A group of 26 eminent Indian scientists have written to the Union government’s principal scientific advisor seeking a clarification on whether “unfair non-scientific considerations” influenced this year’s list of recipients of the prestigious Vigyan Yuva Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award.
On condition of anonymity, four signatories to the letter told Scroll that they have come to know from their peers and media reports that two of the three names recommended by a selection panel of experts for the Vigyan Yuva Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award for the physical sciences section were dropped from the final list of winners.
On Tuesday, The Indian Express reported that a third candidate in another section was also dropped.
The signatories told Scroll that this was a departure from the convention as recommendations made by the expert panel have always been followed since the award was instituted in 1958. One of the scientists whose name is believed to have been dropped from the list is a vocal critic of the Narendra Modi-led government, these scientists said.
The Vigyan Yuva Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award is the rechristened avatar of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award, which has for more than six decades been widely considered to be the most prestigious science award in India.
The awards are given in the fields of biological sciences, chemical sciences, mathematical sciences, physical sciences, medical sciences, engineering sciences, and earth, atmosphere, ocean and planetary sciences.
The prize is administered by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, which is under the purview of the Union Ministry of Science and Technology.
The four signatories said that the government had not responded to their letter sent on August 30. Scroll has written to the principal scientific advisor asking for a clarification on the doubts expressed by the signatories. This article will be updated if Scroll receives a response.
Changes in procedure
This year, the government not only tweaked the name of the award, but also introduced changes in the selection procedure. First, the award was made part of a larger group of science prizes called the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar. Four categories of awards – the Vigyan Ratna, Vigyan Shri, Vigyan Yuva Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar and Vigyan Team – are now part of the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar.
The more significant change, however, came in the process of selecting the winners. For the first time, bureaucrats were part of the selection committee, in addition to which, the final approvals came from the science and technology minister.
Until last year, committees of 12-15 previous Bhatnagar award winners were formed for each of the fields in which the honours were to be given, a physicist who is one of the signatories to the letter told Scroll.
“These committees would recommend names of the awardees to the science and technology ministry,” said the physicist, who has been a part of one of the committees in the past.
This year, the subject-specific committees were constituted by a panel called the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar Committee, chaired by the principal scientific advisor. This committee, after soliciting suggestions from the subject-specific panels, made recommendations to the science and technology ministry.
In addition to the chairperson, the committee comprised four presidents of science and engineering academies, six distinguished scientists and technologists, and six bureaucrats who are the secretaries to ministries and departments related to science.
Curiously, the selection process for the award described on a government portal has been tweaked only over the last week to reflect the involvement of the minister, according to screen shots shared by this physicist.
The physicist said that until last year, the recommendations of the expert panel were sent to the science and technology ministry “only for rubber stamps”. He added: “Now that we know that two names [in the physics category] have been dropped from the recommended list of awardees, it raises the question whether the minister took the final call on the awards and overrode the recommendations made by the selection panel.”
Another signatory to the letter, who has previously been a member of the subject committee for physical sciences, said that the changes made on the official portal showed that the “government was trying to wriggle out of the situation after getting our letter”.
On two names being dropped from the recommended list, he said: “This is like the king of Sweden rejecting a Nobel Prize awardee”.
‘Ideological control’
One of the signatories to the letter said that he was aware that the subject committee for physical sciences had recommended the names of three scientists to the newly-formed Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar Committee for the prize in that category. But when the awards were announced on August 7, only one of the three was featured on the list.
All four signatories to whom Scroll spoke said that it would not be proper to speculate on why the two names were dropped from the physics list.
One of the signatories said that the government should at least come clear on whether the names were indeed dropped by the science and technology minister despite being recommended by the selection committee. “The criteria needs to be transparent, and more so when the person said to be dropped is critical of the government,” he said.
He added that if the minister took the final call on the winners, it “pointed towards imposing ideological control” on the science community. “This would be detrimental to Indian sciences,” he said.
A third signatory to the letter said that there should be no reason to reject recommendations made by the selection committee unless there are matters of ethics like plagiarism or sexual harassment charges involved.
“I do not feel happy about bureaucrats becoming part of the selection committee, but still there are 10 members from the science community who can give inputs,” he said. “The bigger concern is whether the names were dropped by the minister. That is what we are asking the government, but unfortunately we have not received a response yet.”
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