidney. 

It is believed in the Eastern Schools that there is immortal permanent essence exists inside-out the body. It enters physicality at the time of fertilization of the mother’s egg cell with the father’s sperm cell. It witnesses every moment of life and leaves at the time of death, rendering all cells fit to be disposed of. The ‘formations’ of energy residues even move along in the new body as fragrance with the wind, in the reincarnation cycle. I saw Tanya free of this internal formation and therefore, radiating bliss. 

Vipassana is a Pali word (विपस्सना); in Sanskrit, it is known as विपश्यना. The prefix “vi-” means “special” and “passana” means “seeing.” It could be seeing “into” or seeing “through,” but essentially, seeing in a special way. And what is that special way? It is about direct perception – not intellectually derived from study, reasoning, or argument. The insight gained from Vipassana enables one to see, explore and discern “formations” trapped in the energy body. 

Teachers at the retreat told Tanya that there are five types of “formations”: material images or impressions, mostly memories about people and places; feelings, received from these people and at these places; our understanding as perceptions; mental activity or formations; and the common ground to support them as consciousness. There are as many as 51 mental factors, like coins we keep carrying in our purses to buy our fortunes in vain. 

Tanya explained with the enthusiasm of a teacher, “When I have a desire, when I plan, when I like or dislike something or somebody, I am hoarding consciousness in a “packet.” This hoarded consciousness lands in my body and grows. Just as a seed that germinates in the soil eventually becomes a tree, these “packets of consciousness” become my fate. With time, I experience sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress and despair, not even knowing why these are happening to me.”  

My own experiences with Vipassana date back to the mid-1980s. I was working in the Missile programme, doing extremely challenging work without any prior experience and with the foolhardiness of a novice that brings unexpected success, but also makes one commit costly mistakes, which experienced people could have avoided. All this stress resulted in my developing migraine. There was not a single week when my vision did not blur for a few minutes, followed by intense pain in one half of my head, culminating in massive vomiting. 

I consulted many doctors, took many medicines, including Ayurvedic nasal drops, but my suffering continued. And then, my friend, Ravi Kumar, who sat beside me on the bus, gave me a book by Fritz Perls on Gestalt Psychology, and I landed into the art of introspection from that route. A few weeks of practice, in short spells, cured me of the migraine headaches, and they never returned to trouble me since then. Later, in 2005, I went to Myanmar and met Prof Kyaw Myint, a Fellow of the three Royal Colleges of Physicians of Edinburgh, Glasgow, in Internal Medicine, and then Minister of Health of Myanmar. Besides being an eminent doctor, he is a practicing Buddhist. He initiated me into Vipassana, the science of introspection. 

Dr. Kyaw Myint told me that the Vipassana meditator, after practice, becomes aware of how sense impressions arise from the contact between the senses and the physical and mental phenomena. The key is to know the impermanence of things, called “अनिच्च” in Pali, or “अनित्य” in Sanskrit, and the irrefutable law of dependent origination at work, both fundamental ideas in Buddhism

Everything in human life; all objects, as well as all beings, wherever or whoever they are, are always changing, inconstant, undergoing birth and death. Rupert Gethin (b. 1957) at the University of Bristol puts it brilliantly, “As long as there is attachment to things that are unstable, unreliable, changing, and impermanent, there will be suffering.” Nothing lasts! This worldly existence is in a constant state of flux and change. 

This change can be seen as a series of cause and effect. Everything and every person (as A or B) is linked through a causal process. Curd is made from milk; it is different from but dependent on milk. When there is no milk, there is no curd.

The realization of this principle of dependent origination, called “प्रतीत्यसमुत्पाद” in Sanskrit, indeed clears one’s confusion – “When this is, that is. With the arising of this, that arises. When this is not, that is not. With the cessation of this, that ceases.” 

Putting it in simple terms, we store memories in our consciousness as names and forms. These memories can trigger feelings even after a lapse of many years. These feelings draw their energy from our likes and dislikes, like anodes and cathodes in a battery cell, through the electrolyser of our desires. So, with the practice of Vipassana, even if desires still exist, the attitude of equanimity prevents these desires from stirring up emotions. 

