Former Prime Minister of India - Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee

PRIME MINISTER SHRI ATAL BIHARI VAJPAYEE INAUGURATES 88TH SESSION OF INDIAN SCIENCE CONGRESS

The following is the text of the speech of the Prime Minister, Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee at the inauguration of the 88th Session of Indian Science Congress here today:

“It gives me great pleasure to participate in this important annual event of Indian science and be in the midst of a distinguished assembly of scientists. I convey my best wishes to all of you for the New Year that has just begun.

Of the many forces that will shape human history in the new millennium, science and technology will perhaps be the most potent. We know how science and technology have changed the complexion of the world in the last couple of centuries of the last millennium. But this is just the beginning of a long and exciting voyage. All the discoveries of science and all the inventions of technology so far amount to the arrival of just a couple of stars in a sky of countless stars that are yet to appear.

How true was Newton when he confessed, in spite of all his epochal discoveries, that he felt like a boy on the seashore who found just a pebble or a shell, whilst the great ocean of knowledge lay all undiscovered before him.

The sky of science belongs to the entire mankind. No part of it can be a monopoly of any single nation. That is how it should be. If science has the power to benefit man, then that power should be accessible to men all over the world. Nevertheless, every nation on this planet – and certainly a big and ancient nation like ours – is required to ask itself: “How many stars in the sky of science have we caused to appear? How much have we contributed to the advance of scientific knowledge and to the betterment of life? And what plans have we drawn up for its progress in the future?”

Today we pay our tributes to all the visionaries of the past century who built a strong edifice of science and technology in India. We should pledge to not only strengthen the institutional base that they have created, but also to further expand it to make India a front-ranking scientific power in the new century.

Since the theme of your session is “Food, Nutrition & Environmental Security”, I cannot but remember with deepest gratitude and admiration the name of my friend, Bharat Ratna C. Subrahmaniam, who passed away recently. He, along with Dr. M.S. Swaminathan – who is in our midst today -- was the principal architect of the Green Revolution, which ensured India's self-reliance in food production. Subrahmaniam retained his interest in new developments in science and technology until the very end of his long life and used to regularly give me useful suggestions. India needs many more such top-class administrators with a multi-dimensional vision.

The theme of your session this year is most appropriate for it simultaneously impacts on many of India's critical developmental priorities. I compliment our hard-working kisans for steadily increasing the country’s food production. Today we are facing a shortage not of food, but of facilities to store food. If India was able to withstand economic sanctions following Pokharan–II, a major part of the credit must go to our talented scientists, including our agriculture scientists.

Having achieved food sufficiency, our aim now is to achieve food security for all our citizens. The percentage of our population living below the poverty line has come down, and we have overcome starvation. Our objective now is to overcome malnutrition. The new century will be the Century of Knowledge and the Century of Mind. However, if the brain does not develop properly in nearly one-third of our children who are undernourished, how will we be able to create those young minds that are essential to build India of our dreams in the 21st century? More than 50 percent of the pregnant women and children are anaemic. Vitamin and protein deficiencies are rampant. These realities overshadow our achievements and burden our national conscience.

At another level, the increases in food production that we have achieved in the past 3-4 decades have come at a cost to the agricultural environment. There has been both qualitative and quantitative degradation of land, water, and bio-resources. I have seen fertile lands that have become uncultivable due to waterlogging and salinization. I have seen areas where yields have come down because of wrong cropping pattern and faulty usage of fertilisers. I have also seen how excessive pumping of water has caused such acute depletion of water table that even drinking water has become scarce.

Environmental security is, therefore, no longer peripheral to the issues of food and nutritional security. Neglecting it yesterday has proved costly today; and could prove far costlier tomorrow. We must, therefore, step up our programmes on soil and water management, renewable energy sources, forest management, containment of chemicals and other pollutants, waste management, and conservation of bio-diversity for sustainability of Indian agriculture.

I urge the participating scientists to come up with comprehensive and useful recommendations to deal effectively with all the issues relating to food, nutrition, and environmental security. Accomplishing this task requires massive efforts in many areas that range from increasing crop yields to improving rural infrastructure; preventing huge wastage and losses that now characterise our food economy.

The government has taken some steps in this direction. The ambitious national rural roads project, which aims at providing all-weather road connectivity to over one lakh unconnected villages in the country in the next seven years, is one of them. Another recent initiative in food security is the Antyodaya Anna Yojana, under which wheat and rice will be provided at Rs. 2 and Rs. 3 per kg respectively to one crore poorest of the poor families.

The Government has unveiled a National Storage Policy under which private sector investment is encouraged for the construction of modern silos at 20 locations to take care of buffer stocks. We shall soon initiate steps to restructure the Food Corporation of India in order to reduce costs and introduce greater efficiencies in the procurement, storage, and distribution of foodgrains. I recognise, however, that many more steps are necessary to resolve the long-neglected problems at all points in the food chain. Towards this end, the Government has recently set up a high-level inter-ministerial Group on the Food Economy to unlock its huge potential to create employment, generate wealth at the grassroots and boost our agricultural exports. The group, which is headed by the Finance Minister, will consult experts from various fields.

