Science, The New Frontier

FEWER VOTARIES OF PSEUDO- SCIENCE WILL HELP INDIA OCCUPY ITS RIGHTFUL PLACE AT THE HIGH TABLE OF GLOBAL SCIENCE

- Minhaz Merchant

WHEN THE PIONEERING universities of Europe – Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna, Heidelberg and the Sorbonne – were founded around the 1200s, their mission was ecclesiastical. Religious teaching dominated learning. Science had little place in their curricula.

In England, Oxford initially taught courses in Latin. English hadn’t developed as a coherent separate language. Over the next three centuries, it grew out of Latin and French but at heart remained Germanic. Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written during 1387- 1400, is in barely recognisable “Middle English”. Two centuries later, in the late-1500s, when William Shakespeare began writing plays, English had finally acquired form and content, still replete though with words from Middle English.

The scientific revolution in the 1600s laid the foundation for the industrial revolution a century later. For the next 250 years, the West dominated science and industry, helped by rapacious colonialism and the brutal slave trade from Africa to the new American colonies. The tide began to turn in the 2000s. China and Japan led a wave of Asian nations using technology to leapfrog over several eras of the industrial revolution and create modern societies.

In 2017, the United States still led the world in the number of patents filed. According to the World Intellectual Property Organisation, the US filed 29,84,825 patents in 2017. But the big revelation was the number of patents filed by China – 20,85,367, overtaking Japan (20,13,685 patents) to take second place worldwide. India was way behind with just 60,777 patents filed.

A key reason for India lagging behind is bureaucracy. It takes 1,560 days for a patent in India to be granted from the time it is applied for. In Poland it takes just three days. In Sri Lanka it takes 15 days. Even the Honduras takes only 30 days.