Aashima Dogra

IISc to Take Action Against Professor for Sexual Harassment After #MeToo Allegations

The woman had alleged that the professor had made several sexually coloured remarks and relentless phone calls to her late at night.

New Delhi: The science community has not been immune to the #MeToo movement that picked up speed in India in October. This month, a PhD student at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, had complained that a senior academic had sexually harassed her.

According to reports, an internal committee took immediate cognisance of the complaint and stressed that “IISc has always taken strong action”. The woman had alleged that the professor had made several sexually coloured remarks and relentless phone calls to her late at night.

The professor against whom the allegations have been made, who cannot be named because of IISc’s internal policy, has a doctoral degree from the US and is a recipient of the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, and is a J.C. Bose National Fellow.

Also read: Indian Science’s #MeToo Moment Remains Caged in Lattice of Lopsided Relations

“He is listed among the top 1% of scientists by the (research platform) ISI Web of Knowledge and is serving in senior editorial capacities across several top-rated science journals,” an Economic Times report said.

The academic at the centre of the storm in the prestigious institute has been associated with IISc since 1998. According to ET, his scientific work has “resulted in more than 500 publications, 15,000 citations and an h-index of 55, the highest among all engineering faculty in India”.

When members of the council were contacted, a few reportedly said that the decision on the issue had been taken almost two weeks ago, but they refused to divulge what action would be taken.

Under the service rules of the central government (Rule 11 of Central Civil Services Classification Control and Appeal Rules), which also governs disciplinary action against IISc employees for sexual harassment, disciplinary action includes removal and dismissal from service among the most stringent penalties in cases where sexual harassment is proven.

In its 2017 policy statement on preventing and prohibiting sexual harassment at the workplace, IISc states that it “believes that all its students deserve an education without fear from discrimination and sexual harassment, in order for their education to be more effective and valuable”.

The PhD scholar’s complaint has not been the solitary one in the science community, which for years, because of the tilt in the gender balance, has been plagued by a culture of silence. As The Print reported, Nandita Jayaraj and Aashima Dogra, the co-founders of The Life of Science, created a Google document last week to circulate around the scientific community so that anyone who has been harassed or abused can offer their accounts anonymously.

Over 20 people answered the questionnaire with their accounts over three days. “These stories in our inbox range from an unwelcome sexist comment to actual dangerous situations women find themselves in,” Jayaraj told The Print. “Most of the time, the perpetrator is a senior or a guide, holding a position of power over the women who are desperate to not lose their career.”

“Women have seemingly resigned to this and normalised it, feeling grateful that they were just molested and not raped,” she said. “It feels like justice is too much to ask for when they want to be successful.”

A Scientist’s Quest to Photograph the Atom and Life at Large

Beginning with a perfect analogy for cutting open an atom, Vandana Sharma, takes us through the crests and troughs of her research on atom probing machines.

Beginning with a perfect analogy for cutting open an atom, Vandana Sharma takes us through the crests and troughs of her research on atom probing machines.

Vandana with one of the RIM systems she has built. Credit: The Life of Science

“Say you have two fruits: an apple and a mango. To see which one has the bigger seed, you have to first cut it, right? Here the fruit is an atom.”

“The knife to cut an atom is made of charged particles or a source of light. With this, we can cut the atom and observe the fragments coming out and see how they evolve over a period. We can trace back the history of the atom. And now with the advent of laser technology, we can image this in real time!”

With this analogy, Vandana Sharma introduced me to her field of research. The 37-year-old heads the ‘Few Body Quantum Dynamics Laboratory’ at IIT Hyderabad, one of the eight new IITs founded in 2008.

Being less than ten years old with a brand new campus, the institute was not initially on my lab-hopping list. However, the university website changed my mind. It appeared that the R&D wheels were rolling already. Besides, I noticed a happy predominance of young faculty members, many of whom have returned home after being trained at prestigious institutions abroad. Sharma is one of them.

How to cut open an atom

When she first adopted the research problem of imaging atoms during her Ph.D, it was already known that if a charged particle or a photon (a tiny particle of light or electromagnetic radiation) was made to bombard an atom or a molecule sample, this collision would result in the usually-neutral atom losing an electron and becoming positively charged or ‘ionised’. Instruments equipped with specialised detectors can sense, amplify and record the electrons that are generated from this collision. These signals tell scientists more about the construction of this atom or the molecule sample it came from.