The task of ensuring food, nutrition, and environmental security in a vast country like India is gigantic. And not all solutions to the problem lie in science technology, although your contribution will certainly be invaluable. What is needed is a collective and coordinated action among all those who are associated with our agriculture and the rest of the food economy. We know that Mother Nature yields the best crop only when all the necessary conditions are properly fulfilled. Similarly, kisans and rural credit institutions, Agriculture Universities and Krishi Vigyan Kendras, meteorological offices and marketing cooperatives – all have to work in perfect concert for us to achieve best results in the task before us.

In this endeavour, we will have to fully mobilise the vast pool of our people’s traditional wisdom and knowledge, just as we have to employ new frontiers of scientific knowledge such as information technology, bio-technology, space science, nuclear science and genetic engineering. We should not be afraid to experiment with bold ideas. Green Revolution, for example, would not have been successful if our scientists had yielded to the resistance they faced. We are now entering the era of what is called “precision agriculture”, which is knowledge-intensive and uses the latest that science has to offer. India should take the lead in this.

We also have to close the vast distance that still separates the scientist from the kisan. Despite some commendable efforts of the Indian Council of Agriculture Research, “Lab to Land” has still largely remained a nice-sounding slogan. I think that it needs to be supplemented with the reverse initiative of “Land to Lab”.

For instance, I often wonder why there are so few facilities even for our most progressive farmers, who otherwise might have very little exposure to the formal educational system, to improve their theoretical and practical knowledge. If business executives and professionals can have short-term retraining courses specially designed for them, why not for our knowledge-hungry farmers? Lack of formalised agricultural education to practising farmers is, in my view, the weakest link in our farm strategy. There seems to be a well-entrenched misconception that a farmer needs no formal education in farm management. We must rectify this lacuna urgently to enrich the human resource in Indian agriculture.

Distinguished Scientists, let me now turn to some other critical issues before Indian science. During the last Science Congress Session in Pune, I had pledged that the Government would hike investments in R&D from the present level to 2% of GDP over the next five years. We have taken some specific steps in this direction, and many more will follow. The Finance Minister has earmarked Rs.50 crores for the India Millennium Missions to be executed by Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC) and an additional Rs.50 crores for the New Millennium Technology Leadership Initiatives by CSIR. The message of these initiatives is clear and simple: India should be ahead of, and not lag behind, other nations in at least some areas of technology in the 21st century.

The challenges and opportunities of global competition in the emerging Knowledge Economy have placed a major task before the nation. It is the creation of a vast army of top-class professionals in science and technology, especially in information technology and bio-technology, to meet the demands of both the domestic and international markets. However, the ever-increasing demand for the Indian software professionals in India and abroad, along with the opening up of new career opportunities, has resulted in a lack of enthusiasm among young students for higher studies in science and careers in scientific research. Such a trend, if not arrested at this stage, may result in serious shortages of good quality teachers and research scientists.

To bridge this gap between demand and supply, the Government is seriously considering setting up a National Mission for Technology Education. It will aim to ramp up, on a crash basis, the facilities at IITs, RECs and other premier science and engineering colleges. It will also seek to bridge the gap between academia and industry on the one hand, and between teaching and research institutions on the other. To realise these objectives, we will take necessary measures to radically reform the governance structures of our higher education institutions and encourage the flow of philanthropic funds from alumni and the Indian Diaspora abroad.

In this context, I would like to make a special mention of the proposal by a group of highly successful Indian IT entrepreneurs in the United States to set up Global Institutes of Science and Technology. The Government will actively facilitate this and other such initiatives.

Removing the controls of bureaucrats is one of the pressing reforms needed to improve the governance structure of our research and higher education institutions. For Indian science to flourish, the administration and government officials should serve as facilitators of science and not as masters of scientists. I have said this before, but I feel it bears reiteration.

We need bold and unconventional initiatives also to seize the big new opportunities arising on the horizon. One of them is the information generated by the Human Genome Project in the open domain. It is now available to Indian scientists. Once the ‘base’ is established, it is the knowledge of ‘variation’ over the base that matters. India's vast human genetic diversity provides that knowledge, like no other country does. India already has a superb IT manpower and also people trained in biosciences. Thus, ‘bioinformatics’ is the next wave in which India should be in the vanguard. India caught up with the ‘Silicon Valley’ phenomenon rather late. Can we not create the new ‘Genomic Valleys’ of the twenty-first century?

I understand that these initiatives need huge investments, which cannot come from the traditional budgetary route alone. But the funding needs of Indian science can be adequately met by promoting an innovative public-private partnership. I am happy to note that the physical and intellectual infrastructure developed by the government at long last is being tapped by the Indian private sector to take a global lead. Indian businesses are beginning to respond to the opportunities in knowledge industry, rather than being oblivious to global S&T developments as in the past.

Distinguished Scientists, our goal to make India a leading scientific nation in the world in the new century hinges critically on how successfully we take science to the people and create a stronger scientific temper in our society. I appreciatively recall that last year’s session at Pune turned out to not just ‘Science Congress’ but a ‘People’s Science Congress’. The ‘Children’s Science Congress’, which was held simultaneously, was also a novel initiative. I am happy that this initiative has been taken forward by mobilising kisans in large numbers in this Session of the Indian Science Congress. I am sure that this trend will be further strengthened in the future.

With these words, I am happy to announce the formal inauguration of the 88th Session of the Indian Science Congress.

Thank you.