Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: Millennium Plaque of Honour

  • A tale of two awardees

    In many respects Krishna Ella and Elon Musk are poles apart but on some they share a few similarities. Both of them have played along with nationalist elements in their respective national governments in order to further their agendas, if not profits. Both men are also at the helm of successful companies that build valuable products that a lot of people need, that the world needs. But while Elon Musk continues to be a despotic techbro, Krishna Ella is just a fellow who’s made some detrimental decisions.

    Recently, both men were also in the news for honours they’d received.

    The Royal Society in the UK continues to remain under pressure to rescind its fellowship of Musk, which it granted in 2018, owing to his attacks on free speech (ironically in the guise of protecting an absolute right to free speech), support for pseudoscientific ideas (including his antivaccine sentiments and support for climate denialism), and generally being unable to tell profundity from horseshit.

    At least one other fellow has resigned to protest the Royal Society’s unwillingness to suspend Musk’s membership: retired University of Oxford psychologist Dorothy Bishop. She wrote in November 2024 on her blog:

    There was no formal consultation of the Fellowship but via informal email contacts, a group of 74 Fellows formulated a letter of concern that was sent in early August [2024] to the President of the Royal Society, raising doubts as to whether he was “a fit and proper person to hold the considerable honour of being a Fellow of the Royal Society”. The letter specifically mentioned the way Musk had used his platform on X to make unjustified and divisive statements that served to inflame right-wing thuggery and racist violence in the UK. 

    Somebody (not me!) leaked the letter to the Guardian, who ran a story about it on 23rd August.

    I gather that at this point the Royal Society Council opted to consult a top lawyer to determine whether Musk’s behaviour breached their Code of Conduct. The problem with this course of action is that if you are uncertain about doing something that seems morally right but may have consequences, then it is easy to find a lawyer who will advise against doing it. … And, sure enough, the lawyer determined that Musk hadn’t breached the Code of Conduct.

    According to Bishop, Musk is in breach of sections 2.6, 2.10, and 2.11 of the ‘Code of Conduct’:

    2.6: Fellows and Foreign Members shall carry out their scientific research with regard to the Society’s statement on research integrity and to the highest standards.

    2.10: Fellows and Foreign Members shall treat all individuals in the scientific enterprise collegially and with courtesy, including supervisors, colleagues, other Society Fellows and Foreign Members, Society staff, students and other early‐career colleagues, technical and clerical staff, and interested members of the public.

    2.11: Fellows and Foreign Members shall not engage in any form of discrimination, harassment, or bullying.

    Seems fair. I reckon that together with the possibility of the unspecified “consequences” for the Royal Society Bishop has speculated, the body will also be mindful of being obligated to reassess the fellowship of many other individuals on its roster should it remove Musk on these grounds. (To be clear, this isn’t a defence of its position.)

    I’ve always held that awards are distinguished by their laureates and not the other way around. Fellowship of the Royal Society isn’t technically an award but for the most part it operates with the same incentives. Its code is thoughtful enough to not be limited to one’s conduct as a scientist. Just as the Millennium Plaque of Honour wouldn’t make a dent on the reputation of any scientist who wins it because it was awarded to Appa Rao Podile in 2017 — after he let police personnel lathi-charge the students in his care at the University of Hyderabad — it must be difficult to count Musk among one’s peers as fellows of the Royal Society.

    Consider Krishna Ella now. As part of its annual routine, the Indian National National Science Academy (INSA) handed out 61 fellowships last week, Ella among them. It’s the first time INSA has included industry leaders for this recognition. According to a statement on the INSA website:

    Dr. Krishna Ella, a prominent Indian scientist and entrepreneur, leads Bharat Biotech in ground-breaking vaccine development. His achievements include India’s Covaxin, the world’s first clinically proven conjugated Typhoid Vaccine, ROTAVAC, and the first preservative-free vaccine, Revac-B mcf Hepatitis B Vaccine. Bharat Biotech also introduced India’s first cell-cultured Swine Flu vaccine and manufactures the world’s most affordable Hepatitis vaccines. Additionally, they were the first globally to develop a vaccine for the Zika virus.