Though the technology was there, the instruments, called Recoil Ion Momentum Spectrometers (RIMS), were unavailable in India. Even for prestigious academic research institutions like the ISRO-funded Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad, where Sharma did her Ph.D, or even IIT, they were too expensive. That’s why back in the early 2000s Bhas Bapat, her Ph.D guide, thought it would be a good idea for them to build their own. This had never been done before in India.

It was a tall task. Bapat was one of the newer faculty members at PRL at the time and Vandana was his only student. “There was nothing in our lab, whereas the other students who joined (for Ph.D) in the same batch had everything in theirs,” recalled Vandana. It was a frustrating period for her.

The parts they required – such as the detector and the laser – needed to be ordered and each order took six months to arrive. Some other parts had to be designed from scratch in the lab and the design sent to companies who would fabricate it accordingly. Further time was spent on tweaks and defects to be corrected. “All this took about three-four years, and it was a struggle to watch my batchmates already doing experiments and starting to write papers. I thought I will not be able to finish my Ph.D.”

But fortunately for Sharma, the toughest part was over. “After that, it took only two-three months for me to do the experiments and acquire all the data. My batchmates had already submitted their papers but I was the first to get my paper accepted – the last to submit, but the first to get published,” she smiled widely. Sharma went on to publish seven papers during her PhD.

Vandana and the machine

Today, almost ten years after its creation, the detector has come a long way. It has been used successfully to probe into simple molecules like oxygen, carbon dioxide and carbon tetrachloride. Soon, it will be ready for experiments with more complex molecules, even DNA. The key is the inbuilt detector that amplifies any signal detected.

If an oxygen molecule is the sample, it is first ionised and then when the O2 ion hits the surface of the detector, two secondary electrons are released. This goes on to release four more electrons, followed by eight and then 16, so much that eventually an ‘electron cloud’ is formed which can be recorded by the machine Sharma helped built with her guide.

The electron cloud itself tells us very little but the data about where the ion hit and what time it hit gives Sharma specifics on the structure of the sample molecule. “We can tell how the electrons are arranged in the atom – if the electron came from a low energy level (close to the nucleus of the atom) or a high energy level (close to the outer surface of the atom).”

But don’t we already know about the electronic configuration of atoms? I asked, recalling high school physics. Sharma replied, “For many things we do – for atoms it’s very well studied, but for molecules it’s not. We are only starting out with O2 – we know a lot about it so we can compare our results and see if our system works fine. Now that we know it does, we can go ahead to bigger molecules like DNA, bacteria…”

The system she has developed cannot be patented as the technology is not new, however the resolution obtained is leaps ahead, so Sharma believes that hers has an edge.

Determined to be a ‘Dr.’

Growing up in Khetri Nagar, Rajasthan, Sharma dreamt of becoming a medical doctor. But remembering biological facts was never her strength, she said. Vandana could not secure an MBBS seat. She took up B.Sc in Physics at Rajasthan University. By then, however, she’d gotten attached to the idea of having ‘Dr.’ prefixed to her name, and when she realised that there was still a way, she was set for an M.Sc and a Ph.D.

Unfortunately, her father had decided that she would go for a Master’s in Computer Application(MCA). “Being from a village he used to think computer science was the only growing science.” When she resisted, her father warned that he would not fill up any of her (M.Sc.) forms and that he would fix her marriage. “That was a very strong slap on my face. I did not want to get married.” But both father and daughter were stubborn and for a whole week, Sharma was given the silent treatment.

Meanwhile, Sharma heard the results for the IIT entrance exam were out. She listened disbelievingly as the recorded message on her phone informed her that she was ranked 17! Vandana told her sister about this but it seemed too incredible to announce it to her father just yet. She wasn’t sure what his reaction would be. Before she had the chance to tell him, the postman rang the bell. “It’s a small town you know. He told my father some counselling letter has come, sweet chahiye (I want celebratory sweets).” Her father was puzzled at first but when she told him it must be her IIT results, he opened the letter to check. “Then he said ‘Vandana, prepare your bags, you have to go to IIT.’”

During her M.Sc at IIT Roorkee Sharma got the exposure in physics she needed badly. “Back in the village, I only had a few good teachers. I did not even know what a Ph.D was, though I knew that with a Ph.D you will get the ‘Dr.’ title. In Roorkee, I really could understand what physics is. I cleared all the exams and got into PRL for my Ph.D.”

