Bharat: India 2.0

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Gautam Radhakrishna Desiraju was born on 21 August 1952, in Chennai and is presently an honorary professor at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is a recipient of several prestigious international awards such as the Alexander von Humboldt Forschungspreis, the TWAS Award in Chemistry and the ISA Medal for Science of the University of Bologna. He was President of the International Union of Crystallography between 2011-2014. As IUCr President, he proposed to the United Nations that 2014 be celebrated as the International Year of Crystallography. He spearheaded this resolution and inaugurated the Year in UNESCO, Paris in January 2014 sharing the podium with Irena Bokova, the then Director General of UNESCO.

Prof. Desiraju's scientific contributions are significant. His work has led to the development of a new chemical concept, Crystal Engineering, wherein he is acknowledged to be a world leader. At the same time, his original work on weak hydrogen bonding has been held by some to be one of the influential ideas in the last half century of chemical thought. With the importance of the generic component t of the pharmaceutical industry in recent years, the work of Prof. Desiraju is of direct importance to the Indian pharmaceutical industry and to the general public in the context of bringing cheaper drugs to the masses.

Citations are the true measure of the impact of a scientist's work. Prof. Desiraju is the second most highly cited Indian scientist today, with three authored books, two edited books, 450 research papers, 65,162 citations and an h-index of 100. He has received a Ph.D honoris causa from Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, Rayalaseema University and Gulbarga University. He was awarded the Acharya P. C. Ray Medal of the University of Calcutta for innovation in science and technology. He is presently chairman of the Governing Council of Bose Institute, Kolkata. He has constantly campaigned for making our scientists look towards swadeshi ideas rather than being copycats of the Western world.

He has authored several commentaries on science, the evolution of chemistry as a subject, emergence and complexity, and research habits and practices in various cultures. He has also written articles about the state of science education and research in India, and about the status of chemistry research in India, where he has identified problems and suggested solutions in situations that are, in part, expected in a country that is rooted in the traditional but aspires for the contemporary.

He strongly believes that if a sense of "Indian-ness" is inculcated, a modern competitive spirit and adherence to professionalism will enter automatically. He feels that this is now largely lacking and has led to our present sluggishness. This book is an attempt to highlight this issue with reference to what he believes is the core issue in India: an unsuitable system of governance that does not optimally dovetail the economic realities of the modern world with our essential civilisational nature. Our present system of governance is, of course, laid out in its most basic form in the Indian Constitution and this therefore is the subject of Bharat: India 2.0.

The writing of this book on Bharat has given me an opportunity to reflect and recollect matters that many might have thought about in recent times. To this concerned citizen, at least one who is no expert in constitutional matters, the actions of our legislators appeared to be politically biased beyond reasonable limit (legislators must be political to some extent!). The actions of our judges seem whimsical and interventionist, whilst the executive, especially its bureaucracy, appear distant and aloof. A genuine lack of knowledge led me to believe that my reactions might simply be incorrect or impulsive, arising from information overload in the social media. However, a desire to learn more about a topic, very distant from my home turf of structural chemistry, arose from my instincts as a researcher, in particular the sure knowledge that a researcher in any given topic is by definition a researcher in any other topic provided they do sufficient reading. I use the word 'sufficient' with care. Extensive reading often leads to scholarship which need not always be research. Research produces a model which is freely open to criticism. Unlike the world of science, to which I have been habituated, and where the referee reports are seen before publication, a book receives its referee reports after publication and this is a risk all writers of books cheerfully take.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages