User:Soham321/Nehru

Nehru and Science

• Nehru is credited for coining the phrase scientific temper in his book Discovery of India.In Cambridge, Nehru had taken a Natural Science Tripos degree with his subjects being chemistry, geology, and botany. He had also done extensive reading of philosophers and scientists like Bertrand Russel, and Joseph Needham. After 1947, when he assumed power, Nehru is credited for unleashing a 'scientific revolution' in India in a way which few former colonial countries have experienced. He is credited for having established over thirty National Laboratories in diverse areas of science and industry.Nehru had remained President of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research from 1947 till he died. He would attend annual meetings of the Indian Science Congress where he would give the key-note address. He had become a member of the Science and Social Relations Committee of the Indian Science Congress in the early 1940s, and its General President in 1947.

• In 1947, the British Nobel Prize winning scientist P.M.S. Blackett, who had military experience, had lunch with Nehru during an annual meeting of the Indian Science Congress during which they conversed about Indian national security. Following this, Nehru requested Blackett to advise him on military requirements of India, and subsequently on problems confronting India in civil science and education; this resulted in Blackett visiting India on several occasions during which time he would often stay in Nehru's residence in New Delhi. Twenty years later, after Nehru had passed away, Blackett would deliver the first Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi in which he would state:

  Like so many others I fell under the spell of Nehru's charm, his luminous intelligence and his total dedication to achieving world peace, to maintaining the unity of India and to increase the wealth and prosperity of his country by the application of modern science and technology.

• In a 1967 interview, Blackett said that although Nehru did a lot to popularize science, the Nehru regime on the whole could have performed better in modernizing Indian agricultural and industrial sectors if Nehru had Ministers with the requisite mindset needed for the job :

  Nehru did an enormous amount to get non-scientists to understand what was scientific. But his regime did not do nearly as well in implementation. What he lacked were hard-headed industrial-minded Ministers who could push on the agricultural program, the industrial program.