The recent statement of India born Noble Laureate Venkat Ramakrishna at a Punjab University programme at Chandigarh few days ago that Homeopathy and astrology are useless and harmful practices is severe indictment of the current medical environment in which our country is engaged.
These days we see a proliferation of astrology based programmes being aired on Electronic media and people of India are unnecessarily being forced to believe in myth based astrology at a time when the world today is engrossed in research and development and every day the benchmark set by science itself is being replaced by the new research.
Ramakrishnan, better known as Venki among scientific communities is the first Indian origin President of the Royal Society,UK’s national academy of sciences, in its 350 years of existence. He aptly pointed out that India is the only country where the constitution asks for promotion of scientific temper among the citizen of the country. Under the section on Fundamental Duties, article 51A (h) of our Constitution enjoins every citizen of India ‘to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of enquiry and reform’.
Despite the Constitution exhorting to build up scientific temper, the country spends less than 1% of its GDP on scientific research. On the one hand good amount is spent to promote astrology based programmes on TVs with the tacit approval of Ministry of Information and Broadcasting which is responsible for regulating the media .The Ministry seems to be least concerned about the content of the programme.
Mr Venki rightly termed astrology as “bogus” as it has no scientific backing but these days myth based astrology programmes are increasing taking space on TV shows and understably will go a long way to stifle the spirit of scientific temperament among the viewers.
He elaborated that astrology evolved from the human tendency to look for “pattern, generalise and believe”. He further said, “There is no scientific basis for how movement of planets and stars can influence our fate. There is no reason for time of birth to influence events years later”.
Today we see the corporate world is leaving no stone unturned to exploit the opportunity, and even people’s beliefs and sentiments have not been spared, to corner the wealth.
On the one hand we aspire to become the “super power “and on the other hand not a single Indian institute of higher learning figures in the top 100 ranking of world university is a poor comment on the quality of education and research in the country.
Let our government intervene seriously to fulfil one of the fundamental Duties of our Constitution as a facilitator so that the scientific temperament is built up among the citizen.