How scientist PM Bhargava made school curricula innovative to cultivate a scientific temper in India
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Nehru became the first President of the Association of Scientific Workers of India (ASWI), a trade union of scientists with at least a BSc degree or its equivalent, founded in the late 1940s. One of ASWI’s stated aims was to promote scientific temper. Pushpa Mitra Bhargava was on its first Executive Committee and, between 1950 and 1953, served as Secretary of its Hyderabad branch. The association began well but soon slid into virtual irrelevance. Among its early members was M Channa Reddy, then a young minister and later Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh. As his political stature grew, his reliance on superstition grew alongside it. So anxious was he about holding on to power that he carried a “lucky” wand prescribed by a godman to ward off the evil eye.
ASWI’s decline was rapid, and by 1963 its revival was virtually impossible. Bhargava, along with Satish Dhawan and Abdur Rahman, decided to start afresh. They set up the Society for the Promotion of Scientific Temper, convinced that the country needed a national body devoted solely to this purpose. They published a statement on scientific temper in Seminar, spelling out what the term meant and why it mattered. The postal address of...