Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy recently shed light on India's historical superiority in science and innovations. He pointed out that youth are pushed back by 1000 years due to foreign invasions and British colonisation. He called for India to reclaim its science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) power to solve the nation’s problems.
Murthy emphasised the power of scientific discovery and innovation for every nation while quoting the late Shimon Peres from Israel. “In Israel, a land lacking in natural resources, we learned to appreciate our greatest national advantage: Our minds. Through creativity and innovation, we transformed barren deserts into flourishing fields and pioneered new frontiers in science and technology,” he said at the announcement ceremony for the 2024 Infosys Science Prizes (ISP).
Drawing parallels with Israel's achievements, Murthy pointed out that India was a leading nation leveraging the power of ideas in mathematics, astronomy, engineering, medicine, and surgery from the Vedic times. He said that the multiple invasions stunted the nation’s progress while noting that rulers from Afghanistan and Uzbekistan did not have much appreciation for science, medicine, and mathematics.
“But our progress was slow. Thus, Indian youth were held back in their pursuits of these areas, including observation of nature, curiosity, inferencing, critical and analytical thinking, invention and innovation, and problem definition and problem-solving between 1000 AD and 1947 AD — a period of about a thousand years,” he was quoted as saying.
Further, Murthy laid down factors that are essential for restoring India’s academic prominence.“History also teaches us that successful countries develop a mindset of high aspiration, global benchmarking, and open-mindedness to learn how top-quality global research and higher educational institutions are governed in countries that have produced groundbreaking ideas from research efforts. Singapore is a good example. We may want to study the case of Singapore,” he added.
