What would a complete overhaul of science education look like? The student protests we witnessed across the country called for constructive steps to get us out of our educational rut. In the case of science, we can answer this question by looking at the small, sporadic, progressive campaigns voiced by the scientific community.
There is no denying that in 2026, Indian science suffers from mediocrity. First, there are many Indian names in the global conversation about AI, but there is no talk about Indian AI models. In the scientific world, mediocrity also means a lot of bad research papers, and India is among the top three countries with the highest number of retracted papers. In 2025, six of the ten universities in the world with the most article retractions will be in India.
While industrial applications and science-based innovation are policy priorities for the country, they have yet to materialize on the ground. This is despite the fact that India has a huge pool of knowledge workers with the potential to achieve innovation. Vishwaguru proportions. Over the last decade, science students and the wider community of educators, professors and scientists have had to internally grapple with the systemic monsters that confront them every step of the way.
First, restricting academic freedom is fundamentally anti-scientific. According to the Scholars at Risk Network’s Academic Freedom Index, India’s score fell from 0.6 in 2013 to 0.2 in 2023, the lowest level since the mid-1940s, and further to 0.16 by 2025, ranking India 156th out of 179 countries. The restrictions imposed over the past decade are not only counterproductive because they restrict the free flow of knowledge, but also unconstitutional because they interfere with the exercise of our political rights that guarantee freedom of speech and expression, as well as the right to peacefully assemble and associate.
This graph shows India’s progress in the Academic Freedom Index from 1950 to 2026, with its score currently at its lowest in that time period. | Photo credit: V-Dem Institute
Locally, this manifested itself not only in the cancellation of lectures. Aniket Sule of the Homi Bhabha Center for Science Education (HBCSE-TIFR), Mumbai, has witnessed several instances where the hands of the government have tried to suppress dissenting voices in Indian science. He cites two recent examples: when the International Olympiad in Astronomy and Astrophysics, held in India in 2025, banned Israel from participating; and most recently, when scholar-subscribers from across the country jointly criticized a mandatory conference for IIT Mandi students that included classes on the afterlife, reincarnation and astrology. In both of these cases, as in many others, Sule says ruling party ministers made inquiries through the directors of these supposedly autonomous institutions about who was behind these campaigns and demanded an explanation as to why such political actions were taken.
There were also indirect warnings. Sule, a frequent advocate for academic freedom in India, knows that political discussions are not welcome: “Every time we meet people at certain committee meetings, we are verbally told that the ministry is monitoring all these activities and you better be careful.”
Memos and warnings sent from higher levels of government managed to create an atmosphere of fear in the wider scientific community. According to Sule: “80 percent [to] As far as I know, 90 percent of the scientific community does not share the government’s ideology, but they are simply too afraid to stand up for their beliefs. Maybe it’s fear for your job, fear of getting promoted or getting a management position somewhere.” This fear mongering must be stopped to free the mind of every government employee, scientist, worker and student.
Investments in pseudoscience
India’s scientific progress has also been seriously damaged by the magical thinking that is now permeating the government: from Narendra Modi’s own fascination with numerology, to NCERT’s removal of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution from Class 10 textbooks in 2023, to the widely ridiculed claim of a retired High Court judge that peahens will become pregnant by swallowing peacock tears, and countless other pseudo-scientific claims by people holding public office. Achieving India’s scientific potential would mean shutting down all pseudo-scientific projects and putting the brakes on the Centers of Indian Knowledge Systems that are now festering inside our IITs. These initiatives only serve to promote the Hindutva philosophy.
As Meera Nanda, a historian of science, warns, this appropriation of science for the glory of the Vedas is one of the central pillars on which the myth of Hindu superiority rests, and in the name of national pride, students are deprived of the conceptual tools they need to solve the real problems they will face as scientists and engineers.