Sharma let me in on a happy accident in her life that she says she’s never talked about before. “In the first few months of Ph.D coursework, I went to my (future) Ph.D boss for the first time. It was actually not to join his research group but just to talk to him about how long a Ph.D will take and whether I will be able to get a postdoc after that. I was not very fluent in English. So maybe because of this, he understood from what I said that I am joining him and he congratulated me and welcomed me to his group. I was shocked – what did I say! And so, because of a play of words – either I said it wrong, or he got it wrong – this happened.”

After her Ph.D, Sharma did postdocs in the US and in Germany. The former was especially meaningful to her. “The reason my father was fixated on an MCA degree was because he wanted me to go to the US, come back and open a school. At the gate of the school, he said, there should be a sign: Hindi is not allowed here.” She explained that this desire of his came from his struggles with English. “His goal was to open an affordable English school in our hometown. I told him I don’t know if I can fulfil your dream but I will try to go to US for sure. When I did, he was very happy.”

Kinds of discrimination

Sharma is married and has a child with her fellow-physicist husband. They were both working in Europe, she in academics and he in the industry, when they decided to come back to India after battling the infamous ‘two-body problem’ in academia (where a couple in academia find it difficult to obtain jobs in the same university. It’s likely that in such cases, the female gives up her professional life for the sake of the family staying together). Sharma beats the odds. Today, her husband works at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Hyderabad. “I would say that he compromised a little bit but still we are both happy because we are in the same city. I feel both should be in the same place because productivity increases.”

Sharma went through another trial while applying for jobs when she was pregnant in Germany. “If they see you are pregnant – even if they say no discrimination on paper, it’s not true. This happens everywhere, not just in India. I was shortlisted for many positions but in the final step I lost out because I was pregnant,” she said.

After she delivered her baby, she noticed things got a bit easier, but while sitting for interviews for faculty positions in India, she realised there was a new type of discrimination facing her. “The kind of questions they ask… They asked me ‘your husband is in the Netherlands and you are applying here, how will you manage?’ I felt like giving it back to them! Why don’t they realise that if I have applied for the position, I must have thought about this? Why should they worry? The interviewers must not worry about my family matters – I will take care of that. They don’t ask this from any male applicants. This is really a drawback for women.”

Now, seated on the other end of the table, Sharma is careful to be straightforward about her hiring policy. “If I find a female candidate better than a male candidate, I will prefer the better candidate. If the candidate drops out, it is a loss for the system (that has trained them). To disqualify the female based on an assumption that she will drop-out along the way is unfair. A male also can make that decision, right? A candidate may have many offers, and a female has as much right as a male to choose the best one for her.”

Working at a new IIT where buildings are still coming up and a lot of infrastructure is still under construction is a challenge, admitted Sharma, but it gives her a lot of freedom that she cherishes. “You become a pillar of this institute, you feel proud. You may not get as much time as you want for research, but you are making path for the newcomers.” Now that the instruments she’s developed are complete, fully tested, and the experiments have begun, Vandana’s lab is on the brink of an interesting future.

This piece was originally published by The Life of Science. The Wire is happy to support this project by Aashima Dogra and Nandita Jayaraj, who are travelling across India to meet unsung women scientists.

Debunking the ‘Junk DNA’ Theory

A.J. Rachel, a molecular biologist, was determined to prove that the Y heterochromatin was not junk.

A.J. Rachel. Courtesy: The Life of Science

Though human DNA, or the genome as it is called, is a chain of around three billion molecules called base pairs, only small segments of them called genes are involved in making/coding proteins. There are 20,000 such genes and together they constitute less than 2% of the whole genome. In the early days of genomics, only genes were considered useful. The rest of the genome was termed junk DNA. This irked scientists for years. How could 98% of the genome be just sitting there doing nothing?

Our genome is organised in each cell of our body as 23 pairs of chromosomes. One pair of these 23 are the ‘sex chromosomes’ and these typically are either XX (in the biologically female) or XY (in the biologically males). As chromosome-Y is the one granting a mammalian individual with biological maleness, most of its genes tend to be have roles specific to males, such as biological sex determination and sperm development. But here’s where the mystery starts: chromosome-Y has very few genes – just about 50-60 out of total 20,000 human genes existing in all other chromosomes.

