Researchers in India are asking the nation’s science adviser to clarify how the government awards its top science prizes after reports that senior officials vetoed prizes for several scientists who had criticized the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“We are worried that … the selection of awards henceforth will also involve non-academic considerations. This is a rather unhealthy development for Indian science,” states a 24 September letter to Principal Science Adviser Ajay Sood signed by nearly 180 researchers, including the former directors of several prominent science institutes.
“The issue here is not about the specific individuals who were deleted,” says physicist Suvrat Raju of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, who has criticized the Modi government. A colleague told him he was in line to receive a prize, he says, but then learned he had been cut from the list. “It is about the government’s intolerance for dissent and [its] attempts to assert control over the scientific community.”
The controversy has its roots in the Modi government’s move, begun in 2022, to replace hundreds of prizes and cash bonuses aimed at recognizing scientific accomplishments with a set of four prizes called the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar (RVP). The goal, the government said, was to ensure “transparency and fairness in the entire selection process” for prizes that go to individual scientists and research teams.
The government announced the first 33 RVP prizes on 7 August. Even before the prizes were announced, however, some researchers were concerned that the selection process had become politicized. In particular, they said, it appeared that late in the process India’s minister of science and technology, Jitendra Singh, had removed several names from lists prepared by a selection committee. The deletions involved two prizes: the Vigyan Shri award, which recognizes “distinguished contributions” in any field; and the Vigyan Yuva-Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar (VY-SSB) award, for scientists up to age 45.
Raju, who had been told he was selected to receive the VY-SSB award, thinks it is no mystery why he was removed from the prize list. “If you look through some of the articles I have written or collective statements from the scientific community that I helped coordinate, it is clear that I am critical of several policies of the government of India,” he says. “That the government has not been happy with all this is not a secret.”
On 30 August, a group of 26 scientists—all former winners of a previous prize for young scientists—wrote Sood, asking him about the process of selecting the VY-SSB winners. The guidelines for the award, they noted, specified no role for the science minister. In a response, Sood pointed to unannounced changes that had been made to an awards website; they indicated the science minister had the final say over the awards. But Sood “did not make any further comments,” says physicist Sandip Trivedi, a signer of the letter.
In an effort to learn more, a larger group of researchers sent Sood the 24 September letter. “We are very concerned that this issue is much larger than a few awards,” they wrote. Some researchers are concerned, for example, that politicization could influence grant decisions at India’s Anusandhan National Research Foundation, a major new funding agency. Others worry ideology will skew hiring decisions. “One does not want that kind of a scenario,” says biologist TNC Vidya of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, who signed the letter. “It should be that people are recruited or awarded based on their science, not their political view.”
Sood has not yet responded to the letter, and did not respond to a request from Science for comment.
As they await an answer, some researchers are giving the government the benefit of the doubt, saying a number of factors might have prompted the ministry to scale back the list of awardees. But, “The government now needs to reassure the scientific community that the awards will be given for scientific achievements and no other considerations are important,” Trivedi says. “And this has to be substantiated by giving clarity on what is the role that the different committees and people involved are going to play.”
Astronomer Aniket Sule, who signed the second letter, isn’t optimistic that the Modi government will offer that reassurance. “Realistically, with this government, I don’t think anything is going to change,” he says. “But we would like our voice to reach people, to let them know that everything’s not alright in the science ecosystem.”
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/indian-government-accused-political-meddling-science-prizes
