Amarendra Kumar Mishra
On February 28, we celebrate National Science Day. Students are seldom told the reason for such celebration. It was on this day a scientist of Indian origin discovered the phenomenon of scattering of light and later went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1930 for it. This discovery is today known as the Raman Effect.
The importance of this invention by Sir Chandrasekhar Venkata Raman, popularly known as CV Raman, is highlighted by the fact that within a decade of his discovery, almost 2,000 research papers on this topic were written and published in reputed international journals.
Many educational theories often refer to excellence in multiple disciplines. People like Leonardo Da Vinci and CV Raman prove that they were scientists, artists and sportsmen rolled into one being.
A celebrated student, there are illustrious stories of Sir Raman like the one about his three double promotions at the age of eleven. Besides being academically brilliant, Raman was also exposed to music, Sanskrit, literature, swimming and sports; an example of interdisciplinary learning, a theory so popular in today’s times. Raman was also known to be interested in acoustics and studied harmonics of musical instruments.
CV Raman may be a Nobel Laureate in Science, but he reached the field en route Accountancy. His family could not afford his higher education in Science abroad.
He instead had to pick up a job as deputy accountant general at Rangoon to contribute towards studies of his siblings. He soon got a lucky break and was transferred to Calcutta where he left his job and started full-time research work at Indian Association for Cultivation of Science. This perhaps was his first step towards global stardom.
When India@75 was launched by Professor CK Prahalad, one of the goals of the project was to win Nobel Prizes for India in Science and Mathematics. It is one thing to set goals and yet another to build an environment and society to enable achievement of these goals. Until his last breath, CV Raman regretted his inability to build a true science community in India.
The focus on patronising research in the country is well laid-out as a percentage of GDP but in order to build scientific inventions and innovations, the education system has to encourage original thinking.
When classrooms stifle student opinions and expect them to cram and reproduce what is written in textbooks, how can students learn to invent?
In CV Raman’s words, “I feel very strongly about textbooks. I think the only crime worse than reading one is to write one”. There is a general feeling that research in India is lacking due to lack of equipment but CV Raman, in that era, proved otherwise. His creation was a result of independent thinking, consistent hard work and not equipment.
Science today is compartmentalised into physics, chemistry and biology that can be learnt through B.Sc and M.Sc. The quality of science education is far from satisfactory and not a single Indian university ranks among top-100 universities of the world.
Eight decades after Sir CV Raman was pronounced Nobel Laureate, we are still striving towards improving basic quality in teaching science.
As optimistic as we may like to be, we continue to lag where building a scientific community conducive to producing Nobel scientists are concerned.
(The author is Principal, K C Public School, Jammu.)
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