Author: Dr Jagdish Rai
Image Courtesy: Shutterstock On an ordinary Indian street, a heated argument breaks out. Voices rise, a scuffle begins, and a small crowd gathers. In the past, the resolution of such a conflict would depend entirely on who shouted the loudest or which eyewitness the police chose to believe. Today, the scene is different. Someone in the crowd hesitates, then raises a mobile phone and starts recording. By the next day, the street looks unchanged. But what happened there is no longer a matter of competing memories or biased testimonies. It has been fixed into data—frames, timestamps, audio, and context. This…
One of the reasons why India lags in science research is the non-availability of scientific equipment and instruments. While national institutes and eminent university departments procure state-of-the-art instruments costing crores of rupees from generous funds they receive, remotely located small colleges, research institutes and labs can hardly do cutting edge research due to lack of funds for purchasing instruments. This lopsided scattering of research equipment facility in certain specific locations and structurally fragmented scenario further create imbalance by denying opportunity to bright minds, who have landed in institutions located in the backwaters and now languish there. Another phenomenon regarding the…