The Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, inaugurating the Indian Science Congress in Thiruvananthapuram on Sunday, echoed the sentiments of thousands of young scientists when he made a fervent plea to rid science of red-tapism and political interference, which he acknowledged had led to the “regression” of science in India. Young scientists are being relentlessly thwarted by administrators and accountants, who can make or break a Nobel laureate in the making by trying to arbitrarily decide what he or she should or should not do. The office administrators at our institutes of science and higher learning are not impressed by the flight of imagination of young people, which is essential for the development of indigenous science. Administrators, because of their training and attitude, prefer “stability” and pre-set procedures, and to stick to “time-tested methods”, allergic to innovation of any kind. This, needless to say, has made any kind of original research or thinking in this country next to impossible. The Prime Minister has obviously been touched to the core by the remarks of 2009 Nobel laureate Venkataraman Ramakrishnan, who made the obvious point that Indian scientists needed greater autonomy from red tape and politics. After he and two others shared the Chemistry Nobel last year, Dr Ramakrishnan found almost everyone in India had started claiming him as their own — after showing almost no interest in his work for several decades. He is not the first Nobel laureate born in India to comment on this — 1968 Medicine laureate Hargobind Khurana had noted how he had to go abroad to even do his Ph.D. The rot had set in that far back! It is true that despite all shortcomings and red-tapism, India has advanced tremendously in science and space — from two nuclear explosions to the successful Chandrayaan mission which found traces of water on the moon. It would be unrealistic, uneconomical and untenable to depend entirely on experiments conducted in overseas laboratories. We have to develop at our own pace — and our young scientists must be given unfettered freedom to pursue their innovations, whether in “pure” science or even more prosaic disciplines such as manufacturing. Dr Manmohan Singh has called for a switch from the brain drain to a “brain gain” — urging scientists of Indian origin working abroad to come back to the homeland, if only for a few months at a time, to deliver lectures or otherwise inspire successive new generations. He called for the setting up of a mechanism to free science from bureaucratic heavy-handedness: it goes without saying this needs to be done on a war footing. Apart from anything else, it would also further our strategic interests — in making us less dependent on the developed countries, which would like nothing better than to be able to dump their outdated technologies on us. The human resources development minister, Mr Kapil Sibal, has been working tirelessly since the start of the second UPA government to create centres of excellence in higher education as it is necessary to develop absolute quality and not work on a percentile basis. This is somewhat reminiscent of the extraordinary vision of our first Prime Minister Jawaharalal Nehru, who could dream big and, besides the IITs, had laid the foundation of India’s science, nuclear and space programmes through geniuses like Homi Bhabha to whom he gave a free hand.