A forum for pseudo-science

The Science Congress has lost its way. There is a strong case for abolishing it altogether

The Science Congress is an expensive annual tamasha funded by the Government of India. Since it is in the name of science, it escapes close scrutiny. The high point of every Congress is the inaugural session presided over by the prime minister. Duty bound, the bigwigs of government also attend but leave as soon as the chief guest does.

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A large number of research papers are read at the Congress, most of them sub-standard. Even if a small fraction of them were capable of being enlarged into a full-fledged peer-reviewed research publication, India would be a major player in the field of modern science. Higher-ranking institutions, as a rule, hold the Science Congress in contempt and dissuade their researchers from attending.

Things were not always so. India was the first country outside the Western world to take to modern science; the world’s first non-White modern scientists are Indian. In the early years, Indian science was fairly competitive and the Science Congress was set up a century ago as a community forum on the lines of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The memoir of an American delegate for the January 1947 Congress, noted botanist Albert Blakeslee, provided some insights into where Indian science stood on the eve of Independence.

He noted that Indian participants were well informed on the latest developments in their field and asked searching questions. Very perceptively, he recorded that a person’s official position was considered more important than the work he was doing. Not surprisingly, young researchers felt that “pull” played a role in selecting candidates for foreign scholarships. But at least rigorous scientific training was seen as essential for the new generation of scientists.

As world science dramatically grew after World War II, India started lagging behind. In recent decades, as our desire to service the Western economy has increased, respect and support for science have gone down. It is important to do good science, but it is more important not to do bad science. Mediocre and low-level research feels emboldened when the government makes official forums available for its dissemination. As any gardener knows, removing weeds is a prerequisite for growing flowers.

In the past couple of years, an extremely disturbing trend has set in. The Science Congress is increasingly being used as a forum to propound and propagate absurd notions about sacred ancient Indian literature. When the trend has been set by the prime minister, science minister and chief ministers, lesser people can only compete among themselves to see who can stoop lower. At this Congress and elsewhere, the birth of a hundred sons and a solitary daughter of Gandhari have been presented as proof of the prevalence of stem cell research. The Mahabharata talks of a piece of iron as the foetus and the employment of water and ghee as the means of splitting it. Surely, modern research requires more complex materials than that.

Irresponsible utterances at hitherto respected forums not only insult modern science but ancient Indian authors and poets as well. When a crackpot declares from a government-supported modern scientific forum that Newton’s and Einstein’s theories are wrong, India becomes an object of international derision.

Regular Indian modern science is not sufficiently productive and fast-paced to be able to provide new results every 12 months. A strong case exists for abolishing the Science Congress altogether, especially when discipline-specific learned bodies are in existence. If the Science Congress is to be continued for old times’ sake, it should not be held annually but every three or four years.

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Globalisation has provided India with a pretext to abdicate its responsibility in the vital area of education. For some reason not made public, and a departure from general practice, the task of organising this year’s Science Congress was entrusted to a private university in Punjab. The sole aim of private universities is to make money; this they can do only by offering professional courses. This year’s host has a school for fashion design but none for basic sciences. Hosting an event inaugurated by the PM and attended by Nobel laureates will enhance the host university’s profile and further encourage students to move away from basic sciences.

The nation must develop collective wisdom and realise that in the present age, science is the only instrument for ensuring economic growth, improving quality of life, and bringing about social change. Cultivation of science demands respect for its methodology and strict avoidance of pseudo-science.

The shallowness of the Science Congress culture can be seen from the fact that the entire country goes gaga over the presence of a handful of Western Nobel laureates who come as part of a diplomatic exercise. It may not be out of place to recall an incident from 20 years ago (to which I was privy). The Science Congress president told the Chinese ambassador, with obvious pride, that as many as six Nobel laureates would be attending the forthcoming event. The ambassador turned his head towards the Indian scientist, and said in an even tone: Do you have that many Nobel laureates in your country? This was his way of saying: Produce your own Nobel laureates; do not exult as an event manager.

The inauguration of this year’s Science Congress has coincided with the successful landing of a Chinese robotic rover on the dark side of the moon that had never been seen before. The rover is named Chang’e, after the Moon goddess of Chinese mythology. This is China’s way of linking its ancient heritage with its present-day prowess. The highlight of the Science Congress has been a paper read by a university vice-chancellor ridiculously claiming that various types of aircraft were known in the Ramayana.