    Impressive achievements, right? But to me, Ella will equally be the man who saw fit to file defamation cases against me and many of my fellow journalists for publishing evidence-based articles critical of the manner in which the Indian government approved Covaxin for COVID-19 (with emphasis on the Indian government, not Bharat Biotech).

    I’m not at liberty to quote from these articles as Bharat Biotech was able to obtain an ex-parte injunction to take them offline until the proceedings concluded. But as with Bishop vis-à-vis Musk, here’s an instructive passage from the INSA ‘Code of Conduct’:

    All people associated with INSA are expected to adhere to certain minimal standards of ethical behaviour which include but are not limited to, honesty, integrity, and professional (sic). Integrity in the context of scientific research means trustworthiness of the data collected/presented, their interpretation, and the soundness of methodology/protocol followed in carrying out the research.

    At the time the Drugs Controller General of India (DGCI) signed off on the use of Covaxin and Covishield in “clinical trial mode” on the cusp of India’s drive to vaccinate against COVID-19, in January 2021, the country’s medico-legal doctrine didn’t recognise the term “trial mode” and phase III trials of both vaccines hadn’t been completed.

    To make matters worse, the DGCI said the vaccines were “110% safe” when the safety data hadn’t even been collected. AstraZeneca came through later with the complete safety and efficacy data for Covishield. In July 2021, Bharat Biotech researchers uploaded a preprint paper reporting safety data for only 56 days following vaccination with Covaxin. To this day, Bharat Biotech and the Union health ministry have yet to release the long-term safety data collected during Covaxin’s phase-III trial. Instead, both the company and the national government have simply expected people at large to trust them. Irrespective of whether the vaccine is safe, these actions are inimical to trustworthiness.

    I’m not opposed to Ella becoming an INSA fellow because I don’t care. Instead, my concerns are about INSA: I know it focuses on a prospective fellow’s scientific work at the time of granting the fellowship (see link below) and I suspect the Royal Society does too, but the latter also has a code of conduct that extends to fellows’ conduct beyond the scientific enterprise and other fellows who find value in all their peers adhering to it.

    The Royal Society fellows’ protests against sharing the honour with Musk is of a piece with his increasingly rightward turn in recent years being met with scientists speaking up against him in various fora. While there isn’t a correspondingly objectionable scientist in India, I also don’t recall members of the Indian scientific community speaking up in defence of science journalists who are speaking for science when they’re harassed by other members of the research enterprise, at least beyond the constant few I remain grateful for.

  • On India’s new ‘Vigyan Puraskar’ awards

    The Government of India has replaced the 300 or so awards for scientists it used to give out until this year with the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar (RVP), a set of four awards with 56 laureates, The Hindu has reported. Unlike in the previous paradigm, and like the Padma awards to recognise the accomplishments of civilians, the RVP will comprise a medal and a certificate, and no cash. The changes are the result of the recommendations of a committee put together last year by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).

    The new paradigm presents four important opportunities to improve the way the Indian government recognises good scientific work.

    1. Push for women

    A note forwarded by the Department of Science and Technology, which has so far overseen more than 200 awards every year, to the MHA said, “Adequate representation of women may … be ensured” – an uncharacteristically direct statement (worded in the characteristic style of the Indian bureaucracy) that probably alludes to the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar (SSB) Awards, which were only announced last week for the year 2022.

    The SSB Awards are the most high-profile State-sponsored awards for scientists in the old paradigm, and they have become infamous for their opaque decision-making and gross under-representation of women scientists. Their arbitrary 45-year age limit further restricted opportunities for women to be nominated, given breaks in their career due to pregnancies, childcare, etc. As a result, even fewer women have won an SSB Award than the level of their participation in various fields of the scientific workforce.

    According to The Hindu, to determine the winners of each year’s RVP awards, “A committee will be constituted every year, comprising the Secretaries of six science Ministries, up to four presidents of science and engineering academies, and six distinguished scientists and technologists from various fields”.

    The SSB Awards’ opacity was rooted in the fact that candidates had to be nominated by their respective institutes, without any process to guarantee proper representation, and that the award-giving committee was shrouded in secrecy, with no indication as to their deliberations. To break from this regrettable tradition, the Indian government should publicise the composition of the RVP committee every year and explain its process. Such transparency, and public accountability, is by itself likely to ensure more women will be nominated for and receive the awards than through any other mechanism.

