What would a complete overhaul of the science education system look like? The student protests we have witnessed across the country were pleading for constructive steps to get us out of our educational rut. In the case of science, we can answer that question by looking at the small, sporadic, progressive campaigns that have been voiced by the science community.
It is undeniable that in 2026, Indian science is plagued with mediocrity. For one, the global discussion on AI features many Indian names but there is no talk of Indian-AI models. In the scientific world, mediocrity also translates to having many bad research papers and India ranks among the top three countries with the most retracted papers. In 2025, six of the ten universities in the world with the most paper retractions are in India.
Even though industrial applications and science-backed innovation for the country have been policy priorities, they have not yet materialised on the ground. This is despite the fact that India possesses a vast mass of knowledge workers with the potential to achieve innovations of vishwaguru proportions. For the last decade, science students and the wider community of teachers, professors and scientists have had to internally battle systemic monsters that meet them every step of the way.
Firstly, restricting academic freedom is fundamentally anti-science. The Academic Freedom Index by the Scholars at Risk network saw India’s score fall from 0.6 in 2013 to 0.2 in 2023, its lowest since the mid-1940s, and further to 0.16 by 2025—ranking India 156th of 179 countries. Restrictions imposed over the last decade are not only counterproductive, as they limit the free flow of knowledge, but also unconstitutional, as they inhibit the exercise of our political rights that guarantee freedom of speech and expression, and the right to assemble peaceably and form associations.
This graph depicts India’s progression on the Academic Freedom Index from 1950 to 2026, with the value currently at its lowest in this time frame.
| Photo Credit:
V-Dem Institute
This has shown up on the ground as a lot more than cancelled lectures. Aniket Sule from the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE-TIFR), Mumbai, has witnessed several instances where the arms of the Government have reached out to stifle dissenting voices in Indian science. He points to two recent examples: when the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics, hosted in India in 2025, barred Israel from participating; and, more recently, when scientist-signatories from across the country jointly criticised a mandatory conference for students from IIT Mandi that included sessions on afterlife, reincarnation, and astrology. In both these cases, and numerous others, Sule says that ministers from the ruling party sent enquiries via the directors of these supposedly autonomous institutions about who was behind these campaigns and demanded explanations for why such political action was taken.
There have also been indirect warnings. Having often raised his voice for academic freedom in India, Sule knows political discourse is not welcome: “Every time we meet people at some committee meetings or the other, we are orally told that the ministry keeps a tab on all these activities and you better watch out.”
Notes and warnings sent from higher levels of government have succeeded in instilling a climate of fear within the wider scientific community. As Sule puts it: “80 per cent [to] 90 per cent of the scientific community, that I am aware of, don’t buy into the ideology of the government, but it is just that they are too afraid to stand up to their beliefs. Maybe it is fear for a job or fear for promotions or getting directorships somewhere.” This fear mongering needs to be stopped so that the mind of every government employee, scientist, worker, and student are set free.
Investment in pseudoscience
India’s scientific progress has also suffered gravely from the magical thinking that now runs through the government: from Narendra Modi’s own fascination with numerology, to the NCERT’s removal of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution from Class 10 textbooks in 2023, to a retired High Court judge’s widely mocked claim that peahens get pregnant by swallowing peacock tears, and countless other pseudoscientific pronouncements from people who occupy positions of public authority. Reaching India’s scientific potential would mean rolling back all pseudoscientific projects and putting the brakes on the Centres for Indian Knowledge Systems that now fester inside our IITs. These initiatives serve only to advance Hindutva philosophy.
As Meera Nanda, a historian of science, has warned, this appropriation of science for the glory of “the Vedas” is one of the central planks on which the myth of Hindu supremacy rests, and, in the name of national pride, students are being deprived of the conceptual tools they need to solve the real problems they will face as scientists and engineers.
Meanwhile, AI already has a foot in the doors of our workspaces and classrooms as India’s research and development (R&D) spending has stagnated at roughly 0.6-0.7 per cent of the GDP for two decades. This is a fraction of the 2.5–5 per cent that innovation-led economies invest. In the last 14 years, Indian taxpayers have funded the erosion of their own scientific institutions. This must end.