Source: Indian Express, 14/01/2019

Transform Your Mind

It is the pursuit of happiness which prevents happiness from happening and, until this realisation happens, the pursuits must go on. What is seeking happiness is Consciousness. Impersonal consciousness had identified itself with a particular body-minded organism (form) and a name as a separate entity; and it is this trapped, unidentified consciousness which is seeking its personality. When the ego, the practical seeker of everything in life, takes over the search for happiness, pleasure is mistaken for happiness in the flow of life... The few egos that focus on real happiness become spiritual seekers, for they realise that what they are seeking is not to be found in the flow of life, but in their attitude. The Greek word metanoesis implies changing the mind, but means transformation of mind. Transformation happens. The Sanskrit word for it is paravritti, meaning turning around at the deepest level of the heart-mind. Paravritti tells the seeker-ego that happiness is not something to be pursued and achieved. It is one’s natural state. We’re instructed from childhood that life means competition with the other, and happiness means success over the other, in the classroom as well as playing fields. The other is seen as a potential enemy. Ultimately, happiness means not something in the flow of life, it is the attitude to life — paravritti or metanoesis. And the most important point about it is that there is no “doing” in it. It is a pure happening.

Source: Economic Times, 14/01/2019

If knowledge is power, language should be no bar

India is experiencing a schism between mythology and Science. This schism has its moorings in the fact that most scientific knowledge is unable to percolate among the non-English-speaking populace of the country. If we seek a knowledge revolution, speedy and large-scale translations may be in order.

The progress achieved over the last few decades in India is marked by a series of revolutions. The green revolution, for example, achieved self-sufficiency in food; the white revolution accomplished a similar victory in milk production. We may envisage the advent of yet another revolution that will provide the foundation on which any other future revolution in India would occur. We may describe it as the revolution of knowledge or, poetically, an Exultation of Light.

Although there has been a lot of talk by visionaries like Shri Sam Pitroda and late Shri Abdul Kalam, Indian society is plagued by a severe starvation in terms of knowledge. Knowledge always begs the question of a medium, a receptacle, a language in which that knowledge is captured. There is an ocean of knowledge in English and other world languages. But the fact that only a very tiny portion of it percolates into Indian languages leads to a kind of mental malnutrition, a grim fact of which our societies do not seem to have yet fully grown conscious.

A few revealing statistics are in order. If we accept Wikipedia as a standard repository of knowledge, the number of articles in Indian languages relative to those in English and other dominant world languages is quite disappointing. The number of Wiki articles in English, Swedish, German, and Chinese (in millions) are, respectively, 5.7, 3.7, 2.2 and 1. Corresponding figures (in millions) for some of the highest-scoring Indian languages are: Hindi (0.1), Urdu (0.14), Tamil (0.12), Telugu (0.07) and Bengali (0.06). Similar comparisons may be drawn between the largest of Indian libraries and the best libraries in the world. The largest library in the world, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, has 162 million holdings. The second position is occupied by the British Library in London with 150 million holdings. By contrast, the largest library in India, the National Library of Kolkata has only 2.2 million books while the Anna Centenary library has just 1.2 million. It is noteworthy that in both these measures (Wiki articles and libraries) the figures corresponding to the dominant languages of the world and Indian languages differ by about two orders of magnitude. It appears that Indian society does not particularly fancy knowledge; it wishes to live in a void where knowledge is uninvited.

It is not difficult to see that a society that lives in a vacuum of knowledge sits in a precarious position, with uncultivated inner potential, unrealised outward opportunity. Nowhere is the deficiency starker than in matters of our history. The average common Indian seems to believe that India had a glorious and resplendent past, as per the picture painted in our epics. The ultimate objective of any social progression is then a regression back to that past glory — a perfect Ramarajya. It is shocking to note that the lay Indian scarcely distinguishes between mythology and history. Not many understand that Ramarajya was a mythical concept, it did not exist in the historical timeline, like the pyramids or the dinosaurs. In popular Indian imagination, demons and demi-gods, god-kings and gnomes, yakshas and yatis all mingle freely, transcending all boundaries of space and time. There is a need to ameliorate this situation by infusing massive amounts of material, from both mythology and history, into Indian-language literatures.