So, from that perspective, for ten days in the Vipassana retreat, Tanya was alone – all by herself: no phone, no contacts, no talking with the other participants around, and no activity. No bodily fabrications, verbal fabrications and mental fabrications were possible. The sense bases of her eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind (intellect) were turned inward like a laser beam. Like algae covering a stone can be scrubbed off, the wind of insight dispersed away the dark clouds; the “packets” trapped in her body were released. 

This cleansing, or emptying, helps one see things as they really are; it helps one to understand suffering as mind fabrications created by past impressions embedded in one’s body, and not created due to outside people, situations, and circumstances, as one would love to see them. Training and using one’s mind is a wonderful way to live. Even if pain is inevitable in life, suffering is optional.

One need not go to a retreat to disengage and can practice detaching from the world for brief spells while at home and work. Accepting life as it is, finding one’s way through it, rather than resisting and lamenting, is the secret to attain peace. As one rids one’s body from impressions of the past, one feels happy inside and a calm sense of tranquility envelops one, like a child experience in its mother’s loving arms. Indeed, one would be most unfortunate to ignore this simple tool available in life!

The lockdown period showed how much human activity has been polluting the environment. The air got cleared and rivers turned blue, something of a first time for the teenage generation. It was proved beyond doubt that with the fast pace of life, mankind, on a consumerism binge, is out to inflict injury upon itself. But as soon as life returned to normal, the pollution levels also returned, demonstrating an uncanny stubbornness.

But the good news is that the science and technology of sustainability are now mainstream and there is an understanding of the needs for water, clean air, food, mobility, and health besides energy which is intertwined with the environment. The return of hydrogen as fuel is one such development as the exhaust of hydrogen fuel is nothing but clean air and water. 

I vividly remember Prof AK Dhol candidly telling us in the class, at GB Pant University where I studied, that mechanical engineers are typically involved with the generation, distribution, and use of energy. The rest of their activities like, the processing of materials; the control and automation of manufacturing systems; the design and development of machines; and the solutions to environmental problems have evolved from this core function of handling energy.

During my missile days at the DRDO, although I worked in making air bottles and airframes, I watched closely my propulsion colleagues who made rocket motors – the solid propellants, the liquid propulsion engines and finally, the amazing technology of Ram Rockets. I developed camaraderie with propulsion scientists Dr Ramprasad Ramakrishna (RR) Panyam and Dr B Subhash Chandran at the apogee of my engineering career while working on the Akash missile system. 

I also watched from the periphery, the conceptual design of the hyperplane, a single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle in the late 1980s led by Air Commodore R Gopalaswami. It was to be a hydrogen fueled, horizontal take-off, fully reusable single-stage hypersonic vehicle. The project never really took off for the want of budget. Cryogenic GSLV (Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle) rocket engines developed by ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) use hydrogen.

At the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT), where Dr S Chandrasekhar, Director and J C Bose National Fellow, invited me to work as a Platinum Jubilee Mentor, I had the good fortune of meeting Prof CNR Rao, the third Bharat Ratna scientist after Dr CV Raman and Dr APJ Abdul Kalam and the “Hydrogen Man of India” as he is reverentially called.  

I was fascinated by the process of synthesizing hydrogen fuel through the artificial photosynthesis process, on which Rao has been working at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) in Bengaluru. Mankind can generate enough fuel from the atmospheric water vapour and sunlight to meet its transportation fuel requirements and industrial energy needs, he believes.

Prof CNR Rao has received the International Eni Award 2020, also called the Energy Frontier award, for research in renewable energy sources and energy storage. This award is considered to be the Nobel Prize in Energy Research. Italian President, Sergio Mattarella, gave him the award. Prof Rao laments, “Unfortunately, we in India have been used to working on problems that are somewhat repetitive. If we want to be at the cutting edge, we have to be innovators and originators.”

And then recently, I had an online meeting with Dan Bates who lives in Los Angeles and works in the Renewable Energy space. He discussed with me the idea of Aqua Hydrogen, which he placed between the blue hydrogen that is derived from fossil fuels and green hydrogen that is created by splitting water by electricity from a renewable source. He had the technology to create electricity from plastic waste and split water with it to get hydrogen. “Can we do a scale-up and ruggedization in India?” he asked. 

