Page 34 - Science India August 2022

COLLECTOR’S EDITION 2.0
Swatantrata ka Amrut Mahotsava
Image Courtesy: kishorimohanbandyopadhyay.wordpress
Image Courtesy: Kishori-Mohan- Bandyopadhyay/Facebook
Above: A plaque at the entrance of the house in Panihati, in present- day North 24 Parganas district of West Bengal, where Kishori Mohan Bandopadhyay once lived
Left: Panihati Co-operative Bank founded by Kishori Mohan Bandyopadhyay and his friends
doctors felicitated Bandyopadhyay at an event in the Senate Hall in Kolkata. The programme was also attended by Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy, who would go on to become the first Chief minister of West Bengal.
FOOT SOLDIER AGAINST MALARIA
Bandyopadhyay was a noted social worker of his time. Under the influ- ence of the revolutionary Mokhyada Charan Samadhyayi, he started im- parting lessons on physical well-being and Swadeshi. On 24 March 1918, Dr Gopal Chandra Chattopadhyay started a public health movement to control the malaria epidemic. Bandyopadhyay be- came his ardent co-worker. A major contribution of Bandyopadhyay was the anti-malaria movement. He started the Anti-Malaria Cooperative Society at Panihati in Bengal.
Dr Gopal Chandra Chattopadhyay established that the spread of malaria could be controlled through the sani- tary conscience of the common people. Chattopadhyay was the organisation’s first president and Bandyopadhyay its first secretary. Within a short time, by cleaning ponds, drains of the village, removing garbage and spraying kerosene
by Ross in his Nobel lecture, nor even mentioned in his memoirs having a full account of the great malaria problem and solution in 1923.
KNOWING KISHORI MOHAN BANDYOPADHYAY
Kishori Mohan Bandyopadhyay was born in 1883 in Calcutta. He joined as laboratory assistant for Ross in 1898 at the Calcutta Presidency General Hos- pital. Bandyopadhyay was a versatile genius — a scientist, social worker and nationalist. Ross quickly realised that he had hit a goldmine as Bandyopad- hyay was immensely popular among local villagers. The reason being that his grandfather was a renowned practi- tioner of Ayurveda medicines who had sown the seed of scientific curiosity and love for exact sciences in his grandson too. Bandyopadhyay travelled to differ- ent villages, often very poorly connected by roads or railways, and convinced malaria patients to give blood samples for research. With the large sample of data available for Ross, it was rather straightforward to draw conclusions for the malaria cycle in birds.
In 1901 he passed the entrance examination for the Ripon Collegiate
School. In 1903 he passed the F. A. ex- amination from Ripon College as well as the Addya examination in Sanskrit. He later taught at B M S Girls School in Kol- kata and thereafter at Trannath High School of Panihati where he worked till 1914. Two years later he passed the Bachelor of Laws at the University of Calcutta.
After Ross received the Nobel Prize, Upendranath Brahmachari, Acharya Jagadis Chandra Bose, Brajendra Nath Seal, Sivanath Sastri, Surendranath Ba- nerjee and Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray requested Lord Curzon to honour Bandhyopadhyay’s contribution to the scientific achievement. This led to the presentation of King Edward VII’s Gold Medal to Bandyopadhyay in 1903 during the Delhi Durbar by the Duke of Connaught. He was only 20 years old at that time! After his return from Delhi, several scholars, scientists and
After Ross’ Nobel Prize, Lord Curzon was requested to honour Bandyopadhyay’s contributions to the scientific achievement
34 SCIENCE INDIA AUGUST 2022