Segregating students and disciplines
The skewed access to education in Indian society, seen along with who leads our science institutes and universities, makes it clear that upper-caste domination persists in our country. Caste sorting begins long before the university level and continues into higher science education. At the top five IITs and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), 98 per cent of the professors are from privileged castes. And at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, an “Institution of Excellence”, which is exempt from the constitutional guarantee of reservation for marginalised castes, the situation is similar if not worse. Adivasis make up under 5 per cent of undergraduate STEM classes in India. And at the PhD level, Dalit representation across the top IITs averages just at 10 per cent and Adivasi representation 2 per cent, both below the mandated 15 and 7.5, respectively.
There is also the human cost. When Dalit and Adivasi students and faculty finally enter our campuses, they are often met with harassment, sometimes fatally: Rohith Vemula in 2016, Payal Tadvi in 2019, and many others ended their lives after institutional apathy toward caste-based harassment. University Grants Commission (UGC) data show that discrimination complaints rose by 118 per cent over five years. When UGC tried to respond with modest equity regulations, earlier this year, backlash arrived within days, like we are also seeing now with the aarakhshan hatao (remove reservation) rhetoric.
The caste representation at India’s top IITs across academic career levels does not meet the government quotas they are expected to.
| Photo Credit:
Ankur Paliwal/Nature
Tied to the brahmanical supremacy of knowledge systems in India is the appointment of pliant directors and vice-chancellors for these institutions, which has become commonplace under Modi’s governance. Leadership across the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research’s (CSIR) labs, IITs, IISc, and the Indian Institutes of Science Education Research (IISER) must be transparent and insulated from political patronage. The existing leadership has proved itself unable to engage meaningfully with reservation policies. For example, Jawaharlal Nehru University’s vice-chancellor Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit described caste discrimination as a “manufactured reality”. With thousands of reserved faculty posts remaining vacant nationwide that the existing leadership has been unable to fill, understaffing itself functions as another mechanism of exclusion.
Finally, Indian academia has grown too comfortable with placing the humanities and science into two silos. Technical expertise devoid of any understanding of how technology ends up interacting with society still defines Indian STEM education. Integrating the humanities into the science curriculum is essential for building critical minds. Technological progress does not happen in a vacuum, and if STEM students aren’t equipped to understand that, we will follow old patterns where decades of science-funding priorities do not translate to science-powered solutions on the ground.
As Vetti Giri, a science education faculty member at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, puts it in an interview to The Life of Science describing his work on the nature of science: “If students are exposed to the idea that knowledge-making and knowledge-holding are social and political processes, then they will be critical about the nature of information.”
A working alternative can be seen in China. In a recent article for Nature, Xin Fan, vice-dean at ShanghaiTech’s Institute of Humanities, argues that science and the humanities need not compete. He says the world “needs humanities research to understand the reasons and implications” behind fast-moving science. As AI reshapes labour, medicine, and information itself, the students holding the technical keys need the ethical and historical grounding to use them responsibly.
All of the suggested changes collapse without transparency and accountability. Besides saffronisation, the main criticisms of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 have been about the centralisation and privatisation of education. These two are not separate problems but the same one twice, concentrating decision-making where the public can’t see it—whether in Delhi or in an institutional boardroom that is not accessible to the public. It needs to be made clear in science departments around the country that transparency is not a bureaucratic nicety but the precondition for enforcing every other step to progress. For the last decade, government-backed attempts to reform the Indian education system have been limited to initiatives that are released with much fanfare but soon disappear behind opaque operations, funding, and hiring. Looking back, you can see only a graveyard of schemes; the tombstones are etched with acronyms of Sanskrit-sounding words. Lying alongside these schemes are all our scientific aspirations.
Aashima Dogra is a science writer; she co-founded the feminist science media portal thelifeofscience.com and is the co-author of the recent book ‘LabHopping’ which investigates the realities behind the gender gap in Indian STEM.
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