Why should our knowledge of mythology be confined to our own epics, itihaasas, and myths, the 18 puranas? Our children would do well to familiarise themselves with Greek, Roman, Norse, Celtic, Arabic, Persian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, North and Central-American mythologies too. In the domain of history, it would be a splendid project for the community of Indian historians to create an extensive body of literature pertaining to world history in every Indian language. It could be a voluminous, prodigious and an encyclopedic work, running into about ten thousand pages, aggregating all of known human history. It must be written, however, in an easy language, keeping the lay Indian reader in mind. Access to such a scholarly body of literature will give a strong fillip to every one of our creative endeavors — films, TV, novels, poetry, music, dance and drama. It will have a positive influence on our polity, may inspire deep social reforms, or suggest more effective forms of governance. Such a profound historical awareness will equip our societies to defend themselves against the malicious influence of bigots and zealots and cultural fanatics, who mislead whole generations through vigorous propaganda buttressed only by backward scholarship. It will give our society a more objective perspective of our past, of our place among the world cultures, and, most importantly, of the secure and glorious future that we are collectively trying to envision and co-create.

Another area that benefits from a massive infusion of knowledge is the domain of Science. Science in India is generally considered the special preoccupation and prerogative of “science students” and “scientists”. Scientific research is an esoteric affair confined to the ivory-tower walls of our universities, these “temples” of learning (an anachronism that prescribes a religious attitude even in areas that require perfect objectivity). The future of humanity, at least as envisioned by futurists like Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Michio Kaku, and others, is a world that is shaped and upheld by a scientific outlook. We are living in an era that sees a progressive encroachment of Science in areas that were off limits for science in the past. A scientific, empirical approach is being attempted today even towards seemingly intractable questions like the nature of Consciousness and God. Therefore, Science must be permitted to step off its hallowed altars of educational institutions and walk among the commoners. Science must be shaped as a tool for individual growth and handed out to the common man. Vast tracts of untested or obsolete belief systems permeate the Indian mind today. The next generation of Indians would ideally grow on strong traditions of scientific empiricism, reconfirming, to the extent possible, data that is inherited from the past, and allowing all that does not stand the test to slip quietly into oblivion. A massive effort must be undertaken to create comprehensive, easy-to-understand, scientific literature in all Indian languages.

Freshly creating such a great body of literature, in so many languages, in a meaningfully short social and historical duration, would be nothing less than a miracle. It is only pragmatic, therefore, to depend on translated writings to achieve such an end. Translation work is sometime looked down upon in India. But in history there have been large translation missions that have had a tremendous regenerative influence on the societies that supported them. A remarkable example was the Toledo experience. In the ancient Spanish city of Toledo, a massive translation work was undertaken with royal support stretching over the 12th and 13th Centuries. It was initiated by Archbishop Raymond in the 12th Century, and saw its consummation under the reign of King Alphonso X. The translation was initially done from Arabic sources to Latin, but in later to the native language of Spanish. Such large-scale translation movements in Europe were thought to be the redeeming power that dragged medieval Europe out of the dark ages, ushering in the scientific and cultural Renaissance. On similar lines, massive translation efforts must be undertaken in every single one of the Indian languages.

There must be a government policy by which all the public university faculty must contribute in a variety of meaningful ways to rural education in India (such initiatives have been taken up, albeit in slightly tyrannical form, in the Maoist regime, as a part of the Chinese Cultural Revolution). They can visit government schools, for example, and give lectures. The aim of these lectures, delivered in lucid and native language, is not merely to help the village kids in test-taking, but to inspire them and expose them to the most impactful ideas of the modern world. Or they can write books, or train and motivate government-school teachers. It must not be a million disconnected efforts. All that must be done as a part of a grand, solid, coherent, and well-thought-through framework.

In the latter part of his life, the former President of India, Abdul Kalam, often spoke of a mission called PURA — Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas. The aim of this mission was to bring high-quality urban facilities to the villages. This is a laudable goal but will have to face the challenge of funds. I propose an intermediate step that can greatly facilitate the realisation of the aims of PURA. One may call this mission Providing Urban Knowledge Amenities to Rural Areas (PUKARA). Move the knowledge that makes the urban world tick, knowledge that is behind urban wealth and urban energy, to the rural world. Make that knowledge available in local language literature in village libraries, teach it in village schools. Access to modern knowledge in native tongues will greatly empower rural India. (At IIT Madras, with funding from the Institute, a group of us have undertaken a modest project that publishes popular science books in Indian languages, and send them freely to rural schools and NGOs engaged in educational activities. Currently, the work is confined to Tamil and Telugu, due to constraints in access to human and financial resources. But we hope to expand to other Indian languages over the years.)

