SCIENCE FACTION

Meet the 12 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar awardees for 2022, who, apart from scientific rigour, share an undying passion for their work and the determination to never give up  

- POOJA BIRAIA JAISWAL

On September 11, after nearly a year’s delay, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research announced the 2022 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, named after the renowned chemist and its first director-general. The contenders for the award—the biggest in Indian science—are nominated by their institutes, and judged by a panel of eminent scientists. Over the years, the winners have been men and women who have added depth to India’s scientific rigour and have encouraged scientific temper in academia.

There are several threads that unite this time’s awardees, one being their humility. Each one of 12 awardees attributed their success to their PhD/graduate students who worked with them, for five to six years, or even more in some cases. “Science is often done as a team,” said Basudeb Dasgupta, theoretical physicist at Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. “You need a team to move a mountain, and so this award must be celebrated as a team achievement.”

At the heart of the achievement lies years of patience, the determination to keep going despite failures and their diehard passion for the subject. For instance, Professor Debabrata Maiti, from IIT Bombay’s chemistry department, spent the past 12 years working on a single aspect—developing a cost-, energy- and time-efficient way of transforming simple organic molecules into complex products for use in the agrochemical and pharmaceutical industries. “In scientific journeys, there are no shortcuts,” he said. “There had been numerous instances when we were frustrated because we were not getting the desired reactions from smaller molecules. This went on for five to seven years. Naturally, my students were more frustrated because it was their career and future.”