Journey

The making of modern Indian science

Modern Indian science from the colonial laboratories to Chandrayaan-3: scientists, universities, national institutes, launch sites.

Stops (28)

1. M. Visvesvaraya · M. Visvesvaraya — civil engineering and the modern state

   Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya (1861-1962), Dewan of Mysore, designer of the Krishna Raja Sagara dam and the Bhadravati steelworks, founder of the Government Engineering College at Bangalore, and co-founder of the Bank of Mysore. His automatic flood sluices at Khadakvasla were patented in 1903. Bharat Ratna 1955; his 15 September birthday is observed as National Engineers' Day.

2. Jagadish Chandra Bose · J. C. Bose — plant electrophysiology at Presidency College

   Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937), Presidency College professor whose crescograph work (1900s) measured electrical responses in plants and demonstrated microwave radio in millimetre-wave form a year before Marconi. His Royal Institution lectures of 1897 were cited by Nobel laureate Nevill Mott decades later as the first demonstration of semiconductor behaviour. Founder of the Bose Institute, Calcutta (1917).

3. Srinivasa Ramanujan · Srinivasa Ramanujan — Madras to Cambridge, 1914

   Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920), the self-taught mathematician from Erode and Kumbhakonam who sent G. H. Hardy at Trinity College in 1913 a letter of 120 theorems in number theory, modular forms and infinite series, almost none of which Hardy had seen before. Hardy brought him to Cambridge in 1914; by 1918 Ramanujan was Fellow of the Royal Society and of Trinity. The Ramanujan notebooks are still generating published mathematics a century later; the mock theta functions underpin modern work on quantum partition functions.

4. Meghnad Saha · Meghnad Saha — the ionisation equation

   Meghnad Saha (1893-1956), whose 1920 paper gave astronomers the Saha ionisation equation and for the first time let them read a star's spectrum as a thermometer. Professor at Allahabad and Calcutta; founder-director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics at Calcutta (1950, now Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics). Also a founding member of the first Lok Sabha from Calcutta North-West.

5. Satyendra Nath Bose · Satyendra Nath Bose — Bose statistics, 1924

   Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974), whose paper 'Plancks Gesetz und Lichtquantenhypothese' derived Planck's radiation law from a new statistics of indistinguishable particles. He mailed it to Einstein, who translated it into German for Zeitschrift für Physik. The resulting Bose-Einstein statistics named a whole class of fundamental particles (bosons, Dirac's coinage) and underwrote the prediction and 1995 observation of Bose-Einstein condensation.

6. C. V. Raman · C. V. Raman — Nobel in physics, 1930

   Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888-1970), who at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science laboratory on Bowbazar Street, Calcutta, in February 1928, measured the inelastic scattering of light that bears his name — a vibrational frequency shift that is now the basis of Raman spectroscopy. The first Nobel Prize in a science awarded to an Indian, and the first awarded to any non-white person outside Europe. Founded the Raman Research Institute at Bangalore (1948).

7. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis · P. C. Mahalanobis — statistics and the planning state

   Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893-1972), founder of the Indian Statistical Institute (1931) and of the journal Sankhyā, author of the Mahalanobis distance (1936), designer of the first national sample surveys from 1950, and architect of the Second Five-Year Plan (1956-61) — the Mahalanobis model that prioritised heavy industry. Fellow of the Royal Society 1945; his 29 June birthday is National Statistics Day.

8. Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata · Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata

   The IACS at Jadavpur, founded 1876 by Mahendra Lal Sarkar as the first Indian-run research society on the Royal Institution model. In its physics laboratory on Bowbazar Street between 1917 and 1933 C. V. Raman carried out the mercury-arc scattering experiments that won the 1930 Nobel. Became an autonomous institute under DST in 1986 and runs 11 research schools in the physical and chemical sciences.

9. Aligarh Muslim University · Aligarh Muslim University

   Founded 1875 by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan as the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, chartered as a university by Act of Parliament 1920. One of the earliest Indian institutions to teach modern science alongside Islamic studies; its Centre of Excellence in Materials Science, the Interdisciplinary Nanotechnology Centre, and the J. N. Medical College make it a continuing research university. Zakir Husain, Hakim Ajmal Khan and Sir Shah Muhammad Sulaiman are AMU figures.

10. Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi · Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi

    Founded by Madan Mohan Malaviya in 1916 on a 1,300-acre campus along the Ganga at Varanasi — the largest residential university in Asia at its founding. Its Institute of Science is one of the oldest Indian faculties for pure physics, chemistry and mathematics; the IIT (BHU) was carved out of its College of Engineering in 2012. BHU trained a disproportionate share of the mid-century Indian scientific civil service.