The section that we condescendingly call the “masses” must be empowered through knowledge, which must be abundant, affordable and accessible in local languages. Once people learn, they can uplift themselves by creative, inspired self-effort. Right now in India most of the visible progress — all the ‘shaking’ and the ‘moving’ — is driven by the English-speaking section, or at least the section that is influenced by the knowledge available in English. English puts you in contact with the great progressive movements of the world. All that movement is driven by knowledge of a very specialised kind, which is present in English and other world languages. If such knowledge is also ported to Indian languages on a massive scale, we can anticipate the Second Wave of growth in India, similar to the First Wave that occurred with the birth of the IT industry in the ‘80s. When that happens, the groundswell of creativity and energy that will be unleashed in our country will probably be unprecedented in human history.

Source: The Hindu, 4/01/2019

A solution in search of a problem

Instead of addressing inequality, the 10% quota for economically weaker sections creates huge anxieties

If the number of demands for implementing reforms is any guide, India’s reservation system is clearly in disarray. However, it is unlikely that the recently passed Constitution (124th Amendment) Bill, 2019, creating a 10% quota for the economically weaker sections (EWS), will serve as anything more than a band-aid.

Given the deep inequalities prevalent in access to education and jobs based on caste and socio-economic status, affirmative action (or positive discrimination) makes a lot of sense. However, the system that was put in place during the early years of the Republic deserves serious re-evaluation in an era when technology has paved the way for deploying a better equipped arsenal. Here I present an evaluation of the potential implications of the EWS quota Bill, followed by some alternatives.

Excluding no one

The Bill promises 10% reservation to individuals classified as economically backward. However, while a number of criteria were discussed in the parliamentary debate, the Bill is quite silent on this. Assuming that among the criteria discussed in Parliament, those that are currently applied to the definition of the Other Backward Classes (OBC) creamy layer are the ones to be used, it is not clear how useful they would be. While the OBC creamy layer has been created to exclude people who are clearly well off, the EWS quota, in contrast, is expected to focus on the poor. One of the criteria — the income threshold of Rs. 8 lakh per annum — has been mentioned. The National Sample Survey (NSS) of 2011-12 shows that the annual per capita expenditure for 99% of households falls under this threshold, even when we take inflation into account. Similarly, as per the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), the annual household incomes of 98% of households are less than Rs. 8 lakh. Even if we apply all the other criteria for exclusion (e.g. amount of land owned and size of home), the Bill would still cover over 95% of the households. So, who are we excluding? Almost no one.

While the benefits of the EWS quota are likely to be minimal, the cost may be higher than one anticipates. First, it is important to remember that general category jobs are open to everyone, including Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST) and OBC individuals. Thus, by removing 10% jobs from the “open” category, it reduces the opportunities for currently reserved groups. Hence, this is by no means a win-win situation. This may be particularly problematic for OBCs since OBC reservation is limited to 27% of the seats whereas the OBC population is at least 40% of the population, possibly more. Thus, this move is almost certain to result in calls for greater OBC reservation, particularly if a constitutional amendment to increase the proportion of reserved seats from 50% to 60% is already being adopted.

Getting caste certificates

Second, actual implementation of the EWS quota could be challenging. Few non-SC/ST/OBC individuals have a caste certificate. A large number of SC/ST/OBC households report difficulties in obtaining these certificates. How would an individual practically lay claim to this status?

Third, in an era when skill demands are rapidly outpacing supply of candidates in specialised fields, the EWS quota increases the constraints. If a university advertises for an associate professor for quantum physics under the EWS quota and the only suitable candidate happens to be from an OBC category, she could not be hired. These challenges occur for all positions under specifically reserved categories and we have chosen to live with these difficulties in the interest of the greater good of equity. However, there is little benefit to be derived from the EWS quota.

Redesigning reservations

Arguably, the greatest cost of this amendment lies in the foregone opportunity to develop an enhanced and more effective reservation policy so that we can genuinely see an end to the entrenched inequalities in Indian society in the medium term. We have gotten so used to business as usual that we make no effort to sharpen our focus and look for more effective solutions, solutions that would make reservations redundant in 50 years.

If we were to redesign from scratch, what would an effective affirmative action policy look like? If the goal is to help as many people as possible, we are facing a serious challenge. On the one hand, 50% reservation looks very large; in the grand scheme of India’s population it is a blunt and at times ineffective instrument.

