Precious materials

The importance of C N R Rao's Bharat Ratna

On Saturday, the Indian government awarded its highest honour, the Bharat Ratna, to the scientist Chintamani Nagesa Ramachandra Rao. Dr Rao, a materials chemist, is the fourth scientist or engineer to be awarded the Bharat Ratna, after the Nobel laureate physicist C V Raman in 1954, the civil engineer M Visvesvaraya in 1955, and missile engineer and former President A P J Abdul Kalam in 1997. That list itself is revealing. Under India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1950s, the establishment of a "scientific temper" - a phrase he often used - was considered of paramount importance for the Indian state. Raman was an Indian scientist who had achieved international acclaim; Visvesvaraya had built a complex flood protection system for Hyderabad, a series of dams and reservoirs across the Deccan Plateau, and a barrier that protected the port of Visakhapatnam from sea erosion. In all the years since that time, the high noon of scientific optimism in India, only Dr Kalam - best known, perhaps, as an administrator of India's missile programme and not a scientist - has been deemed worthy. The turning away of India from Nehru's vision of indigenous science and engineering as a path to greatness is obvious.

Thus, Dr Rao's award deserves unqualified celebration. He is now 89, at the end of a long and celebrated career in which he has demonstrated remarkable skill and virtuosity as a research chemist. But perhaps most importantly, he has taken the time to help build institutions as well. He is chairman of the prime minister's scientific advisory council; he helped reinvigorate the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in the 1980s and 1990s, and has set up several similar institutions since. Nor has his association with power curbed his tongue; he has spoken out about the tendency to ignore the importance of basic science, and has been scathing on the subject of Indian institutes' inability to compete on the world stage. In fact, he has gone further, and demonstrated a keen understanding of the economic importance of basic science. His basic research had several real-world implications for semiconductors, for example - but he has on occasion bewailed the fact that India lost out on the semiconductor revolution, with microchip manufacturing being largely unknown in this country. Dr Rao, with a very few peers across the world, helped propel materials chemistry in the 1950s into being the powerhouse it is today - the source of many hoped-for technological advances. But India, where he has lived and worked, has stumbled at translating this into economic gains.

After years of working on semiconductors and superconductivity, Dr Rao has turned his attention in his eighties to nanotechnology - the production of infinitesimally small "machines" - working on, among other things, how to generate semiconducting nano-tubes. As he has remarked, India cannot afford to miss out on the nanotechnology revolution as it has the biotechnology and semiconductor revolution. Over his long life and career, Dr Rao has seen India de-emphasise basic science, minimise the role of scientists and scientific temper in society, and fail to implement technological advances in its manufacturing sector. It is to be hoped that this award represents, more than anything else, a turning of the tide back to what it was when Dr Rao was a young scientist.