34th Annual Report (2021-22)

86 The Thirty-Third Foundation Day Lecture The 33rd Foundation Day Lecture of IUCAA was delivered by Dr. Shekhar C. Mande on Wednesday, December 29, 2021. Shekhar C. Mande is a Structural and Computational Biologist. He joined CSIR in mid-October 2018 as the Director General and served till April 2022. He has also served as the Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), Ministry of Science and Technology. Before this, he was the Director of the National Centre for Cell Science, Pune. He was awarded 2005 the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest science award in India, in the Biological sciences category. Mande completed his M.Sc. in Physics from the University of Nagpur in 1984. In 1991, he earned his PhD in Molecular Biophysics, from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Following his PhD, he joinedWim G. J. Hol as a Postdoctoral researcher at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands. He served as the chair of the National Committee for the International Union of Crystallography for the Indian National Science Academy, NewDelhi. As an ode to 75 years of Independent India, Professor Munde delivered a talk on “ India’s Science and Technology Journey in the Post-Independence Era”. He shared his views on the contemporary history of Science and Technology and spoke about the Indian contributions to scientific developments fromancient times. A journey of the resurrection from the dark age period to becoming a flourishing nation after the colonial powers left the country. With suitable examples, he argued [AP: argued] that post-independent India has sufficiently developed to address the most fundamental questions of the origins of modern humans in South Asia. He walked the audience through the journey of building and Nurturing India’s Science and Technology ecosystem, narrating the conception and formation of one of the first publicly funded organisations Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) in 1942 followed by the other national o r g a n i s a t i o n s t o e n c o u r a g e t h e development of science and technology in the country. Having recognized the fact that discoveries of science made in the laboratories can be taken to society by strong collaborations with the industry led to the involvement of Philanthropists [AP: philanthropists] and the general public during the early phases of its development leading to the formation of Tata Institutes of Fundamental Research, (TIFR). He spoke of the Atomic Energy Commission and India’s efforts in strengthening the country’s atomic energy programme with TIFR as the centre for all large-scale nuclear physics in India. With the help of a graph, he elaborately discussed the S&T drivers in India through the times while explaining the difficulties faced during the early implementation of democracy. India has demonstrated effectively by the adoption of science and technology that the `nation is now at par with the rest of the world as regards its intellectual and technological power. One major example is its role in themitigation of COVID-19 with its SARS-COV-2 diagnostic innovations He devoted a few minutes to highlighting the outstanding Indian accomplishments in the field of biotechnology by talking about the contributions of G N Ramachandran and Sambhu Nath De to the subject. He emphasized the need for large collaborative work between different fields of fundamental sciences to address some of the most challenging problems in natural sciences. He concluded his lecture by briefly talking about a few future technological aspirations of the nation that are currently in process. This enlightening talk came to an endwith an interactiveQ&A session. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the Lecture was held entirely online, with a live YouTube stream that drew in about 470 viewers as well as a smaller, interactive audience on Zoom. Watch this lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opUo-KBgHHs