TRUTH is often the first casualty when science is reported. In the Indian
media, it seems, it is a luxury indeed. Nowhere was this more apparent than in
Pune, when 3000 scientists gathered recently for the Indian Science Congress.
Now Pune likes to be recognised as a city with a fine tradition of scholarship.
The congress is the Indian scientific establishment鈥檚 annual chance to show off.
This year鈥檚 event, like those before it, attracted the leading lights of Indian
science and VIPs, including Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, the government鈥檚 principal scientific adviser with the
rank of a cabinet minister, gave one of the most popular presentations. He
talked about the state of Indian research on missiles and aircraft and told his
audience that three new short and medium-range missiles would be ready before
year end and said that within 10 years India would be making an uncrewed
supersonic fighter aircraft.
For some reporters, all this talk of missiles and aircraft was just too much.
The next day, The Hindustan Times announced that India was
working on its own version of the US鈥檚 Star Wars programme. And the
government-run television channel reported Kalam as saying that India was
building long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles.
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Remarkably, neither the defence ministry, the Science Congress鈥檚 information
bureau nor Kalam鈥檚 office tried to deny the story, which originated from a news
agency report. And so it rolled on. 鈥淸This] will only encourage Pakistan and
China to increase the size and penetration abilities of their nuclear arsenals,鈥�
The Times of India fulminated in an editorial. The Hindustan
Times declared that the government should concentrate on more pressing
priorities, such as health and education. Perhaps the government didn鈥檛 correct
the error because it was happy to let voters have an inflated view of India鈥檚
missile capability.
As if that wasn鈥檛 enough, in his lecture on quantum computing, E. C. George
Sudarshan, a particle physicist at the University of Texas at Austin, took great
pains to explain that he was not a computer expert and that much of what he said
was based on the work of one of his graduate students. Needless to say, he was
described in a national newspaper the next day as 鈥渁n eminent computer
蝉肠颈别苍迟颈蝉迟鈥�.
In the same vein, Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan of the government鈥檚 space
department was pictured in The Financial Express receiving an award
from the Prime Minister鈥攂ut the caption named him as M. S. Swaminathan of
the National Dairy Development Board. Now Swaminathan is as well known in India
as Carl Sagan was in the US, or Richard Dawkins is in Britain. So it is hard to
see how a major newspaper could misidentify him.
The problem is that few newspaper editors in India care much about science,
and few publications have specialist science correspondents. The two most
popular Indian science magazines, Science Today and Science Age,
closed down because they couldn鈥檛 attract enough advertising. Science coverage
in newspapers is a roving brief鈥攔eporters fit it in when they are not
covering politics or business.
Indian scientists hardly deserve this: despite poor funding, they have had
considerable success in agriculture, space and defence research. What will it
take for the media to pay more attention to science? An incoming ICBM from
China, perhaps?