Science and tech focus helps India shine, propels nation toward 2047

India’s journey from 1947 to today is a remarkable story with twists, turns, surprises and a bit of horror. In just two generations, the nation’s face has changed from an impoverished nation to a developing one. 

When India got Independence, it was one of the poorest countries in the world. Just about 12 out of 100 knew how to read and write. The life expectancy at birth was a  paltry 32 years. Nearly 260 newborns out of every 1,000 live births died, and about 2,000 of 1,00,000 pregnant mothers died during childbirth.

Today, infant mortality is just 39 per 1,000 live births, maternal mortality is 103 for every 1,00,000 live births, and the life expectancy is nearly 70 years. Despite many shortcomings, we have achieved self-sufficiency in food and better healthcare for more than a billion people.

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Confidently, Indians are engaged in global academics, basic science research, IT, pharma industry, space research and other sectors. From being the home of diseases and pandemics, India is now exporting life-saving vaccines and drugs at an affordable cost to more than 100 developing and poor nations, earning the name ‘pharmacy of the third world’. 

From being a country that imported food grains to feed the population, we have emerged as one of the top five economies in the world. The remarkable transformation was possible thanks to the application of science and technology in building the nation.

Science & tech to the fore

The remarkable turnaround would not have been possible but for the investment in science and technology, education and health the nascent nation made 75 years ago. 

The anti-colonial struggle in many nations went awry. Reacting to the colonial claims of cultural superiority, the leadership in these countries took the path of revivalism. They eschewed modern science as ‘western’ and took refuge in obscurantists’ traditions’. Keeping the obscurantists at bay, the visionaries who shaped the Indian freedom struggle, Bhagat Singh, BR Ambedkar, Jawaharlal Nehru and others, were forward-looking. They yearned not for a revival of the past but a resurgent new India.

“I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible,” wrote Mahatma Gandhi firmly in Young India, June 1, 1921.

The dream of a new India was imbued with social, economic and political justice; liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; and equality of status and opportunity. Support for the growth of science and nurturing scientific temper was part of this ethos.

Homegrown pharma industry

Take the case of the pharma industry. During colonial rule, at best, packaging of the imported drug formulations was undertaken in India, which kept the cost of drugs too high for people to afford. With foresight, Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray, a noted chemist and freedom fighter, started Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works in 1901.

The strong foundation for chemical engineering laid by the early leaders of modern Indian science enabled India to march forward. Once India became Independent, with the available human power, the government started Hindustan Antibiotics Ltd. Central Drug Research Institute, Lucknow, Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, Hyderabad, National Chemical Laboratory, Pune and the Regional Research Laboratory in Jammu and Jorhat nourished the research environment.

The ecosystem developed the capacity of chemical engineers in India. When a suitable policy climate was created, in the form of the Indian Patent Act, 1970, Indian scientists could reverse-engineer the generic drugs. Using this knowledge and know-how, Indian pharma companies emerged strong. 

By the 1990s, self-sufficiency in essential medicines was achieved. In this scenario, essential drugs could be provided at a fraction of the original cost.

Looking ahead

Looking back with nostalgia is gratifying but makes us self-satisfied. However, looking forward leads us to progress. The future is not out there, but we shape it by our acts and omissions. The science and technology projects embarked on today are what will take us to the future.

Here are five significant big science and technology endeavours we are embarking upon.

Artificial Sun

The fusion that powers the Sun and the stars is a potentially safe, green energy source. India, along with China, the European Union, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States, is engaged in an ambitious project to build a thermonuclear reactor called Tokamak, mimicking the fusion processes at the core of the Sun.

When two isotopes of hydrogen, namely deuterium (with one neutron and proton in the nucleus) and tritium (with two neutrons and a proton in the nucleus), combine or fuse, it turns into a helium atom. The combined mass of the deuterium and tritium is a bit more than the mass of helium. The missing mass turns into energy, in line with the famous e=mc2 formula.

Physical conditions comparable to the Sun’s core, with enormous pressure and extremely high heat, will be created inside Tokamak’s thermonuclear reactor. Under the insistent pressure and scalding heat, the positively charged deuterium and tritium will be able to overcome the electrostatic repulsion and fuse together.

The construction of the 500 MW demonstration reactor, delayed due to the COVID pandemic, has commenced at Saint Paul-lez-Durance, southern France. The reactor machine and plant assembly are underway. The heart of the reactor is ITER Tokamak, a device that looks like a vada with a hole at the centre.

Weighing 23,000 tonne, the complex machine has 1 million components and an estimated 10 million individual parts. Each participating nation is designing, developing, and building a few of the components. The parts will be brought to France and assembled to make the whole machine. The entire assembly of the reactor and the complex is expected to be completed by 2035.

