The history of science is replete with thousands of examples of the way modern or empirical science was opposed by well-entrenched forces in society at any given time. Some of the oldest cultures have also resisted scientific ideas based on their own interpretation of the physical world.
There have been innumerable debates and controversies about the power of scientific inventions and concepts since the Vedic times. At the Indian Science Congress held in Mumbai in 2015, there was a separate session on “ancient sciences through Sanskrit” that drew a lot of fire from rationalists and modern scientists. It was alleged that the session was organised just to please the new political dispensation in Delhi as the Prime Minister usually inaugurates the Science Congress every year. Many of the speakers on the Vedic sciences drew ridicule for not being able to provide any rational explanation of the phenomena they were trying to demonstrate. Subsequent Science Congresses have disbanded the ancient sciences session.
India was home to ancient universities or seats of higher learning of Nalanda and Takshashila that were either destroyed or decayed a long time ago. However, the government of India resurrected Nalanda, but the project is now mired in political infighting. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, the first head has resigned. No one really knows what goes on at this university.
In the early part of the Christian era, science was strongly opposed. In the middle ages, western Europe was in scientific darkness. The Roman empire had no interest in science, and after its fall there was scientific barrenness. However, later, the universities in England and other European countries emerged as leaders in scientific research. By early twentieth century, North American centres of science, engineering and technology developed at the speed of light; the rest of the world has been struggling to catch up with the West in science even to this day.
The ancient church was vehemently opposed to modern science and even persecuted scientists like Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Halley, Darwin, Hubble and Bertrand Russell. The church has also opposed modern social sciences by promoting and silently supporting slavery, anti-Semitism, witch hunts, sexual repression, censorship and the inquisition. The church has strongly promoted wars and capital punishment for even small misdemeanours. This kind of opposition to sciences in the church is called apologetics. Even today, fundamentalist Christians in the United States believe in the theory of special creation which states that Earth was created 7,000 years ago.
They completely disbelieve in evolution and support the theory of intelligent design. Many modern-day Quran-thumping Islamic preachers also do not believe in evolution and preach the same with all fervour in their speeches around the world. There are many extreme right-wing Republican congressmen who strive hard to cut funding to science agencies.
What has happened in the present era of scientific dissonance is the emergence of highly organised and orchestrated anti-science movements aided and abetted by modern information and communication technology and so much funding that these movements have become a multi-million-dollar protest industry. The role of non-governmental organisations and the so-called civic society organisations keep a selective anti-science movement boiling. Some of the science and technology they seek to ban or be kept under wraps are nuclear technology, modern biotechnology and vaccines. They fight against some modern sciences so vehemently that polarisation is on the rise and even reasonable people have started to doubt scientific reason.
One branch of science called eugenics, which deals with the study of human genetics, came to earn a really bad name for good reason at the hands of Hitler’s Nazis. The Nazi doctor Josef Mengele conducted experiments on human beings at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The eugenic movement started in California long before the Nazis adopted it as state policy with the intention of creating a race of superior people in Germany. The Rockefellers even funded the German eugenic movement. It is these kinds of misuse of science by wicked people that really heightened the anti-science movement in Europe, which is alive and kicking even to this day. The California eugenic movement died out, and today it is a state with some of the finest institutions for scientific research and development.
In Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece Dr Strangelove, Jack Ripper, an American general who orders a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, had his own paranoid worldview; he believed that fluoridation of water was a monstrous communist plot. Anti-fluoridation conspiracy theories are now stuff of comedy. Some Americans don’t like the idea of government adding chemicals to water, forgetting that water is also a chemical – dihydrogen monoxide. The scientific and medical consensus is that fluoride, a natural mineral, at low concentrations protects dental enamel, prevents tooth decay and promotes public dental health. But the citizens of Portland town have banned fluoridation of water in their community because they don’t believe the scientific consensus.
In today’s world, modern sciences like the safety of fluoridation, vaccines, climate change and GMOs are furiously opposed, much against the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Using their own sources of information, which is called parallel science, and the interpretations of their “scientific experts”, activists deny the mainstream expert scientific consensus. Doubting science has become pop culture. There is a whole bunch people who don’t believe that Apollo moon landing was real. A Hindu priest in Varanasi those days even said Americans don’t know our Chandrama, and they have landed somewhere else, calling it moon.
