Bengaluru, (Agencies): Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Thursday, called on scientists and innovators of the country to widen their horizons, as he assured them that the Government was completely with them.

“Your capability is vast, you can do many things to widen your horizons, change the parameters of your performance ... fly spreading wings .. there are opportunities. I am with you”, he said, as he dedicated the five Young Scientist Laboratories of the Deference Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) to the nation and expressed confidence that the lab would give wings to thoughts and actions of young scientists. ...

 

THE statement and the event of dedication of the five Young Scientists Labs of DRDO to the nation mark the high end of the national scientific spectrum in which the country’s highest leaderships in Government and science have opened their arms to embrace whatever new is forthcoming from the arena of young researchers, offering a gladdening feel to the people.

 

However, at the other end of the spectrum is certain debilitating darkness with all the ugly propensities to drag the nation down. It is to this dangerous portent that the nation must pay attention, failing which we will only be signing the death warrant of learning in the country. If the nation fails to listen to the call from the dark valley of Indian education, it will only harm itself in the long run.

 

A lot of harm has already been done over the past 3-4 decades when the nation pursued wrong definitions of school and college education particularly as regards science and generally as regards classicism. So deep is the harm that it may take us a massive revolution to undo it and set the national journey of education on the right course. In actual terms, this is an anathema to basic Indian thought.

 

Most unfortunately, as a nation we have failed to notice what actual damage we have done to our education at lower levels. That was so because in some fit of introducing so-called smartness to education especially at school and junior college levels, we chased mirages whose definitions we messed up in a grand manner. As a nation, we started ignoring the importance of schools and their laboratories and their libraries. We started allowing our junior college students to remain absent from their official classes and instead attend tuition classes. Countless crores of students in tuition classes rarely visit the labs and libraries in a standard sense. The entire thrust is on mugging up things and score marks good enough to pass some or the other competitive tests that would guarantee entry to some haloed institution.

The end result, however, is poor, in the sense only a small percentage of the aspirants get into the right slots while the rest linger around what is only an apology to college education. And most unfortunately, this includes engineering education as well which is made mockery of by allowing thousands of engineering colleges in private sector. Most of those are now getting defunct, thanks to the ever-shrinking numbers of students seeking admissions.

This was because we, as a nation, linked education to jobs. Technically, there should be nothing wrong in job-oriented education. But the leaders of this drive forgot to keep the focus on learning, and allowed it to shift to job-seeking.

 

Thus, all the talk of promoting science and scientific temper at the highest levels becomes an exercise in near-futility. And unfortunately, the nation has not noticed this terrible decline that we have officially allowed over the decades. The nation, in fact, has stopped thinking about these aspects as everybody seems interested more in jobs for their kids and nothing more. Bah!

 

It is against this overall background that the Prime Minister’s encouragement appears as a bright spot. In fact, all our national leaders have done that -- encouraged science and its learning. Unfortunately, however, their encouragement has remained in the domain of tall talk and not got down to actualities. That is the reason why countless Atal Tinkering Labs given to schools have fallen on bad days. That is also the reason we are still talking of developing scientific temper among our kids but are actually achieving nothing.

 

It is this area that the nation needs to pay attention to. All of us are aware that our kids re really brilliant if given the opportunity to work in right direction. But the sad part is that our ground pool is poor not because of absence of brilliance but because of the absence of a properly-planned educational scenario. Our schools and colleges ignore this aspect not because they are bad, but because there is national movement on this count. And that is the reason why our young scientists’ numbers are not as big as they actually should be.

 

There is a silent unease in our minds about this, but we hardly speak up on that count. We do not like the way our schools and colleges are run, but none of us seems to muster enough courage to point to the flaw we have so painstakingly developed -- paradoxically!

 

If we want to make the new Five Young Scientists Labs just a small tip of the national iceberg of potential in learning of sciences, then we will have to create favourable ecosystem in schools and colleges. It may not take much money; it will, however, take a lot of deep and focused thinking and actual implementation of the national plan. We need a proper infrastructure of laboratories and libraries to make this happen at the lowest levels. That along would give a special strength to the dream highlighted so well by the Prime Minister.

This is our national need.