11. Khalsa College, Amritsar · Khalsa College, Amritsar

    Khalsa College on Grand Trunk Road, founded 1892 by the Singh Sabha movement to combine Sikh religious instruction with modern science and English. The Indo-Saracenic main building by Bhai Ram Singh (1911) is on the Punjab heritage list. The college produced Har Gobind Khorana (BSc 1943) and Khushwant Singh, and was a feeder for the mid-century Sikh scientific civil service.

12. Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru · Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru

    The IISc campus at Malleswaram, Bangalore, endowed in 1909 by Jamsetji Tata, the Maharaja of Mysore and the Government of India. Founding director Sir William Burton; C. V. Raman became director 1933-37. The campus holds nineteen departments including the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, the Centre for Nano Science and Engineering, and the Centre for Infectious Disease Research. India's first Institute of Eminence.

13. Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata · Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata

    The Indian Statistical Institute at Baranagar, Kolkata, founded by P. C. Mahalanobis in 1931. Declared an Institution of National Importance by Act of Parliament in 1959. Runs the National Sample Survey framework, publishes Sankhyā, and has centres at Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Tezpur and Giridih. ISI graduates built the planning, census, agricultural-pricing and election-forecast machinery of independent India.

14. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar · Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar — the Chandrasekhar limit

    On the voyage from Madras to Cambridge in 1930, nineteen-year-old Chandrasekhar worked out that a cold stellar core of more than ~1.4 solar masses cannot be supported by electron degeneracy pressure and must collapse — the Chandrasekhar limit, foundational to the physics of white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. University of Chicago from 1937; Nobel Prize in Physics 1983 with William Fowler. The NASA Chandra X-ray Observatory, launched 1999, is named after him.

15. Har Gobind Khorana · Har Gobind Khorana — the genetic code, Nobel 1968

    Har Gobind Khorana (1922-2011), born at Raipur (Multan district, now Pakistan), BSc Khalsa College Amritsar, PhD Liverpool. Nobel Prize 1968 with Marshall Nirenberg and Robert Holley for interpreting the genetic code and showing how it functions in protein synthesis. First to chemically synthesise a complete biologically active gene (1972) and the first synthetic gene expressed in a living cell (1976). The chemical approach shaped a half-century of molecular biology.

16. Homi J. Bhabha · Homi J. Bhabha — the Indian nuclear programme

    Homi Jehangir Bhabha (1909-1966), author of the 1937 Bhabha-Heitler shower formula in cosmic-ray physics. Returned to India from Cambridge in 1939, founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay (1945) and the Atomic Energy Commission (1948). Chaired the 1955 Geneva Atoms-for-Peace conference. Designed the three-stage Indian nuclear fuel-cycle plan — natural-uranium PHWRs, fast-breeder plutonium, thorium — that is still the official policy. Killed in the Air India crash on Mont Blanc, 1966.

17. Vikram Sarabhai · Vikram Sarabhai — the Indian space programme

    Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai (1919-1971), the Ahmedabad industrialist and physicist who returned from Cambridge in 1947 and founded the Physical Research Laboratory at Ahmedabad (1947), the Indian National Committee for Space Research under DAE (1962), and the Space Science and Technology Centre at Thumba (1963, now the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre). Chairman of ISRO from its formation in 1969 until his death in 1971. Started Indian satellite TV with the SITE experiment (1975, posthumous).

18. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam · A. P. J. Abdul Kalam — missile programme and the Presidency

    Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam (1931-2015), aerospace engineer at DRDL, project director of the SLV-3 that put Rohini-1 in orbit (1980), head of DRDO's Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP) from 1983 (Prithvi, Agni, Trishul, Akash, Nag), chief scientific adviser 1992-99 (including Pokhran II in 1998), and 11th President of India 2002-07. Bharat Ratna 1997.

19. M. S. Swaminathan · M. S. Swaminathan — the Green Revolution

    Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan (1925-2023), director of IARI 1966-72 and ICAR DG 1972-79; introduced Mexican dwarf wheat varieties IR-8 and IR-36 crossed with Indian lines and raised Indian wheat yields from 10 to 17 million tonnes within four years (1966-70). Later ran the International Rice Research Institute at Los Baños (1982-88) and founded the MSSRF at Chennai (1988). First World Food Prize laureate (1987); Bharat Ratna 2024 (posthumous).

