Kolkata: Science
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A backgrounder
As of 2024
Dec 15, 2024: The Times of India
The year is 1895. A young Indian scientist and teacher at Calcutta’s Presidency College is researching wireless communication. His contemporary Guglielmo Marconi gets the Physics Nobel but, according to multiple accounts, it’s a photo-finish in which Jagadish Chandra Bose may have been ahead by a whisker.
Cut to 2024. Kolkata, home to the Bose Institute, is nominated as India’s science capital by Nature. The British scientific journal, which used research papers generated during 2023 as the yardstick, ranked Kolkata (84) ahead of Bengaluru (85), Mumbai (98), New Delhi (124) and Hyderabad (184). What bodes well for the city’s future in basic science is that its researchers have contributed to more natural-science and health-science journals than those in cities like Edinburgh, Helsinki, Geneva and Frankfurt that already have a formidable reputation for research.
For many top academicians and professors of science, the recognition is a continuum of a process set off by Bose and his contemporaries in the late 19th century. Vice-chancellor of Ashoka University and astrophysicist Somak Raychaudhury is not surprised by the recognition. “Kolkata has been able to achieve this rank despite infrastructure inferior to many other cities. I feel this has been possible because of two reasons. Bengal has an unbroken scientific tradition. Research activities started in Kolkata with Jagadish Chandra Bose and Prafulla Chandra Roy as early as 1885. When I was a student at Presidency College in the 1980s, the head of the physics department was Amal Raychaudhuri, whose Raychaudhuri equation became the basis for the proofs of the singularity theorems of Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose. Secondly, the city has some outstanding research institutes, and the quality of teachers and students is exceptional,” says Raychaudhury, who has also served as the dean of science and head of the physics department of Presidency.
While Bengaluru’s Indian Institute of Science and IIT Bombay are among the top places for research in India, Kolkata boasts an array of institutes such as the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS) where C V Raman discovered the celebrated Raman Effect that won the Nobel Prize, and S N Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences (SNBNCBS). These three, along with Jadavpur University, feature in Nature’s list of top 30 research institutions in India. It was also in Kolkata that the country’s first science centre and science park — Science City — was inaugurated on July 1, 1997. Even before that, the Birla Industrial & Technological Museum (BITM) in Kolkata was established in 1959 with the support of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Bengal CM B C Roy, and industrialist Ghanshyam Das Birla. It is considered the birthplace of the science museum movement in India.
Director of the Kolkata-headquartered Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay too gives credit to the city’s high density of govt-funded research institutions, especially in the natural sciences. But like many others, she hopes the exodus of talent from the city will stop. “Given that most of our students have been leaving for other places and very few from outside the state are making their way to Kolkata, this indeed came as a bit of a pleasant surprise. It points to the fact that the state produces a large pool of capable science students,” says Bandyopadhyay.
“It disproves and challenges the common idea that to be successful one needs to move out of Kolkata,” says Tanusri Saha Dasgupta, director of SNBNCBS. “I am confident that this will have a big impact on reversing the trend of leaving Kolkata for a better future. The future lies in Kolkata,” she says.
Registrar of Presidency University Debajyoti Konar attributes the university’s ranking to hard work in the research & development sector. “In the last three years, we have had 214 sponsored research projects from national and international funding agencies. We are also expanding R&D activity in the area of industry-funded research.” Jadavpur University pro-vice chancellor Amitava Datta points out that its researchers had a good number of publications in the field of chemistry, physical science and earth science. “Their contributions placed JU at 22nd position in the country and at the top of all state and central universities,” Datta adds. JU has been ‘punching above its weight’ for decades, says neuroscientist Sumantra Chattarji, whose move from Bengaluru to Kolkata last year raised eyebrows. “Seeing all the struggles that state universities go through, it is astounding to see its performance. The pool of students it attracts is impressive and many are from small towns and villages, hungry to do well,” says Chattarji.
Dibyendu Nandi, professor, department of physical sciences at IISER Kolkata, strikes a note of caution, saying one must be careful in making sweeping conclusions based on a specific metric of journals that the Nature index uses. Nevertheless, he says Kolkata appearing as a top city in this index is evidence that scientists here are pursuing ambitious research and publishing in high-impact factor journals within the Nature index portfolio. “This indicates that the region has a strong talent base. One can only hope that there is adequate local recognition and support for enabling their pursuits instead of losing this talent as has been happening over decades,” adds Nandi, who is also head of the Kolkata-based Center of Excellence in Space Sciences India (CESSI) that conducts cutting-edge research and predictions on space weather forecasting.
Reporting by Prithvijit Mitra, Dipawali Mitra, Subhro Niyogi and Poulami Roy Banerjee
KOLKATA CONNECTION
➤ It was at IACS that CV Raman conducted his ground-breaking work that earned him the Nobel Prize for ‘Raman Effect’ in 1930
➤ In a small room at PG Hospital (now SSKM), Ronald Ross discovered that the female mosquito spread malaria, leading to the discovery of medicines for the vector-borne virus in 1897
➤ While Meghnad Saha’s ionization equation was a landmark, J C Bose’s crescograph to record plant movement and radiowave receiver changed the face of science and nearly won him a Nobel Prize
➤ Satyendra Nath Bose discovered a class of particles, which came to be known as the boson. More than half-a-century later, the quest to find the boson or the ‘God’s particle’ led to the CERN experiment in Europe where a large hadron collider was made to recreate the Big Bang. Kolkata scientists, led by the late physicist Bikash Sinha, played an important part by getting India to become a member-country for the experiment
➤ Besides S N Bose and Saha, P C Mahalanobis, Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri, Shyamal Sengupta, and Ashoke Sen were alumni of Presidency and each made significant contributions to basic science