I discussed this with Dr Chandrasekhar and his team at the IICT and they envisaged a completely “closed-loop” to create electricity by pyrolysis of plastic waste, use a part of it for electrolysis of water to generate hydrogen, and use it in a hydrogen cell.  Hydrogen fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen. 

Hydrogen cells are the fanciest item of our times. They have already revolutionized drones, which were significantly limited by the power and range provided by traditional batteries. Recently, Microsoft made headlines for running one of their data center’s servers on nothing but hydrogen for two days. Nine of the major auto manufacturers are developing hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (HFCEVs) for personal cars.

So, we nodded, and Dan Bates flew to India without wasting any time. Dan had suffered a brain stroke earlier this year, which affected his right side and yet he travelled alone from the other side of the planet. This speaks of his indomitable spirit. The enthusiasm his visit generated amongst us was palpable.  We learnt from Dan Bates about #CleanSeas, a societal mission of The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), a global movement to tackle the excessive use of single-use plastics and get rid of dangerous microplastics in our toiletries and cosmetics.

Dan is CEO and President of Clean Vision Corporation, which is a holding company that acquires and operates sustainable clean technology and green energy businesses, and he would be starting with an investment of 100 million USD in setting up two integrated pyrolysis-electrolysis plants with plastic waste as feed and hydrogen fuel as output in India. 

Going by the assertion of the Chief of India’s biggest energy company, Reliance, by 2030, India will be producing hydrogen at a dollar for a kilogram that will beat Rs 1000/- worth of petrol. But this technology does not come neat and packaged. It must be nurtured, refined and perfected. From now to Hydrogen Fuel Cells will be a journey of a few years but India will be at par with the best in the world. 

May be not my generation, but the next ones would live in smog-free cities and see no plastics in their surroundings. I would be writing a book soon on the Hydrogen saga starting with a quote from British cosmologist and astrophysicist, Martin Rees, “All the atoms we are made of are forged from hydrogen in stars that died and exploded before our solar system formed. So, if you are romantic, you can say we are literally stardust. If you are less romantic, you can say we’re the nuclear waste from fuel that makes stars shine.” I believe, I am stardust! 

I am into the third year of my confinement to my home. My coronary arteries have dealt with all possible interventions – a bypass surgery in 2004, rotablation and stenting in 2017 and after another angiogram a year later, I am on optimal medical management of stable angina. In between, the lockdown spell came and everyone was confined to home for a while. But then, although things turned normal, for me, staying at home is the new normal.

Lately, I began reading literature classics and took up Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), the ultimate novelist who could write 1000-pages of a story, captivating readers in his world and making them emotionally involved with his imaginary characters. I am an avid reader and must have read all good novels in the last 20 years or so but the expanse of the stories in Tolstoy’s big books offered me solace in times of my physical discomfort and mental uncertainty.

Earlier this year (2021), I read three of Tolstoy’s tomes – Anna Karenina, War and Peace, and Resurrection – in that order. All three are filmed and I could watch them later, on OTT. All the films are beautifully made and yet, the written novels stand out for their feel and the spell they cast upon the readers in the silence and privacy of their reading. No actors, no photography, no music, no sets, just the writer and the reader and what magic is created, what an experience!

Anna Karenina is a complex novel in eight parts. There are about a dozen major characters living in the Imperial Russian society of the 18^th century and the rural versus urban life is a constant theme where the personal dramas unfold. The heroine, Anna Karenina, is the mother of an eight-year-old boy and the wife of a senior government official. When she falls in love with a Calvary officer, this creates turmoil in her family and she ends up committing suicide by jumping in front of a moving train on a railway platform. Tolstoy takes no sides. There are no justifications and no judgements. The novel continues one full chapter after Anna Karenina is gone and it is only in the last scene that you realize that the Calvary officer was the lynchpin of the tragedy. 

