I had earlier raised the issue; pure scientific output alone based on the quality of research AND thought process would lead India to the status of soft power.
India's record as far as citations or pure academic research is appalling. It is not surprising because the basic education system is rotten to the core. Although there are concept papers to "kick-start" the interest in science, there is no urgency on these counts.
For the same reason, patent filings are minuscule as compared to US/Europe which is reflection of poor scientific output.
I am not overtly concerned by the Hans increasing their scope of scientific research, their efforts to scale up super computers or efforts culminating for deep space research etc. Cost overruns and red tapism is inherent in all systems because of unforeseen circumstances but this does not commensurate with the quality of output.
For the same reason, the health care and hence the quality of publications is sparse in the scientific field. There is a total breakdown of the primary and secondary health care leading to rush of patients towards "super-specialists". With falling investments in public health care, the private entrepreneurs have reared their ugly head leading to significant increase in costs for all parties concerned. In this scenario, it's even harder to expect quality output because of excessive demands on the health care service providers.
The idea behind this blog post is to identify the problem; because this affects us in a fundamental manner-directly or indirectly.
Irrespective of the party in power, these questions are almost never asked. Disproptionate column space is allotted to "bollywood stars"; the space for scientific articles has slowly been replaced by tender announcements, Government ads, classified and cricket news.
Sad state of affairs.
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone
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