    2. No cash component

    The RVP awards score by eliminating the cash component for laureates. Scientific talent and productivity are unevenly distributed throughout India, and are typically localised in well-funded national institutes or in a few private universities, so members of the scientific workforce in these locales are also more likely to win awards. Giving these individuals large sums of money, that too after they have produced notable work and not before, will be redundant and only subtract from the fortunes of a less privileged scientist.

    A sum of Rs 5 lakh may not be significant from a science department’s point of view, but it is the principle that matters.

    To enlarge the pool of potential candidates, the government must also ensure that research scholars receive their promised scholarships on time. At present, delayed scholarships and fellowships have become a tragic hallmark of doing science in India, together with officials’ promises and scramble every year to hasten disbursals.

    3. Admitting PIOs

    In the new paradigm, up to one of the three Vigyan Ratna awards every year may go to a person of Indian origin (PIO), and up to three PIOs may receive the Vigyan Shri and Yuva-SSB awards, of the 25 in each group. (PIOs aren’t eligible for the three Vigyan Team awards.)

    Including PIOs in the national science awards framework is a slippery slope. An award for scientific work is implicitly an award to an individual for exercising their duties as a scientist as well as for navigating a particular milieu, by securing the resources required for their work or – as is often the case in India – conducting frugal yet clever experiments to overcome resource barriers.

    Rewarding a PIO who has made excellent contributions to science while working abroad, and probably after having been educated abroad, would delink the “made in India” quality of the scientific work from the work itself, whereas we need more awards to celebrate this relationship.

    This said, the MHA may have opened the door to PIOs in order to bring the awards to international attention, by fêting Indian-origin scientists well-known in their countries of residence.

    4. Science awards for science

    The reputation of an award is determined by the persons who win it, illustrated as much by, say, Norway’s Abel Prize as by the Indian Science Congress’s little-known ‘Millennium Plaques of Honour’. To whom will the RVP prizes be awarded? As stated earlier, the award-giving committee will comprise Secretaries of the six science Ministries, “up to” four presidents of the science and engineering academies, and six “distinguished” scientists and technologists.

    These ‘Ministries’ are the Departments of Science and Technology, of Biotechnology, of Space, and of Atomic Energy, and the Ministries of Earth Sciences and of Health and Family Welfare. As such, they exclude representatives from the Ministries of Environment, Animal Husbandry, and Agriculture, which also deal with research, often of the less glamorous variety.

    Just as there are inclusion criteria, there should be exclusion criteria as well, such as requiring eligible candidates to have published papers in credible journals (or preprint repositories) and/or to not work with or be related in any other way to members of the jury. Terms like “distinguished” are also open to interpretation. Earlier this year, for example, Mr. Khader Vali Dudekula was conferred a Padma Shri in the ‘Science and Engineering’ category for popularising the nutritional benefits of millets, but he has also claimed, wrongly, that consuming millets can cure cancer and diabetes.

    The downside of reduction and centralisation is that they heighten the risk of exclusion. Instead of becoming another realm in which civilians are excluded – or included on dubious grounds, for that matter – the new awards should take care to place truly legitimate scientific work above work that meets any arbitrary ideological standard.

  • The Indian Science Congress has gutted its own award by giving it to Appa Rao Podile

    Featured image credit: ratha/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

    I hadn’t heard of the Millennium Plaque of Honour before yesterday, January 3. From what I was able to read up before filing my report in The Wire (about embattled Hyderabad University vice-chancellor Appa Rao Podile receiving the plaque at the ongoing Indian Science Congress):

    1. It has been awarded by the Indian Science Congress Association since 2003, when it was instituted as the ‘Science & Society Award’
    2. Its name was changed to the New Millennium Plaque of Honour in 2005
    3. It carries a citation, a literal plaque and a cash component of Rs 20,000 “to cover incidental expenses”
    4. It is awarded to two eminent scientists at the Science Congress every year

    If the annual event was considered prestigious or even very laudable until 2014, I’m not entirely sure (although it certainly wasn’t a very gala affair). But in 2015 and after, it’s certainly taken a beating. In 2015, particularly, the congress was invaded by right-wing nuts convinced that Vedic age scholars had flown planes to Mars and transplanted animal heads onto human bodies. Proceedings were relatively free of controversy in 2016 before taking another turn for the worse in 2017: by giving a Millennium Plaque to Appa Rao (as well as to Avula Damodaram, but that’s a lesser problem we’ll come to later).