The first major installation in assembling the Tokamak is fitting the 1,250-tonne cryostat base conducted in May 2020. Several segments of the cryostat, 30 m tall and 30 m wide, the world’s largest ultra-high vacuum vessel made from stainless steel, were machined in India. The parts were taken to the construction site and assembled at ITER. An in-wall shielding system with 8,000 blocks consisting of 72,000 plates made from borated steel, steel alloyed with a small amount of boron is also India’s responsibility. India will also design, develop and manufacture cryogenic, ion-cyclotron heating, electron cyclotron, and diagnostic neutral beam systems for the ITER project.

The cost of the construction, technology and intellectual property arising from the project will be shared by all the member states. Although each member nation develops and manufactures only a subset of the components, all will gain the entire know-how because of technology sharing.

India built its first experimental fusion reactor ADITYA way back in the 1980s. Now, a more advanced Steady State Superconducting Tokamak (SST-1) provides the space for Indian scientists and engineers to train on an actual fusion reactor. Both these experimental fusion reactors are housed in the Institute for Plasma Research (IPR), Gujarat.

Learning from the international collaboration and understanding the physics and technologies will help the Indian team to build our own fusion reactors in the future.

Gravitational wave detector

Until Albert Einstein, physicists thought events occurred in space at some time. Space and time were distinct. All that changed with the general theory of relativity. Einstein showed that three dimensions of space and one of time go together to make up the unvisualisable four dimensions of space-time fabric.

You create waves in the air surrounding you when you move your hand. These are nothing but sound waves. When a charge oscillates, it creates vibrations in the electromagnetic field, radiating as electromagnetic waves. Light, x-ray, radio, and microwave are all different aspects of this electromagnetic wave spectrum.

Rowing a boat on a still lake creates ripples on the water’s surface. Likewise, moving massive objects must undulate the space-time fabric, which would travel as gravitational waves.

Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1915. Still, the first detection was done only in February 2016, about a 100 years later. The gravitational detectors called Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) are currently present at Kagura, Japan, GEO 600 in Germany, Virgo in Italy, LIGO Hanford and the LIGO Livingston in the USA.

An advanced gravitational-wave observatory is underway in India as part of the worldwide network of observatories. A suitable location in Maharashtra has been identified to locate the Indian LIGO (IndiGO)

Collisions of massive cosmic objects, such as black holes, and neutron stars, result in gravitational waves that are loud enough to be detected even millions of light years away. These observations would provide a unique opportunity to test the limits of the general theory of relativity and help discover much deeper physics.

Climate resilient crops

Global warming is real, and the effects are all around us. From 280 parts per million (ppm) during the pre-industrial 1750s, the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased to nearly 415 ppm.

As a result of the increasing carbon and other global warming gases in the atmosphere, the global average temperature has risen by +1 degree compared to the 1750s. It is set to increase to +1.5 degrees by the 2040s. The global temperature can grow to 2 degrees if unchecked, causing havoc and massive disruption.

Climate change will also affect agricultural crops and their yield. For example, high temperatures critically affect the crucial stage of rice crops. Rice and wheat are a type of grass.

Typically, flowers bloom in about 120 days; subsequently, the grains fatten and mature in about a month. High temperature during the opening of the flower bud critically affects the grain filling; that is, the grain accumulates dry mass and becomes fatter. In other words, high temperature during the flower opening could affect the ultimate yield of the plant.

Climate change is raising the global temperature. The varieties used today may not be resilient enough as the global temperature increases and climate change. One needs to look out for germplasm resources with heat-tolerance traits. Early mornings are often a bit cooler, so those plants having the attribute of early morning flowering can endure climate change.

Various factors such as pollen fertility, pollen shedding percentage, stigma receptivity, and spikelet fertility are sensitive to heat. Identifying the right combination of traits and developing a new variety is imperative.

Various institutions in India, from the Indian Institute of Soil Science, Bhopal, to the Indian Institute of Rice Research, Hyderabad, simulate futuristic scenarios with high temperatures, higher atmospheric carbon concentration, etc.

In artificial chambers, they create the conditions that would prevail when the atmospheric carbon elevates and grow various varieties to see which have good heat tolerance. Then they study what provides those varieties’ ability to withstand heat stress. Growing multiple varieties of rice and wheat in these scenarios to identify suitable germplasm resources for developing climate-resilient breeding.

Futuristic transportation

Nearly one-fifth of the global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions come from the transportation sector. India is the 4th largest vehicle market in the world. The current automobile market is dominated by fossil fuel-based vehicles that endanger the environment. Driverless cars to IoT and artificial intelligence-enabled technologies are set to radically transform the transport industry. But the pursuit of cleaner energy and greener, low-carbon energy fuels will lead to imminent change.

India is giving a big push, and the government has set a target that the share of electric vehicles must be not less than 30% by 2030. Electric mobility and hydrogen-powered vehicles are seen as the way to reduce the transportation sector’s carbon emissions.