In fact, one of the largest chunks of junk DNA in the human genome lies on the Y chromosome (chrY) and is called the Y heterochromatin. This is a block of DNA 40 million base pairs long (out of a toatl length of 59 million base pairs). For a long time, this region seemed to have no discernable function. It is composed mostly of sequence repeats and has no genes (DNA segments that can code for proteins). Because of this poverty of genes, chrY is known as one of the genome’s largest ‘gene deserts’.

Rachel asks Y

A.J. Rachel, a molecular biologist in CCMB, was determined to prove that the Y heterochromatin was not junk. “It’s just basic intuition. Nature is not wasteful. If something is present, it has a function,” she said to me matter-of-factly as we settled down in her office. It is with this unshakeable belief, and years of training as a biologist, that Rachel set her sights on solving this important piece of the junk DNA puzzle when she joined the centre 30 years ago.

For a long time, this large chunk on chrY was thought to be functionally inert. It was thought not to participate in processes like transcription where genes are copied into molecules called messenger RNAs (mRNA) and translation where this mRNA codes for proteins. But Rachel and her colleagues had a breakthrough. They used a DNA probe and identified two transcripts (mRNA) that were produced from this region. For the first time, it was proved that this region is not inert after all.

But this is was not enough for Rachel to definitively junk the junk hypothesis. “We needed to find out the function of these transcripts.” Further testing showed that these transcripts would go on to physically mix with another transcript produced from a gene situated in chromosome-1.

This mixing called ‘splicing’ is an important modification that happens before protein synthesis. Splicing refers to the editing of the mRNA to produce a more mature mRNA that is ready to code for proteins. Usually it involves the splitting of the mRNA, the disposal of the unwanted portions, and the rejoining of the wanted portions.

A schematic explaining splicing – to put it simplistically, the mRNA’s useful parts (exons) join together and the useless ones (introns) are subtracted. In the case of Rachel’s discovery, the 5`UTR region of the chr1 mRNA was shown to come from the chrY mRNA. Courtesy: The Life of Science

When a part of mRNA from one chromosome splices into the mRNA from another, as was happening between chrY and chromosome-1, it is called ‘trans-splicing’. This is exceedingly rare. Rachel’s team not only discovered this but also found out that this trans-splicing by chrY was important to regulate how much protein the chr1 mRNA should synthesize and when the protein synthesis should occur.

What does this all mean?

The most exciting part of this discovery was that this trans-splicing event happens only in the cells of the testes. Fom Rachel’s experiments it was clear that chrY is regulating a gene that is transcribed specifically in the testes. What does this tell us, she wondered. Firstly, it shows that this DNA in the chrY that was once considered junk is regulating protein synthesis in testes even though this region does not code for any protein itself. “No trans-splicing between coding mRNA and noncoding mRNA was known till then – and none with chrY. So this means chrY may not just be sitting there determining sex and doing nothing else.”

Secondly this region in chrY is species-specific, Rachel pointed out. The sequence they were studying was present only in humans, not, say, in mice. “You see, male fertility is being regulated by species-specific repeats (this region) present in the chrY. So if by chance some repeats from another species come, they cannot regulate genes involved in human male fertility.” This fits in with our knowledge that cross-species fertilisation does not work. “Man cannot cross with mouse, clearly.”

Fundamental discoveries like these are adding new dimensions to what we know about the human genome. Even though lesser than 2% of the genome code for proteins, today, over 75% of the genome is known to be transcribed into mRNA. These RNAs may not make it to the protein stage but they all have some function or the other. “100% of the genome will have a function,” affirms Rachel, “we just have to discover it.”

This study done in Rachel’s lab was published in Genome Research journal in 2007, and was considered a landmark of sorts. In fact, it even came up for discussion in both houses of the parliament that year, revealed Rachel. “It was the time we thought India lost out in the Human Genome Project. This study came up to show that Indian scientists are still discovering novel transcripts and functions, so how can you say that India did not contribute? That was the discussion.”

To bolster their findings, Rachel and her colleagues experimented with mouse chrY and here too they found non-coding RNAs involved in regulation of autosomal (other than sex chromosomes) genes in mouse testes. “This proved that it is not an isolated event we found in the human genome but seems to be a pervasive phenomenon.”