There are some farmers in Uttar Pradesh who believe that water supplied from hydro-electric dams is useless for agriculture as the dam has sucked all its power to create electricity and then sent down to them for use. Similarly, many NGOs started an aggressive anti-nuclear power movement in Kudankulam. That movement is not totally dead; it will raise its head again when other nuclear power plants are to be commissioned. A farmer leader, the late Professor Nanjundaswamy, used to say young girls working in the Bt cotton fields attain puberty much earlier than normal. Three NGOs in then Andhra Pradesh – ANTHRA, CSD, and DDS – started propagating a false story that hundreds and thousands of sheep died in the state for eating Bt cotton leaves, the only approved GM crop in India. None of these stories gained much currency in those years but did sufficient damage to stall further approvals of GM crops in India.
If these opponents of science and technology are not aware, they should know that science is what is running this world and it is all-pervasive. Even the opponents are beneficiaries of modern science and technology, but they militate to keep it away from the most deserving and the needy. They create non-existent and imaginary hazards and risks. The Ebola virus is known not to mutate to change its way of transmission in human beings, but a new type of “airborne Ebola” was created on the internet just to scare people. The irony is that opponents of science use information technology to attack biotechnology, both of which are cutting-edge technologies. Those who oppose GM crops for want of, in their view, sufficient scientific proof, wholeheartedly accept the scientific proof of global warming.
This duplicitousness of the opponents of science is what creates needless anxiety and fear in the minds of the public. Science is a series of methods to demonstrate natural reality by way of providing evidence that behaves according to the laws of nature. People have a challenging time understanding this methodology, and therefore get swayed easily by mischief makers. Whenever science goes up against human feelings and emotions, science always loses.
That’s how it has become difficult to convince people of science even though they all benefit from it in their day-to-day lives. Scientific truths are not self-evident, but they have been deduced from experimentation and critical observation which calls for people to exercise their brains. That’s where people give up and take the easy route and fall prey to the machinations of the anti-activists. People sub-consciously cling on to their intuitions. Even educated people have reservations about science.
A bunch of masters degree students in the Fergusson College in Pune, when asked if they eat DNA when they have their food, were unable to answer with any confidence. When such is the plight of students of modern biology and biotechnology, it is no surprise that anti-science activists exploit this kind of weakness to press their case. That’s how public opinion is created. These anti-science activists have done such a terrific job of creating doubt about science that even politicians have fallen for it all over the developing world. It is these ill-informed politicians who come in the way of making regulatory policies that affect the implementation of modern technologies. Unfortunately, scientists have done precious little to influence the minds of the same politicians. The result is that many progressive technologies are in a limbo.
In a scientifically advanced country like the United States, some of the far-right politicians of the Republican Party don’t want to fund research on embryonic stem cells and studies in reproductive biology and many of them don’t believe in global warming, and they sit on committees that decide funding for such researches. Indian parliamentarians during the previous regime also produced a scientifically retarded report on GM crops, heavily influenced by the virulent anti-GMO NGO Greenpeace, and submitted it to parliament and not one member of the committee had any inkling of the science or technology. The net result is, for the past seven years, approvals of GM crops have been completely suspended.
In addition to anti-science activists, some industries are also involved in peddling their faulty technology just to sell and make money. The well-known example is the more than 60-year-old stand that tobacco is harmless. The tobacco industry was lying for too long. Such blatant misrepresentations by the industry also erodes confidence in science and technology. The fossil fuel industry is also campaigning against climate change and that does not help the case of good science.
The news media also plays a key role by giving space and time, in the name of objectivity or neutrality, to mavericks, naysayers, soothsayers, professional demagogues and table thumpers.
Scientific enterprise has its own faults in its so-called peer review system. Many faulty and incorrect scientific results fall through the cracks of the peer review system. However, there is no better alternative to this system that by and large catches faulty science up to 95 to 98 per cent. In fact, if one were to critically examine the progress of science in the last 200 years, the peer review system has done a commendable job of advancing credible scientific progress, the benefits of which we all enjoy today.
The boring truth is, scientific progress, most of the time, takes place incrementally, which is why according to a Pew poll, only 40 per cent of Americans accept that global warming is due to human activity. A third of Americans believe humans have existed in their present form since time began. These are members of the anti-evolution league.