One of the vital technologies hindering the rapid spread of EVs is batteries. Most batteries developed in Europe and the US fail in Indian conditions. The ambient temperature affects the performance of an EV battery in terms of its lifetime and performance. The efficiency is better only in the temperature range of 15-40 degrees Celsius. This does not suit Indian climatic conditions. In Uttarakhand and Meghalaya, the temperature is cold, and in Rajasthan and Kerala, it is hot.

Further, factors like road conditions in India and how we use the vehicles on our roads affect the performance. The battery technology developed in Europe and US does not make allowance for these. The rare bursting of the batteries to unreliable performance and early dying results from the technology are results of such batteries not being suited to Indian conditions.

Developing cutting-edge battery technology suited to Indian conditions, batteries with higher energy densities that can give a long-range, faster charging, and reduced battery degradation from charging is imperative for EVs to take root.

Dr N Kalaiselvi, recently appointed as the Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), is known for her work in lithium-ion batteries and, in particular, for developing several electrodes for the batteries. She was also part of the team that developed the Technical Report on the National Mission for Electric Mobility (NMEM). With her at the helm of the affairs, attention will be focused on solving the problems of deploying EVs.

Supercomputers

An Intel Core i7 processor can do 158 billion calculations per second. But the Cray Titan supercomputer can do a whooping 2,70,00,000 billion calculations per second. In other words, what takes 48 hours to render by the Intel Core i7, the Cray Titan will do in just a second.

That’s supercomputer 101.

Imagine an old laptop with insufficient RAM. You move the mouse, but it takes ages before the cursor moves on the screen. But in a faster computer with enhanced RAM, the screen reflects the action in a jiffy. The more computing power, the quicker it can process and render the data.

You and I use the computers to send an email, browse social media, online market or watch a movie, all of which can be done with a Core i7. But weather scientists have to process millions of data points to compute the emerging weather conditions. Climate scientists must process data from centuries collected from various parts of the world to model the Earth’s climate. A bioinformatics researcher has to sieve through billions of permutations and combinations to identify the genes associated with a molecular process.

China, the US, Japan, and Germany are the leaders in supercomputer technology. As the same technology can be used to simulate an atom bomb or decrypt enemy codes, the supercomputing technology is classified as ‘dual use’. That is, it can be used for peaceful civilian purposes like weather prediction and also for defence purposes. Hence, no country will share the technology or sell a high-performing supercomputer.

If we want it, we have to make it ourselves.

Out of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, hardly 2-3 are in India. The National Supercomputing Mission envisages empowering our national academic and R&D institutions by installing nearly 70 high-performance computing facilities, including at NIT-Trichy. The mission will also train around a thousand technical experts who can design, build, operate and use the facility. So far, 10 supercomputers have been installed, and five more are in the final stages of commissioning.

During the first phase, supercomputers were assembled from off-the-shelf products. During the second phase, specific critical components are manufactured in the country. The third phase supercomputer will be designed by India and will be fabricated.

Way forward

Four critical factors will determine if the progress in science and technology will be rapid or dwindle and die.

One, diversity in the Indian research community is still lacking. The participation of women in science is far from satisfactory. Enrolment of marginalised communities and people from remote regions is abysmally low. The fruits of science and technology development will not flow evenly if diverse segments are not part of it.

Without adequate participation, public appreciation for science will go down. This would challenge and adversely affect the science and technology sector’s support from the political system now.

Second, the climate for critical thinking. An intellectual environment that guarantees freedom of conciseness, dissent, and questioning the received wisdom and tradition is necessary for science and technology to flourish. Be it the court of Chandragupta in the times of Aryabhatta or Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate with scholars like Al-Khwarizmi, debates and dissent were welcome.

The third is human resources. According to a recent science indicator for one million inhabitants, there were just 253 people engaged in R&D activities in India. We are way below compared to South Korea 7,980, Singapore 6,803, Japan 5,331, Malaysia 2,379, UAE 2,379, Iran 1,475, China 1,307, Vietnam 708, and Qatar 577. Even Pakistan, with 336, fares better. The dream of a knowledge society is not feasible with such a low number of people involved in R&D.

Fourth is financial resources. India allocates just 0.69 per cent of GDP towards science and technology. This was around 0.6 during the 1990s and increased to around 0.8% in 2010. Since then, the allocations have been seeing a downward trend. Of course, the GDP now is much better than in the 1990s; in absolute terms, the quantum of S&T investments has increased. China spends 2.05% of its GDP, and the result is visible and evident. While China invests $269.2 per head in S&T, South Korea spends $1,484.7, Germany $1,383.8, Brazil $194.4, South Africa $91.3 and India supports a paltry $38.9 dollars. This budget includes ISRO’s ambitious Ganganyan for climate-resilient agriculture research.

(The writer is a scientist with Vigyan Prasar, Dept of Science and Technology, New Delhi)