War and Peace is even bigger than Anna Karenina. It weaves the stories of five Russian aristocratic families during the time of Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Russia, covering the period from 1805 to 1820. The novel begins in July 1805 describing a party hosted by a socialite in Saint Petersburg and ends with a precursor of the part of the Decembrist Uprising that would happen later in 1825, following the sudden death of Emperor Alexander I. Through the character of Prince Nikolai who is present throughout the novel, Tolstoy presents the spirit of the Russian nation, something no history book can ever capture or communicate. I wish that someone would write about the Indian freedom struggle with this honesty and without painting people as good and bad but as they had been living through their times. 

But the final jolt I received came from Resurrection, the last novel of Tolstoy published in 1899. It is a straightforward story of Prince Dmitri Nekhlyudov, who wrongs a young girl out of momentary passion and goes away. Years later, the Prince finds her in the courtroom where he has been invited as a jury member and realizes that it was that one-night stand of his that has ruined the girl’s life and brought her to the punishment of a murder and he, the real culprit who spoiled her life is now an honorable jury. His awakening is described as the resurrection. Although he proposes to marry the lady now, she refuses, calling him a cheap man still out to justify his crime by becoming her savior. Honesty, I have not read anything that has such a powerful effect. I was dumbfounded by the way Tolstoy exposed human conscience – everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing oneself.

Tolstoy offered an unromantic view of religion and government as structures of controlling people. By the simple narrative in his novels, Tolstoy ridiculed the hollowness of religious rituals and showed governments as essentially violent forces controlling national resources for their own profits. He advocated a simplified economy, a lesser need for the exchange of goods, and as such, factories and cities, and showed cities as parasitic over villages, and politics as the engines of corruption.

But it is while examining human nature where Tolstoy turns peerless. Leo Tolstoy sensitively describes the feelings and emotions of the characters, making readers not only understand why they act as they do but also enabling them to identify with them and live their feelings in themselves and in others around them. Even the negative characters in Tolstoy’s novels have their own reasons for their acts. A die-hard humanist, Tolstoy had famously said, “There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes.”

It hurts when every evening, the TV channels paint a picture of the world on fire. Like in some video game, leaders have been divided into heroes and villains depending upon who owns the channel. It is all propaganda with no attempt to report the facts; forget about analyzing them to arrive at the truth. And why blame TV, which is unabashedly a commercial platform, where are the writers? Where is a book on Afghanistan? How come the great integration of the NE people with mainstream India has not captured any author’s imagination? Why are we in denial of the aspirations of a capitalist India? Tolstoy was not only writing about his times, he was sharing with his readers the timeless truth about human nature, society and governments. 

For me, reading Resurrection has been transformative. I am weary of seeing people as kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. They keep changing from time to time and according to the people they are surrounded by. I can be kind and cruel, wise and stupid, energetic or apathetic depending upon whom I am dealing with, at which point of time and station in my life. So, never call anyone kind or wise, or wicked or stupid. Each one is all. Ravana had ten heads, which could be seen and counted. Modern man has morphing heads – they keep changing from frame to frame. 

Tolstoy writes so beautifully, “Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.”

I was initiated to the idea of “science with a human face” by Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, who in 1992 set up a program to develop Civilian Spinoffs of Defence Technology and make me its “lynchpin.” Working on this initiative, I came in contact with some truly outstanding scientists whose work had created tremendous impact on the lives of ordinary people. The indigenous coronary stent created under this program ushered a new era of biomedical industry in India. Later, when Dr Kalam became the president of India in 2002, he used me as his ambassador to connect interdisciplinary people for the common good.

I met the legendary Dr Verghese Kurien and he later hosted me at and invited me to his house for tea. Dr Kurien had been a mechanical engineer like me but strayed to Dairy technology, creating Amul in the process. When I asked him for a mantra, he plainly told me, “If you want to work for ordinary people, live with them, and live like them.” His words, “Extraordinary people are those ordinary people who do extra work,” have remained my guiding light. When in 2012, Dr Kurien was struggling for his life, people suggested that he be shifted from a hospital in Nadiad town for better treatment to Mumbai. However, he flatly refused saying that he would like to die where he had worked since 1949 rather than away in Mumbai. 

Dr William Dar was the Director General, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), in Hyderabad, when Dr APJ Abdul Kalam visited the international organization, which conducts agricultural research for rural development. Later, Dr Dar and I became friends. He facilitated my visit to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Philippines. I wrote two books with him, an autobiographical “Feeding the Forgotten Poor” and the visionary, “Greening the Grey.” In 2014, Dr William Dar completed his record three terms at ICRISAT and left for his home country, the Philippines. He is currently the Secretary of Agriculture of the Philippines. 

I met at ICRISAT my seniors in GB Pant University, Dr SN Nigam and Dr KB Saxena. Both these scientists have given their lifetimes to improve their crops of interests – peanut and pigeon pea. Later, I met the rising star in plant genetics, Rajeev Varshney at ICRISAT, who has created reference genome sequence assemblies for 13 plant species. My other “comrades” are Vilas Tonapi, Director, Indian Institute of Millet Research; Dr Vinod Gaur, Chairman and Managing Director of National Seeds Corporation; and Dr Sanjay Kumar, Director, Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology, Goan Horticulturist Dr Sachin Tendulkar and Kenyan agronomist, Shem Odhiambo (in picture). Vinod and Sanjay were my juniors at GB Pant University. 

What exactly is meant by the human face of science? Dr Dar explained to me, that science that is aimed to better the living conditions of people, is what appealed to him. He also cautioned me that this science is not something separate from the mainstream science but is actually the real essence of it. All high-yield and disease-resistant varieties of seeds and plants, life-saving medicines, and livelihood-technologies are examples of the human face of science. It is an aspect that must be wilfully chosen and pursued by a scientist throughout his lifespan. There have been many chiefs of DRDO and other scientific organizations before and after Dr Kalam, but his passion for doing good for humanity stands out peerless.  

India has a great tradition of science and its unique system of Councils is most democratic, broad-based and participative. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR), and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) are like a tripod on which Indian science is placed. It does not matter what these organizations achieved and what they could not, but around them exists what makes India a modern nation in the world. But for this apparatus, there would be no Green Revolution then and no COVID-19 vaccine now. 

But the five billion poor people in the world are a grim reality. Why has science not responded to societal needs the way it could have? Why has it served more the rich and become the engine of their wealth? It is through owing science, that the world’s richest 1 per cent owns twice as much as the bottom 90 per cent. India’s richest 1 per cent of the population holds more than 40 per cent of the national wealth while the bottom 50 per cent, the majority of the population, owns a mere 3 per cent. So, where is the work of our scientific establishments going? Whose interests is it really serving? 

Public understanding and engagement with science is a hard task but it ought to be undertaken. It is a pity that Indian farmers are protesting against farm laws but not for high yield seeds. Currently, India produces about 110 million tonnes of rice a year from 44 million hectares of land at a rate of 2.4 tonnes per hectare. China grows 4.7 tonnes and Brazil, 3.6 tonnes per hectare. So, if yield is increased, land would be free to grow other crops that would bring more income and improve soil conditions.  

India needs an oilseed revolution. People have made enough money for a long time by importing cheap oils, mixing them and selling them as “branded oils,” with bogus claims about their nutritive value. India needs self-reliance in fertilizers. It is a shame that our fertilizer factory in Assam, where natural gas is available in plenty, is perennially down and urea is imported as if India is a technologically backward country incapable of running a urea production plant. India needs freedom from exports of essential medical consumables too. In the absence of this, our science remains selfish, captive of the enterprises, and used to generate profits rather than relieving the pain of the people. 

I am immensely enjoying watching the transformation of apple horticulture by tissue culture technology in India to the great economic benefit of the people of the northeast and we are now helping Rwanda to grow their own apples rather than importing them from South Africa. Kenya needs cashew farming on its seacoast to settle strife there and India can help in accomplishing this. And above all, the cattle-cloning technology mastered by National Dairy Research Institute, Karnal, can solve livestock production constraints in Africa, especially goat production.

Who is stopping all this? The groups of vested interests that either own science or control scientists. And who gave them this right? The apathy of the ordinary people towards living a better life, and their surrender to bogus ideologies, scoundrel leaders and fraudulent businesspeople. The essence of science is – to keep trying even without being sure, having the willingness to surrender to ideas when the evidence is against them, and always keeping an open mind about the way beyond. It is up to us, humans, to give science its human face, and not the other way round.