The polarisation on science is such that there does not seem to be any kind of middle ground because both groups live in their echo chambers, reinforcing their own beliefs. But the scientific facts are that GMOs are safe, climate is warming, vaccines prevent unwanted deaths. The scientific enterprise also causes confusion in the minds of people by publishing faulty papers like vaccines are linked to autism and GM crops cause terrible cancers, both of which were published the British medical journal Lancet. The vaccines and autism study was retracted by the journal and the report has been definitively debunked by scientists, but some of the most influential people in America are spearheading the anti-vaccine movement, and have even gone to the extent of bombing laboratories and issuing death threats to vaccine scientists who had to be provided protection.
In case of the safety of GM crops, Lancet published the paper by Seralini et al that had been debunked by the mainstream scientific community after it was published in a journal of toxicology and then retracted by it. Thus, even editors of scientific journals sometimes try to please the anti-science crowd in the name of objectivity. A scientific journal in biological sciences, then published by the prestigious Indian Institute of Science, injected itself into the great Indian GM debate and invited both proponents and opponents to write articles to make their case. Scientists did not respond to the call, but the anti-scientist-in-chief did, and the result was that his scientific nonsense prevailed just because it got published in the journal without any peer review.
The editor escaped his responsibility by saying that scientists had an opportunity to rebut and they chose not to. But, why would a journal publish something on GM crops, an issue that is hotly debated, without the benefit of sound peer review? It is due to this kind of naïve attitude to please all that scientists themselves do disservice to science.
The last word is about science teaching that starts in schools. It is taught as a set of facts and not as a set of constantly evolving methods of reasoning. Unless schools and colleges inculcate the scientific spirit, the chances of the public learning about science looks dim. Science is progressing rapidly and technological advances are breathtaking, so the challenge of communicating science becomes even more onerous and daunting.
The scientific community must train a new generation of communicators who are trained properly in science, but also know how to resonate with the public. Until such change happens, scientists will have to contend with the anti-science lobby and fight them as vigorously as possible on all fronts.
Recent Posts
Petrol in India is cheaper than in countries like Hong Kong, Germany and the UK but costlier than in China, Brazil, Japan, the US, Russia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, a Bank of Baroda Economics Research report showed.
Rising fuel prices in India have led to considerable debate on which government, state or central, should be lowering their taxes to keep prices under control.
The rise in fuel prices is mainly due to the global price of crude oil (raw material for making petrol and diesel) going up. Further, a stronger dollar has added to the cost of crude oil.
Amongst comparable countries (per capita wise), prices in India are higher than those in Vietnam, Kenya, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela. Countries that are major oil producers have much lower prices.
In the report, the Philippines has a comparable petrol price but has a per capita income higher than India by over 50 per cent.
Countries which have a lower per capita income like Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Venezuela have much lower prices of petrol and hence are impacted less than India.
“Therefore there is still a strong case for the government to consider lowering the taxes on fuel to protect the interest of the people,” the report argued.
India is the world’s third-biggest oil consuming and importing nation. It imports 85 per cent of its oil needs and so prices retail fuel at import parity rates.
With the global surge in energy prices, the cost of producing petrol, diesel and other petroleum products also went up for oil companies in India.
They raised petrol and diesel prices by Rs 10 a litre in just over a fortnight beginning March 22 but hit a pause button soon after as the move faced criticism and the opposition parties asked the government to cut taxes instead.
India imports most of its oil from a group of countries called the ‘OPEC +’ (i.e, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Russia, etc), which produces 40% of the world’s crude oil.
As they have the power to dictate fuel supply and prices, their decision of limiting the global supply reduces supply in India, thus raising prices
The government charges about 167% tax (excise) on petrol and 129% on diesel as compared to US (20%), UK (62%), Italy and Germany (65%).
The abominable excise duty is 2/3rd of the cost, and the base price, dealer commission and freight form the rest.
Here is an approximate break-up (in Rs):
a)Base Price | 39 |
b)Freight | 0.34 |
c) Price Charged to Dealers = (a+b) | 39.34 |
d) Excise Duty | 40.17 |
e) Dealer Commission | 4.68 |
f) VAT | 25.35 |
g) Retail Selling Price | 109.54 |
Looked closely, much of the cost of petrol and diesel is due to higher tax rate by govt, specifically excise duty.
So the question is why government is not reducing the prices ?
India, being a developing country, it does require gigantic amount of funding for its infrastructure projects as well as welfare schemes.
However, we as a society is yet to be tax-compliant. Many people evade the direct tax and that’s the reason why govt’s hands are tied. Govt. needs the money to fund various programs and at the same time it is not generating enough revenue from direct taxes.
