GRA Principal honoured

The US National Academy of Sciences, a private organisation dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare, has elected Dr Mashelkar, Director-General of CSIR India and a Principal of the GRA as a foreign associate of the organisation. This is a considerable honour as currently there are only 360 foreign associates elected by the Academy.

Dr. Raghunath A. Mashelkar is the Director-General of India's apex scientific body, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. Most recently, his sustained campaign on Intellectual Property Rights has promoted awareness among the scientific and business community. He was in the forefront of the campaign to retrieve India’s rights in the battle over turmeric and basmati rice patents. His work has saved many traditional Indian products from being patented by foreign companies Though Mashelkar began life in poverty, sometimes hungry and shoeless, he now directs a chain of 38 publicly funded industrial R&D institutions in India, and is president of the Indian National Science Academy. That personal experience of ascendance from dire circumstances, improvements in his country's infrastructure, and changing patterns of scientific emigration and immigration have convinced him that India is fated to become one of the world's greatest intellectual and economic engines. He says, "if India plays its cards right, it can become by 2020 the world's number-one knowledge production center, creating not only valuable private goods but also much needed public goods that will help the growing global population suffer less and live better."

Before becoming a leading architect of India's science and technology policies, Dr. Mashelkar did pioneering work in polymer science and engineering, which earned him many international laurels. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (London), a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), and a Foreign Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. Dubbed a "dangerous optimist" in India, he is deeply committed to championing the cause of the developing world.

He recently advised a meeting of scientists thus: "We, in India need to seriously address several issues that hinder the creation of borderless minds and borderless thinking. They include our rigid academic curricula, our process of learning by rote, our rigid examination system based on a single correct answer, hierachical structures in management, etc. Our systems promote inhibition and imitation rather than innovation. It is only in an environment, which fosters innovation that borderless minds can be formed and borderless thinking can flourish. Finally, we must recognize that innovation is not a undimensional process. It is comparable to the intermeshing gears of a clock. The challenge before us is to make this intermeshing happen. It is only breaking up those walls and opening up those windows of mind will bring that fresh wind, that will build the ‘Innovative India’ of our dreams."

Mashelkar says his dream "is to create a global knowledge pool for global good through global funding. Here, India can become an agent for change. This global-good perspective could become the case in diverse sectors ranging from biotechnology to information technology to space research."

Mashelkar recalls that in the late 1950s, he struggled to have two meals a day while he studied under the street lights and went barefoot to school. He had to almost abandon school in 1960, because his poor widowed mother could not support his education. "That this boy, who is myself, could become the president of the Indian Science Congress is what gave me the confidence to say that India could again achieve intellectual and economic greatness. If this miracle could happen to any Indian, then given an opportunity, it can happen to every Indian."

Mashelkar turned to science as a result of the inspiration of his physics teacher. "My own turn toward science began at a poor school in Mumbai. I remember Principal Bhave, who taught us physics. One day, he took us outside the classroom to demonstrate how to find the focal length of a convex lens. He focused the sun's rays onto a piece of paper and told us that the distance between the paper and the lens was the focal length. Then he held the lens in place until the paper burned. That's when he turned to me and said, "Mashelkar, if you can focus your energies like this and not diffuse them, you can burn anything in the world!" I decided at that moment to become a scientist."

After earning a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Bombay University in 1966, Mashelkar received fellowship offers for graduate study in the United States and Canada. But he preferred to remain in India to pursue his Ph.D. "I did postdoctoral research in the United Kingdom, held a faculty position there, and then had a brief stint in the United States as a visiting professor. But in the mid-1970s, when attractive offers came my way for faculty positions in top schools in the United States and United Kingdom, I decided to return to India."