12 years of Science in service of India
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Dr Jitendra Singh
When a lavender farmer in the Doda district of Jammu plucks the first blossoms of the season, she is not thinking about Science policy. Yet it is precisely a decade of deliberate, mission-driven scientific invest- ment that transformed barren hillsides in the Union Territory into fragrant fields of purple — a revolution in rural livelihoods born in a laboratory. This, in essence, is what twelve years of sustained commitment to Science and Technology in India has meant: not the advancement of knowledge for its own sake, but Science as a living, breathing force in the daily lives of our citizens.
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi assumed office in 2014, he articulated a vision that challenged us to think of Science not as a departmental function but as a National mission. The years that followed have borne that vision out in ways that would have seemed extraordinary a generation ago. Today, India has landed a spacecraft at the Moon’s south pole, developed its own antibiotic for the first time, built supercomputers from Pune to Patna, and created a space economy teeming with homegrown startups. But the deeper story — the one that deserves to be told — is how each of these achievements rippled outward into the lives of ordinary people.
Science is no longer confined to laboratories—it has become the single most powerful driver of National development and citizen empowerment.
Consider the farmer. Weather, always the silent sovereign of Indian agriculture, has become far more legible over the last decade. A comprehensive overhaul of our earth observation and forecasting infrastructure now gives farmers accurate, hyperlocal weather predictions—not in the vague language of probability, but with the kind of precision that allows a family to decide whether to harvest tomorrow or wait. When a cyclone forms over the Bay of Bengal today, our early warning systems give coastal communities hours —sometimes days—of advance notice. The difference is not statistical; it is counted in lives saved and livelihoods preserved.
In the mountains and river valleys of Jammu and Kashmir, science arrived in the form of the Aroma Mission—a programme that introduced lavender cultivation and supported farmers with technology, seeds and market linkages.
What began as a pilot has since transformed into what is now celebrated as India’s Purple Revolution : thousands of farming families earning dignified incomes from aromatic and medicinal plants, with Science as the quiet architect of this prosperity. Similar work in saffron expansion, medicinal herb cultivation, and the first-ever introduction of asafoetida cultivation in India has demonstrated that innovation, rooted in the soil, can be as transforma-tive as any industrial technology.
Rural empowerment through Science has extended well beyond agricul- ture. From 3D-printed housing prototypes designed for affordable rural construction to AI-powered systems that detect food adulteration, technology is being deliberately directed at solving the problems that matter most to the people who can least afford them.
The National Mission on Interdis- ciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems—which connects computing, sensing and physical engineering — has established twenty-five Technology Innovation Hubs across the country, seeding more than a thousand startups working on problems as varied as precision agriculture, clean water access, and rural healthcare delivery.
Healing India: The Biotechnology Breakthrough
Perhaps no domain illustrates the transformative power of Indian science more vividly than biotechnology and healthcare. For decades, India’s pharmaceutical strength lay in manufacturing — in producing generic versions of drugs discovered elsewhere. That story is changing. The development of Nafithro-mycin, India’s first indige- nously discovered antibiotic in decades, is not merely a scientific milestone: it is a declaration of pharmaceutical self-reliance. Born from a Government-supported collaboration between researchers and industry, it signals that India’s laboratories can now do what only a handful of Nations have managed — innovate at the frontier of drug discovery.
Equally significant is the country’s first successful indigenous gene therapy clinical trial for Haemophilia—a condition that requires lifelong, expensive treatment—conducted at the Christian Medical College in Vellore. Gene therapy works by correcting the underlying genetic fault rather than managing its symptoms; for a country with a large burden of genetic disease, the implications are profound. Combined with the Genome India Project, which has now sequenced over ten thousand human genomes drawn from India’s extraordinarily diverse population, we are laying the scientific foundation for a future in which medicine is tailored to each patient’s biology.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed, with painful clarity, how essential domestic biomedical capacity is to national security. India’s response — develo- ping and manufacturing its own vaccines at scale, deploying them across a population of 1.4 billion — drew on years of investment in our biotechnology ecosystem. The Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council, or BIRAC, has been instrumental in nurturing biotech startups, bridging the gap between academic research and commercial scale-up, and ensuring that scientific innovation finds its way into the hands of those who need it most. Today, a new generation of bio-entrepreneurs is working on precision medicine, sustainable bio-based materials and next-generation diagnostics — and they are doing so from Indian cities and campuses, not just Silicon Valley.
The Genome India Project has sequenced over ten thousand human genomes — laying the foundation for medicine tailored to every Indian’s unique biology.
Reaching for the Stars, Grounding Every Citizen
On the 23rd of August 2023, as the Vikram lander of Chandrayaan-3 made its final descent toward the lunar south pole — a region no nation had ever reached —millions of Indians watched with a collective held breath. The moment of touchdown was not just a technological triumph; it was a national affirmation. India had done what no one else had managed. What followed — the analysis of the Moon’s surface, the data transmitted back across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometres of space—mattered enormously to Planetary Science. But what mattered just as much was what that landing did to the imagination of a country.
India’s space story over the past twelve years has been one of simultaneous ambition and utility. While Chandrayaan-3 captured the world’s attention, Aditya-L1—our first dedicated solar observatory — quietly began its mission to study the Sun, advancing our understanding of space weather that affects satellites, power grids, and communication systems on Earth.
The SpaDeX mission placed India in an elite club of Nations that have demonstrated the ability to dock two spacecraft in orbit — a capability essential for future space stations and crewed missions.
