This August 15, Let's Swallow the 'Modicine' and Declare our Independence from Science

[kevinUsa]

PTIADVERTISEMENTDuring last month’s Cabinet reshuffle, Prime Minister Narendra Modi replaced Harsh Vardhan as the Union science minister with Jitendra Singh. Since Modi has always pulled the strings, it didn’t matter who his puppet would be. However, Vardhan was a Cabinet-rank minister, whereas Singh is a minister of state. Even if he has science under his ‘independent charge’, effectively, the Ministry of Science and Technology has been demoted.Just as well, for during Modi’s tenure as India’s prime minister, one thing has been clear: the government’s agenda is determined much less by the work of ministries and much more by what the leader needs done. So it doesn’t matter who heads the science ministry: Modi has the last, and only, word. In fact, even when the ministry had Vardhan at the helm, it wasn’t like great things happened, and there’s no reason we should expect different from Jitendra Singh.(The same goes for Mansukh Mandaviya, the new minister who has succeeded Vardhan at the top of the health ministry: in 2019, Mandaviya outed himself as a yesman when he tweeted that generic medicines are “commonly known as ‘Modicines’”.)Proof of Singh’s qualifications for the job has come sooner than excepted. On August 2, he told an event organised by Vijnan Bharti, the RSS’s science front, that when Modi went to  the Katra Vaishno Devi railway station in Jammu and Kashmir to inaugurate it in 2014, the prime minister had a brainwave — to install solar panels there because the day was sunny. “When I was talking about scientific temper, coming straight to contemporary times, according to me one of the most remarkable examples of a scientific temper around us today is none other than Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself,” Singh said. Do we do science when the room is dark and we flip the light switch?