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence has already entered the doors of our workplaces and classrooms as India’s research and development (R&D) spending has stagnated at around 0.6-0.7 percent of GDP for two decades. This is only a small part of the 2.5–5 percent that innovation-leading countries invest. Over the past 14 years, Indian taxpayers have financed the destruction of their own scientific institutions. This must end.
Separation of students and disciplines
The uneven access to education in Indian society, as well as who heads our scientific institutes and universities, makes it clear that our country continues to be dominated by upper castes. Caste sorting begins long before the university level and continues into higher scientific education. In the top five IITs and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), 98 per cent of the professors belong to privileged castes. And at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, an “Institute of Excellence” exempt from the constitutional guarantee of reservation for marginalized castes, the situation is similar, if not worse. Adivasis make up less than 5 percent of STEM students in India. And at the PhD level, Dalit representation in top IITs averages just 10 per cent and Adivasi representation is 2 per cent, below the mandatory 15 and 7.5 respectively.
There is also a human cost. When Dalit and Adivasi students and teachers finally reach our campuses, they often face persecution, sometimes fatally: Rohith Vemula in 2016, Payal Tadvi in 2019 and many others committed suicide due to institutional apathy towards caste-based persecution. Data from the University Grants Commission (UGC) shows that discrimination complaints have risen by 118 percent in five years. When UGC tried to respond with modest share capital rules earlier this year, there was a backlash within days, which we are also seeing now with Arakhshan Hatao (remove clause) rhetoric.
Linked to the Brahminical dominance of knowledge systems in India is the appointment of pliant directors and vice-chancellors of these institutions, which has become commonplace under the Modi rule. The management of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), IITs, IISc and Indian Institutes of Scientific and Educational Research (IISER) laboratories should be transparent and insulated from political patronage. The existing management has proven unable to meaningfully engage with reservation policy. For example, Jawaharlal Nehru University Vice-Chancellor Santishri Dhulipudi Pandit called caste discrimination an “artificial reality.” With thousands of reserved teaching posts lying vacant across the country, which the existing management has failed to fill, staffing shortages in themselves act as another exclusion mechanism.
Finally, Indian academia has become too comfortable separating the humanities and sciences into two silos. Technical knowledge, devoid of any understanding of how technology ultimately interacts with society, continues to define Indian STEM education. Integrating the humanities into the science curriculum is essential for developing critical thinking. Technological progress does not happen in a vacuum, and unless STEM students are able to understand this, we will continue to follow old models where decades of science funding priorities do not lead to scientific solutions on the ground.
As Vetti Giri, a lecturer in the Department of Science Education at Azim Premji University, Bangalore, says in an interview with the publication Life of Science describing his work on the nature of science: “If students are introduced to the idea that the creation and storage of knowledge are social and political processes, then they will think critically about the nature of information.”
A working alternative can be seen in China. In a recent article for NatureXin Fan, deputy dean of the Shanghai Institute of Technology for the Humanities, argues that science and the humanities should not compete. He says the world “needs humanities research to understand the causes and consequences” of rapidly advancing science. As AI transforms the workforce, medicine, and information itself, students with technical keys need ethical and historical training to use them responsibly.
All proposed changes fail without transparency and accountability. Apart from saffronization, the main criticism of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 was the centralization and privatization of education. These are not separate problems, but the same problem twice, concentrating decision-making where the public does not see it – be it in Delhi or in an institutional boardroom that is not accessible to the public. Science departments across the country need to make it clear that transparency is not a bureaucratic nicety, but a necessary condition for ensuring that every step towards progress is followed. Over the past decade, government-backed attempts to reform India’s education system have been limited to initiatives that were launched with great fanfare but soon disappeared behind opaque operations, funding and staffing. Looking back, you can only see a graveyard of schemes; The tombstones are engraved with abbreviations of Sanskrit words. Next to these diagrams lie all our scientific aspirations.
Aashima Dogra is a science writer; she is the co-founder of feminist science media portal thelifeofscience.com and co-author of the recent book LabHopping, which explores the realities of the gender gap in Indian STEM.
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