(To be contd)
When a lavender farmer in the Doda district of Jammu plucks the first blossoms of the season, she is not thinking about Science policy. Yet it is precisely a decade of deliberate, mission-driven scientific invest- ment that transformed barren hillsides in the Union Territory into fragrant fields of purple — a revolution in rural livelihoods born in a laboratory. This, in essence, is what twelve years of sustained commitment to Science and Technology in India has meant: not the advancement of knowledge for its own sake, but Science as a living, breathing force in the daily lives of our citizens.
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi assumed office in 2014, he articulated a vision that challenged us to think of Science not as a departmental function but as a National mission. The years that followed have borne that vision out in ways that would have seemed extraordinary a generation ago. Today, India has landed a spacecraft at the Moon’s south pole, developed its own antibiotic for the first time, built supercomputers from Pune to Patna, and created a space economy teeming with homegrown startups. But the deeper story — the one that deserves to be told — is how each of these achievements rippled outward into the lives of ordinary people.
Science is no longer confined to laboratories—it has become the single most powerful driver of National development and citizen empowerment.
Consider the farmer. Weather, always the silent sovereign of Indian agriculture, has become far more legible over the last decade. A comprehensive overhaul of our earth observation and forecasting infrastructure now gives farmers accurate, hyperlocal weather predictions—not in the vague language of probability, but with the kind of precision that allows a family to decide whether to harvest tomorrow or wait. When a cyclone forms over the Bay of Bengal today, our early warning systems give coastal communities hours —sometimes days—of advance notice. The difference is not statistical; it is counted in lives saved and livelihoods preserved.
In the mountains and river valleys of Jammu and Kashmir, science arrived in the form of the Aroma Mission—a programme that introduced lavender cultivation and supported farmers with technology, seeds and market linkages.
What began as a pilot has since transformed into what is now celebrated as India’s Purple Revolution : thousands of farming families earning dignified incomes from aromatic and medicinal plants, with Science as the quiet architect of this prosperity. Similar work in saffron expansion, medicinal herb cultivation, and the first-ever introduction of asafoetida cultivation in India has demonstrated that innovation, rooted in the soil, can be as transforma-tive as any industrial technology.
Rural empowerment through Science has extended well beyond agricul- ture. From 3D-printed housing prototypes designed for affordable rural construction to AI-powered systems that detect food adulteration, technology is being deliberately directed at solving the problems that matter most to the people who can least afford them.
The National Mission on Interdis- ciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems—which connects computing, sensing and physical engineering — has established twenty-five Technology Innovation Hubs across the country, seeding more than a thousand startups working on problems as varied as precision agriculture, clean water access, and rural healthcare delivery.
Healing India: The Biotechnology Breakthrough
Perhaps no domain illustrates the transformative power of Indian science more vividly than biotechnology and healthcare. For decades, India’s pharmaceutical strength lay in manufacturing — in producing generic versions of drugs discovered elsewhere. That story is changing. The development of Nafithro-mycin, India’s first indige- nously discovered antibiotic in decades, is not merely a scientific milestone: it is a declaration of pharmaceutical self-reliance. Born from a Government-supported collaboration between researchers and industry, it signals that India’s laboratories can now do what only a handful of Nations have managed — innovate at the frontier of drug discovery.
Equally significant is the country’s first successful indigenous gene therapy clinical trial for Haemophilia—a condition that requires lifelong, expensive treatment—conducted at the Christian Medical College in Vellore. Gene therapy works by correcting the underlying genetic fault rather than managing its symptoms; for a country with a large burden of genetic disease, the implications are profound. Combined with the Genome India Project, which has now sequenced over ten thousand human genomes drawn from India’s extraordinarily diverse population, we are laying the scientific foundation for a future in which medicine is tailored to each patient’s biology.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed, with painful clarity, how essential domestic biomedical capacity is to national security. India’s response — develo- ping and manufacturing its own vaccines at scale, deploying them across a population of 1.4 billion — drew on years of investment in our biotechnology ecosystem. The Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council, or BIRAC, has been instrumental in nurturing biotech startups, bridging the gap between academic research and commercial scale-up, and ensuring that scientific innovation finds its way into the hands of those who need it most. Today, a new generation of bio-entrepreneurs is working on precision medicine, sustainable bio-based materials and next-generation diagnostics — and they are doing so from Indian cities and campuses, not just Silicon Valley.
The Genome India Project has sequenced over ten thousand human genomes — laying the foundation for medicine tailored to every Indian’s unique biology.
Reaching for the Stars, Grounding Every Citizen
On the 23rd of August 2023, as the Vikram lander of Chandrayaan-3 made its final descent toward the lunar south pole — a region no nation had ever reached —millions of Indians watched with a collective held breath. The moment of touchdown was not just a technological triumph; it was a national affirmation. India had done what no one else had managed. What followed — the analysis of the Moon’s surface, the data transmitted back across three hundred and eighty thousand kilometres of space—mattered enormously to Planetary Science. But what mattered just as much was what that landing did to the imagination of a country.
India’s space story over the past twelve years has been one of simultaneous ambition and utility. While Chandrayaan-3 captured the world’s attention, Aditya-L1—our first dedicated solar observatory — quietly began its mission to study the Sun, advancing our understanding of space weather that affects satellites, power grids, and communication systems on Earth.
The SpaDeX mission placed India in an elite club of Nations that have demonstrated the ability to dock two spacecraft in orbit — a capability essential for future space stations and crewed missions.
(To be contd)