20. Jayant Narlikar · Jayant Narlikar — IUCAA and Hoyle-Narlikar gravity

    Jayant Vishnu Narlikar (b. 1938), co-architect with Fred Hoyle of the 1964 Hoyle-Narlikar theory of gravity, a conformal reformulation that attempts to incorporate Mach's principle. Returned from Cambridge to TIFR in 1972 and founded the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) at Pune in 1988, the principal pan-Indian training institute for observational and theoretical astronomy. UNESCO Kalinga Prize 1996; Padma Vibhushan 2004.

21. IIT Kharagpur · IIT Kharagpur, 1951 — the first IIT

    The first of the five Sarkar Committee IITs, opened on 18 August 1951 in the former Hijli Detention Camp — the colonial prison that had held Satyendra Nath Bose and other Bengali nationalists. Nehru's 1956 convocation line is on the facade: 'Here in the place of that Hijli Detention Camp stands this fine monument of India, representing India's urges, India's future in the making.' The model for the other IITs; current faculty of 700 across 19 departments.

22. IIT Bombay · IIT Bombay, 1958 — the Powai campus

    The second IIT, founded 1958 at Powai with UNESCO technical assistance from the Soviet Union — a reciprocal of IIT Kharagpur's Western collaboration. The campus between Powai and Vihar lakes was laid out by Charles Correa's firm. Produced the entrepreneurs who built the first wave of Indian IT (Infosys, Flipkart, Zoho co-founders among them) and a disproportionate share of the Indian academic diaspora.

23. AIIMS, New Delhi · AIIMS, New Delhi — the apex teaching hospital

    The All India Institute of Medical Sciences at Ansari Nagar, New Delhi, established by Act of Parliament in 1956 on the Johns Hopkins model — teaching hospital, medical college and research institute under one autonomous governance. The brainchild of Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, India's first Health Minister. Early funding from New Zealand under the Colombo Plan. The autonomy clause (section 23) places it directly under Parliament.

24. Trombay / Bhabha Atomic Research Centre · BARC, Trombay — the Indian nuclear estate

    Bhabha Atomic Research Centre on the Trombay peninsula at the eastern edge of Mumbai, founded by Homi Bhabha in 1954. India's nuclear estate: the Apsara research reactor (1956 — Asia's first), the CIRUS (1960) and Dhruva (1985) heavy-water reactors, the three-stage fuel-cycle work with the Fast Breeder Test Reactor at Kalpakkam, and the Pokhran I 'Smiling Buddha' device (1974) and Pokhran II (1998).

25. Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) · TERLS, Thumba — the first Indian rocket launch, 1963

    The Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station on the magnetic equator near Thiruvananthapuram, inaugurated 21 November 1963 with a sounding-rocket launch of an American Nike-Apache. The rocket components arrived at the site on a bicycle; the launch control was in St Mary Magdalene Church, converted into INCOSPAR's first office. Became the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in 1972 — ISRO's primary rocket-propulsion establishment.

26. ISRO Headquarters, Bengaluru · ISRO HQ, Antariksh Bhavan, Bengaluru

    ISRO HQ at Antariksh Bhavan, New BEL Road, Bengaluru, established 15 August 1969 with Vikram Sarabhai as first chairman. Built Aryabhata (1975), the SLV, ASLV, PSLV and GSLV launch vehicles, the Chandrayaan-1 orbiter (2008) and Chandrayaan-3 lander-rover (2023 — first soft landing near the lunar south pole), the Mars Orbiter Mission (Mangalyaan, 2014 — Asia's first success on the first try), and the 104-satellite PSLV-C37 of 2017.

27. Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota · SDSC SHAR, Sriharikota — the launch pad

    The Satish Dhawan Space Centre on Sriharikota Island at the mouth of the Pulicat Lake, ISRO's main launch complex. Operational since 1971. Two launch pads: the Second Launch Pad (SLP, 2005) for all PSLV and GSLV missions since; the First Launch Pad (FLP, 1993) for PSLV and the SSLV. Launched Aryabhata, Chandrayaan-1/2/3, the Mars Orbiter Mission, and the record 104-satellite PSLV-C37. Renamed 2002 after Satish Dhawan, ISRO's second chairman.

28. DRDO Bhawan, New Delhi · DRDO Bhawan, New Delhi

    DRDO Bhawan on Rajaji Marg — headquarters of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, formed 1958. 52 laboratories across the country. Developed the IGMDP under A. P. J. Abdul Kalam from 1983 (Prithvi, Agni, Trishul, Akash, Nag), the LCA Tejas with HAL, the Arjun MBT, the Pokhran II test infrastructure (1998), and the Mission Shakti anti-satellite system (2019).

Sources

• Wikipedia