    A day or so ago, in a conversation on Twitter, both R. Prasad (The Hindu‘s science editor) and Gautam Desiraju (a celebrated chemist at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru) agreed that many Indian events had off late been banking on legitimacy ‘loaned’ from foreign institutions. For example, a large part of the Indian Science Congress’s public outreach every year involves blaring that X Nobel laureates will be in attendance. Nobel laureates are eminent people men, sure, but often they don’t do much other than give a talk and just be in attendance. And their presence doesn’t do much for the quality of the conference, overall in a decline, either (see footnote). In December 2012, P. Balaram, the director of IIT-Madras, wrote in an editorial in the journal Current Science,

    … few practising scientists of note consider the Congress as an important event. Pomp and ceremony take precedence over substance. Over the years the Congress has been reduced to an occasion where the inaugural session appears to be the raison de etre for the meeting. The traditional opening address by the Prime Minister predictably reiterates governmental commitment to support science and invariably promises to remove the many bureaucratic hurdles that sometimes loom larger than life in the minds of many scientists. The presence of the executive head of government invests the inaugural event with an importance that is often not commensurate with the quality of the scientific sessions that follow. The occasion is also used to showcase a couple of Nobel laureates, who fly in to speak to audiences with little appetite for excessively technical talks. The organisers, bolstered by considerable government backing, are always good hosts; the distinguished foreign presence ensuring that the Congress always acquires a degree of respectability rarely supported by the scientific program.

    In such times, the value of reinforcing local rewards, recognitions, symbols, ideals, etc. is as important as respecting and re-legitimising them as well. This means that an award like the Millennium Plaque of Honour (despite its pompous name), instituted as it has been by the Indian Science Congress, should be given on every occasion to scientists truly deserving of the award and, more importantly, never to anyone who will lower by association the prestige accorded to the award.

    Appa Rao is capable of doing the latter. Particularly after Rohith Vemula’s suicide last year (and more generally for a half-year period before that), Appa Rao, as vice-chancellor, was responsible for allowing partisan interventions from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to interfere in university student politics as well as for violently quelling student protests that followed on the University of Hyderabad campus. Shortly after the news of Vemula’s death broke, the Times of India also reported that Appa Rao had acquired his vice-chancellorship through political connections, especially with BJP minister Venkaiah Naidu and Telugu Desam Party chief Chandrababu Naidu.

    A relevant passage from our coverage of the incidents:

    Police, CRPF and RAF forces came to the campus, and students assembled on the lawns outside the VC’s lodge were brutally removed and lathi charged. Some students were badly injured and had to be taken to hospitals, sources have said. Students have also said that they were abused and insulted, and female students were threatened with rape. Students from minority communities were allegedly called “terrorists”.

    It’s impossible to overlook the fact that his only presence in recent memory was as a craven but powerful stooge, and in fact almost never for his work as a scientist. He hasn’t done anything memorable of late nor as he displayed the integrity due a vice-chancellor of a public institution. In fact, shortly after the student protests, I had also published evidence of plagiarism in three of his research papers. If he has won a Millennium Plaque, then it only means the ‘honour’ doesn’t stand for research excellence anymore as much as for neglecting one’s duties and for perverting the all-important autonomy of an important position.

    Worse yet, it seems an award of the Indian Science Congress has become subverted into becoming an instrument of negotiation for political agents: “You let me interfere in your duties, I will give you a fancy-sounding award”. The other recipient of the same award this year, Avula Damodaram, doesn’t inspire confidence, either – although I concede I have no evidence following my suspicions (yet). Damodaram is the vice-chancellor of Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati, the same institute that’s hosting the science congress this year. Binay Panda, a bioinformatician and friend, wasn’t surprised:

    §

    Footnote: Mukund Thattai, a biologist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, conducted a poll on Twitter asking why people took to science. The option ‘once saw a Nobel laureate’ clocked in last:

    https://twitter.com/thattai/status/815885580651216896

    Seventy-four is not a great sample size but 1% is a far more abysmal number.