The following statistics from the Union Public Service Commission provide a sobering view of ground realities. In 2014, only 0.14% applicants to the UPSC were selected. Moreover, the general category and OBCs have the highest success rate, about 0.17%, and SCs have the lowest, about 0.08%. This may be because of the perception that it is easier for SCs to be recruited via the reserved quota and this may have led to a large number of SCs taking the civil services examination. One might say that many of these candidates are not qualified for these jobs. However, if we look at the candidates who made it past the preliminary examination (providing preliminary quality assurance), the picture is equally grim. Only about 8% of the candidates who took the main examination succeeded. Here the success rate is 8.2-8.3% for SC and ST candidates, 9.9% for OBCs and 7.8% for the general category. This suggests that in spite of the grievances of upper castes, reserved category applicants are not hugely advantaged.

The above statistics tell us that in spite of reservations, a vast proportion of reserved category applicants do not find a place via the UPSC examination. I suspect statistics from other fields may tell a similar story. This implies that if we expect reservations to cure the ills of Indian society, we may have a long wait.

Spread the benefits

Hence, we must think about alternative strategies. One strategy may be to try and spread the benefits of reservations as widely as possible within the existing framework and ensure that individuals use their reserved category status only once in their lifetime. This would require that anyone using reservations to obtain a benefit such as college admission must register his/her Aadhaar number and she would be ineligible to use reservations for another benefit (e.g. a job) in the future. This would require no changes to the basic framework but spread the benefits more broadly within the reserved category allowing a larger number of families to seek upward mobility.

A second strategy might be to recognise that future economic growth in India is going to come from the private sector and entrepreneurship. In order to ensure that all Indians, regardless of caste, class and religion, are able to partake in economic growth, we must focus on basic skills. We have focused on admission to prestigious colleges and government jobs, but little attention is directed to social inequality in the quality of elementary schooling. The IHDS shows that among children aged 8-11, 68% of the forward caste children can read at Class 1 level while the proportion is far lower for OBCs (56%), SCs (45%) and STs (40%). This suggests that we need to focus on reducing inequalities where they first emerge, within primary schools.

The challenge we face is that our mindset is so driven by the reservation system that was developed in a different era that we have not had the time or the inclination to think about its success or to examine possible modifications. The tragedy of the EWC quota is that it detracts from this out-of-the-box thinking!

Sonalde Desai is Professor at the University of Maryland and Professor and Centre Director at the NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre. Views are personal

Source: The Hindu, 11/01/2019

Government must iron out flaws in RTI Act, not manipulate loopholes

The one area where the BJP government has failed to imitate the UPA government is in its commitment to uphold democracy by supporting people-centric initiatives.

The words of Sir Francis Bacon — “Knowledge is power” — aptly bring out the essence of the Right to Information Act (RTI). Knowledge, gained through access to correct information, has the ability to upturn the power dynamic: It places a person at a formidable position to fight for their rights and enables them to ask vital questions.

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The introduction of this Act into the country’s approach to governance has revolutionised the democratic landscape of India. It has strengthened the principles of democracy, which in Abraham Lincoln’s words is “of the people, by the people and for the people”, by facilitating people’s participation in governance. Empowerment of the people by enabling the demand of information from government authorities lifted the veil of secrecy from government functioning — which helped in keeping a check on arbitrary decision making by public institutions. Contrary to popular belief, the RTI was not just limited to the urban elites; it gave voice to the poor sections of the society by providing them with a tool of information to hold the government accountable. This was confirmed by a nation-wide assessment held by PricewaterhouseCoopers, which stated that out of two million RTI applications filed between 2005 and 2009, a total of 4,00,000 were from rural areas.

Even though the Supreme Court in S P Gupta vs President Of India And Ors (1982) held the right to information as a fundamental right, India struggled to have a national law on it for the next 20 years. The National Campaign for People’s Right to Information’s (NCPRI) RTI Bill was delayed multiple times by the then NDA government. In 2002, under pressure from the SC, the government introduced a weakened and toothless Freedom to Information Act in the Parliament. Despite being passed by the Parliament and receiving Presidential assent, the act was never notified by the NDA government.

When the UPA government, led by the Congress, took office in 2004, the struggle of the right to information movement finally bore fruit — the Right to Information Act was enacted in 2005. The Act remains the strongest legislation made by any government across the world in the context of transparency and access to information. It was possible with active engagement between civil society organisations, NCPRI, National Advisory Council and the government.

Alongside the enactment of the RTI, the Second Administration Reforms Commission, which I headed, was set up by the then Union government to reform the public administrative system. On analyses of the Act, the commission concluded that right to information formed the foundation of good governance, as transparency is one of its core elements. It was realised that the strengthening of the RTI would be a step towards transforming the covert public administrative system into a “public-centric” administrative system. Therefore, the commission recommended various measures to toughen the Act and make procedures to access information people-friendly. These ranged from the repealing of the Official Secret Act, introducing an oath of transparency to use of multi-media campaigns in local languages for awareness and opening up the working of parliamentary standing committees for public access.

