The Hindu Business Line : Ig-Nobel record

LEAVING aside the Peace prize, as per the information available up to 2000, 631 Nobel prizes have been awarded, of which the US (242) has been the largest recipient with one prize for a million population, followed by the Britain (85 or 1.66 per million), Germany (73 or 0.93 per million), France (42 or 0.81 per million), Sweden (23 or 3.37 per million), and Switzerland (15 or three per million). Even tiny Denmark (11), sparsely populated Canada (12), nondescript nations such as the Netherlands (15), Spain (6) and Belgium(5) and Japan (7) rising from its ashes after 1945 have notched respectable figures compared to their size and population.

While it is understandable that major industrial nations such as the US, the UK, Germany and Japan are in the vanguard of achievements in science, technology and medicine, countries such as Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark too are surprisingly edging close to them. Switzerland scores with two for Physics, five for Chemistry and six for Medicine, Sweden with six, four and six and Denmark with three, one and four for the same subjects in the same order.

(Those eager for the full picture are advised to visit the site http://www.nobel.se/index.html for their edi(morti)fication.)

Now, what about India, the country of Aryabhata, Bhaskara, Charaka, Dhanvantri, Susruta and Varahamihira, which prides itself on giving to the world zero, the decimal system, ayurveda and yoga, and having fostered the scientific temper for the last 60 years? What have Indian science and Indian scientists to show for all the money invested in national laboratories and higher professional education? Just one Nobel prize in Physics and that too 74 years ago! Chandrasekhar and Khurana with whose names we console ourselves never lived here nor were they Indian citizens. Dr Amartya Sen's equivalent of Nobel Prize was only for Economics and that may be all that we have to count for some years to come.

Even in literature, this country of Valmiki, Vyasa, Kalidasa, Thiruvalluvar, Ilango, Kambar and Bharathi, has only one (Rabindranath Tagore, 1913) to its credit, whereas the number of prizes won by countries such as France (12), the US (11), Britain and Germany (8 each), Sweden (7), Italy (6), Spain (5) and Poland (4) is disproportionate to their population, leave alone their cultural heritage.

Can anyone unravel the mystery of India's Ig-Nobel record?

B. S. Raghavan

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