That’s the reason why, govt is bumping up its revenue through higher indirect taxes such as GST or excise duty as in the case of petrol and diesel.
Direct taxes are progressive as it taxes according to an individuals’ income however indirect tax such as excise duty or GST are regressive in the sense that the poorest of the poor and richest of the rich have to pay the same amount.
Does not matter, if you are an auto-driver or owner of a Mercedes, end of the day both pay the same price for petrol/diesel-that’s why it is regressive in nature.
But unlike direct tax where tax evasion is rampant, indirect tax can not be evaded due to their very nature and as long as huge no of Indians keep evading direct taxes, indirect tax such as excise duty will be difficult for the govt to reduce, because it may reduce the revenue and hamper may programs of the govt.
Globally, around 80% of wastewater flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused, according to the United Nations.
This can pose a significant environmental and health threat.
In the absence of cost-effective, sustainable, disruptive water management solutions, about 70% of sewage is discharged untreated into India’s water bodies.
A staggering 21% of diseases are caused by contaminated water in India, according to the World Bank, and one in five children die before their fifth birthday because of poor sanitation and hygiene conditions, according to Startup India.
As we confront these public health challenges emerging out of environmental concerns, expanding the scope of public health/environmental engineering science becomes pivotal.
For India to achieve its sustainable development goals of clean water and sanitation and to address the growing demands for water consumption and preservation of both surface water bodies and groundwater resources, it is essential to find and implement innovative ways of treating wastewater.
It is in this context why the specialised cadre of public health engineers, also known as sanitation engineers or environmental engineers, is best suited to provide the growing urban and rural water supply and to manage solid waste and wastewater.
Traditionally, engineering and public health have been understood as different fields.
Currently in India, civil engineering incorporates a course or two on environmental engineering for students to learn about wastewater management as a part of their pre-service and in-service training.
Most often, civil engineers do not have adequate skills to address public health problems. And public health professionals do not have adequate engineering skills.
India aims to supply 55 litres of water per person per day by 2024 under its Jal Jeevan Mission to install functional household tap connections.
The goal of reaching every rural household with functional tap water can be achieved in a sustainable and resilient manner only if the cadre of public health engineers is expanded and strengthened.
In India, public health engineering is executed by the Public Works Department or by health officials.
This differs from international trends. To manage a wastewater treatment plant in Europe, for example, a candidate must specialise in wastewater engineering.
Furthermore, public health engineering should be developed as an interdisciplinary field. Engineers can significantly contribute to public health in defining what is possible, identifying limitations, and shaping workable solutions with a problem-solving approach.
Similarly, public health professionals can contribute to engineering through well-researched understanding of health issues, measured risks and how course correction can be initiated.
Once both meet, a public health engineer can identify a health risk, work on developing concrete solutions such as new health and safety practices or specialised equipment, in order to correct the safety concern..
There is no doubt that the majority of diseases are water-related, transmitted through consumption of contaminated water, vectors breeding in stagnated water, or lack of adequate quantity of good quality water for proper personal hygiene.
Diseases cannot be contained unless we provide good quality and adequate quantity of water. Most of the world’s diseases can be prevented by considering this.
Training our young minds towards creating sustainable water management systems would be the first step.
Currently, institutions like the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) are considering initiating public health engineering as a separate discipline.
To leverage this opportunity even further, India needs to scale up in the same direction.
Consider this hypothetical situation: Rajalakshmi, from a remote Karnataka village spots a business opportunity.
She knows that flowers, discarded in the thousands by temples can be handcrafted into incense sticks.
She wants to find a market for the product and hopefully, employ some people to help her. Soon enough though, she discovers that starting a business is a herculean task for a person like her.
There is a laborious process of rules and regulations to go through, bribes to pay on the way and no actual means to transport her product to its market.
After making her first batch of agarbathis and taking it to Bengaluru by bus, she decides the venture is not easy and gives up.
On the flipside of this is a young entrepreneur in Bengaluru. Let’s call him Deepak. He wants to start an internet-based business selling sustainably made agarbathis.
He has no trouble getting investors and to mobilise supply chains. His paperwork is over in a matter of days and his business is set up quickly and ready to grow.
Never mind that the business is built on aggregation of small sellers who will not see half the profit .
Is this scenario really all that hypothetical or emblematic of how we think about entrepreneurship in India?