In October 2018, the RTI completed 13 years of its inception. For the last few years, it has faced constant onslaught by the current regime. The latest Global Right to Information Rating has ranked India at the sixth position, a rank lower than last year. While under the UPA government, India positioned itself at second place, under the BJP-led government the ranking has successively dropped. Such a drop is further contextualised with the findings of a study conducted by the Satark Nagrik Sangathan and Centre for Equity Studies. It revealed that Central Information Commission took an average of 319 days to hear and give an order on an appeal from the date it was filed before the commission, with the maximum number of days taken by the CIC reaching to 862 days. The callous attitude of Information Commissioners (ICs) reflects in the fact that an average of 56 per cent of orders recorded violations of Section 20 of the RTI, based on which penalties should have been imposed. But a penalty was imposed in only 4 per cent of the cases.

The inactivity of the government in strengthening the RTI has led to only seven ICs working at present of which, along with the Chief Information Commissioner, fours ICs are to retire by the end of this year — reducing the strength of CIC to just three, against the mandated strength of 11. To further its motive to break the structure of transparency and accountability, it has attempted to weaken the RTI through an amendment, which gives the power to decide the tenure and salary of the ICs to the central government; thereby, directly influencing the independence of the CIC. A fresh attempt to indirectly amend the RTI has also been made through the Personal Data Protection Bill that makes the wordings of Section 8(j) of the RTI vague, not specifying the extent of harm or differentiation between personal information and personal data.

The regular protests by the civil society against the lethargy of the current government in effectively protecting the people’s right to information reflects the severity of the problem, especially against the backdrop of recent interference by the BJP-led government in the autonomous institutions of our country.

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The one area where the BJP government has failed to imitate the UPA government is in its commitment to uphold democracy by supporting people-centric initiatives. A democratic government’s duty is to ensure the trust of its citizens emboldens with every step it takes. However, the recent efforts of the present regime go against this fundamental principle. Giving up its anti-people decisions, it must ensure that it fills the loopholes in the RTI Act rather than digging for more of them.

Source: Indian Express, 11/01/2019

There is an inherent gender bias in India’s scientific community

More than affirmative action, however, what women need is equal opportunity and wage parity to thrive in the classrooms, laboratories and workplaces.

Never one to shy away from straight talking, textile minister Smriti Irani severely dampened the self-congratulatory mood at the Indian Science Congress by calling out the inherent gender bias in the scientific community that is denying opportunities and jobs to women. Addressing scientists, who work in fields that value rationality, objectivity and meritocracy, Ms Irani used data to put the spotlight on the deeply entrenched gender bias in research and the workspace that pushed women to the margins. Of the 280,000 scientists and engineers employed in research and development institutions across India, only 39,200 (14%) are women. A high number of women face irrational gender based prejudice at work. Four out of every five women working in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) sectors in India say they face pervasive gender bias that affects hiring, performance evaluation, promotion, salary and perks. This discrimination also denies women funding opportunities and leadership positions, driving them away from careers in science.

While the Department of Science & Technology’s Women Scientist Scheme under the KIRAN division offers funding and opportunities to women who took a career break to help them return to mainstream science — including the agriculture and allied sciences; health, food and nutrition; and engineering and technology sectors — the gender gap in employment will narrow only when STEM professions offer a level playing field for all genders. Over the past two decades, the number of women opting to study STEM subjects that offer the best paid jobs has steadily reduced across the world, with the disparity in wages in favour of men persisting. In the US, 50 million women working full time in 2017 had median weekly earnings of $770, compared to 63 million men with median weekly earnings of $941. Women working in computing and engineering occupations earned $1,235, compared to $1,552 form men, according to US Department of Labour data.

If admission to the 23 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) is an indication in India, the number of women studying STEM courses has registered a steady drop, which led the government to take affirmative action and add 946 supernumerary seats exclusively for women in the 2019 academic session, up from 779 in 2018. With these women-only seats at IITs going up from 14% in 2018 to 17% in 2019, women IITians may cross 2,000 for the first time this year. More than affirmative action, however, what women need is equal opportunity and wage parity to thrive in the classrooms, laboratories and workplaces.

Source: Hindustan Times, 11/01/2019