I
experience a sense of duty mixed with fear (of being late and penalized) when it
comes to income tax filing. Most of us, as citizens of this country, feel accountable
towards the law of the land. But, where is the accountability of the government
funded science institutions? I express my agony against the severe lack of
accountability for the use of public money in science and higher education. The
recent funding crunch in country’s science is no excuse to plunderage of past.
There are institutions having poorly managed multiple copies of the same
expensive instruments. Each of such instruments cost a few crores of INR and the plunderage is not an inappropriate term to be used. One might disagree and
counter-argue this view. However, why these arguments are needed at all if
there can be a transparently managed official platform for the accountability
of public money in science institutions. Since most of the instruments and
other facilities are funded by the very same handful of agencies, a database
can be managed and made public. Surprisingly, many of these institutions do not
even declare these facilities on their official web-pages. The institutional reviews
by external peers appears a formality and no real issues are assessed. It might
not be appropriate to argue on why these facilities do not fetch even a single
cell, science or nature article, the real issues are the ignorance, arrogance and the severe lack of co-operation. Why can’t these facilities be limited and shared democratically
among the seekers? After all, these instruments are not discovered by scientists in their backyard neither they diffused in from parallel universe as an investment by aliens in Indian Science. Why do most scientists become assholes?