Between our national obsession with unicorns on one side and glorifying the person running a pakora stall for survival as an example of viable entrepreneurship on the other, is the middle ground in entrepreneurship—a space that should have seen millions of thriving small and medium businesses, but remains so sparsely occupied that you could almost miss it.
If we are to achieve meaningful economic growth in our country, we need to incorporate, in our national conversation on entrepreneurship, ways of addressing the missing middle.
Spread out across India’s small towns and cities, this is a class of entrepreneurs that have been hit by a triple wave over the last five years, buffeted first by the inadvertent fallout of demonetization, being unprepared for GST, and then by the endless pain of the covid-19 pandemic.
As we finally appear to be reaching some level of normality, now is the opportune time to identify the kind of industries that make up this layer, the opportunities they should be afforded, and the best ways to scale up their functioning in the shortest time frame.
But, why pay so much attention to these industries when we should be celebrating, as we do, our booming startup space?
It is indeed true that India has the third largest number of unicorns in the world now, adding 42 in 2021 alone. Braving all the disruptions of the pandemic, it was a year in which Indian startups raised $24.1 billion in equity investments, according to a NASSCOM-Zinnov report last year.
However, this is a story of lopsided growth.
The cities of Bengaluru, Delhi/NCR, and Mumbai together claim three-fourths of these startup deals while emerging hubs like Ahmedabad, Coimbatore, and Jaipur account for the rest.
This leap in the startup space has created 6.6 lakh direct jobs and a few million indirect jobs. Is that good enough for a country that sends 12 million fresh graduates to its workforce every year?
It doesn’t even make a dent on arguably our biggest unemployment in recent history—in April 2020 when the country shutdown to battle covid-19.
Technology-intensive start-ups are constrained in their ability to create jobs—and hybrid work models and artificial intelligence (AI) have further accelerated unemployment.
What we need to focus on, therefore, is the labour-intensive micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME). Here, we begin to get to a definitional notion of what we called the mundane middle and the problems it currently faces.
India has an estimated 63 million enterprises. But, out of 100 companies, 95 are micro enterprises—employing less than five people, four are small to medium and barely one is large.
The questions to ask are: why are Indian MSMEs failing to grow from micro to small and medium and then be spurred on to make the leap into large companies?
At the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), we have advocated for a National Mission for Mass Entrepreneurship, the need for which is more pronounced now than ever before.
Whenever India has worked to achieve a significant economic milestone in a limited span of time, it has worked best in mission mode. Think of the Green Revolution or Operation Flood.
From across various states, there are enough examples of approaches that work to catalyse mass entrepreneurship.
The introduction of entrepreneurship mindset curriculum (EMC) in schools through alliance mode of working by a number of agencies has shown significant improvement in academic and life outcomes.
Through creative teaching methods, students are encouraged to inculcate 21st century skills like creativity, problem solving, critical thinking and leadership which are not only foundational for entrepreneurship but essential to thrive in our complex world.
Udhyam Learning Foundation has been involved with the Government of Delhi since 2018 to help young people across over 1,000 schools to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.
One pilot programme introduced the concept of ‘seed money’ and saw 41 students turn their ideas into profit-making ventures. Other programmes teach qualities like grit and resourcefulness.
If you think these are isolated examples, consider some larger data trends.
The Observer Research Foundation and The World Economic Forum released the Young India and Work: A Survey of Youth Aspirations in 2018.
When asked which type of work arrangement they prefer, 49% of the youth surveyed said they prefer a job in the public sector.
However, 38% selected self-employment as an entrepreneur as their ideal type of job. The spirit of entrepreneurship is latent and waiting to be unleashed.
The same can be said for building networks of successful women entrepreneurs—so crucial when the participation of women in the Indian economy has declined to an abysmal 20%.
The majority of India’s 63 million firms are informal —fewer than 20% are registered for GST.
Research shows that companies that start out as formal enterprises become two-three times more productive than a similar informal business.
So why do firms prefer to be informal? In most cases, it’s because of the sheer cost and difficulty of complying with the different regulations.
We have academia and non-profits working as ecosystem enablers providing insights and evidence-based models for growth. We have large private corporations and philanthropic and funding agencies ready to invest.
It should be in the scope of a National Mass Entrepreneurship Mission to bring all of them together to work in mission mode so that the gap between thought leadership and action can finally be bridged.