The ‘basic intuition’ that basic biologists so rely on to design their studies may or may not be something they are born with, but what is certain is that years of training go into honing that skill. For Rachel, signs pointing her to a life of science started popping up early – in the form of back-to-back scholarships.

Early life and scholarships

“I grew up in Kottarakara, a town in Kerala. I did my basic education in a Malayalam medium school there,” she said. “I used to love reading scientists’ biographies. Marie Curie was a favourite.” Curie’s achievements despite coming from a modest background resonates with Rachel. “I believe it’s not school that matters but intelligence. Good students will come up anywhere.”

Though her parents were school teachers, she recalls her father being very academically oriented. “He made me write these exams. Through one such exam in my class six, I got something called the residential school scholarship (this was given to 200 students all over india).” With this, Rachel got admission to the Rishi Valley school, still considered one of the best residential schools in India.

After finishing her schooling in Rishi Valley, Rachel continued her impressive run by securing herself the science talent scholarship (now evolved into NTSE). This scholarship would facilitate her education in the basic sciences up to doctoral level. “My journey in science began with this. After doing my BSc and MSc in zoology at Women’s College in Trivandrum, I left for Banaras Hindu University to do my PhD.” At this stage, Rachel had also won the CSIR fellowship to aid her research.

Rachel joined CCMB in 1976 and 30 years on, “I’m still enjoying the basic sciences!” Almost 60, Rachel is due to retire in five months (“Do you still want to interview me?” she’d asked, earlier).

Grateful to India, yet worried

Though she completed a couple of postdocs in US universities, Rachel was not significantly tempted by the idea of settling down there. And there were many opportunities too. “I was even invited by a professor during a conference at BHU to come do any work I liked in his lab. But I thought why can’t we do good work in india, why should we go out always? I also had that feeling of – India nurtured me, gave me scholarships – so why can’t I do good work here.”

She was somewhat vindicated later on, following the 2007 Y-chromosome discovery. “When I published the paper, some visiting scientists asked me: ‘who is your foreign collaborator?’ I informed them there is no foreign collaborator. They replied ‘no foreign collaborator? All this work done in India?!’” she said, laughing at the perceived irony.

Which is not to say that doing science is a smooth ride here. “There are definitely ‘n’ number of hurdles in India,” admitted Rachel. “The scientific atmosphere in India needs to change. They are trying to introduce too much of bureaucracy. They don’t leave scientists alone.” Interestingly, she is not talking about the government but scientists themselves, the ones at higher levels. “Scientists themselves do politics. And honestly, in the last 30 years I have only seen it getting worse.”

“You need a free mind. Leave the scientists alone. The government gives us projects so that we can work regardless of red tapism, but the execution is really not good. The minute people come into power, they try to prevent others from doing science. I resent that.” Rachel suspects that this culture could be what is preventing India perhaps from rising as a world power in science.

Rachel never felt discriminated as a woman in her career, though she says that it could be because she had more time and energy as she did not get married and start a family. She joked, “I used to like standing up and telling the men what the Y chromosome does! Ha ha. I’m a lady and I’m doing this. Just fun times…”

Not much of a retirement

Now that she is approaching her retirement, Rachel has some plans, but none of them involve sitting back and taking it easy. “I don’t care for power, position, I just want to be left alone to do science. [This attitude] has helped me so far but I still have work to do – I have two DBT projects which will go on till 2019. Once the director gives me permission, I will continue till then – here or anywhere else.”

Rachel proudly shows of her newest ‘toy’ the minION, a pocket-sized device for DNA analysis. Courtesy: The Life of Science

And after that, Rachel wants to continue contributing, but in a different way: “As long as I can, I want to be energetic and active. The rest of the time, I want to devote to the havenots – children especially.” She already volunteers with organisations like Don Bosco to interact with street children, and she’d like to give more time to this. “After retirement I will go and work with one of the mission fields of the churches. Somewhere where the need is. Hyderabad has been home, but I don’t know what the future holds. It doesn’t – shouldn’t – matter where I am as long as I can help those who need it.”

Unearthing Gujarat’s History, One Figurine At a Time

Archaeologist Sushmita Sen Pramanik studies the early-historic phase of the Indus Valley civilisation, trying to fill gaps in Gujarat’s early trade history.

Sushmita Sen Pramanik, archaeologist. Credit: Aashima Dogra

“You must go to MS (Maharaja Sayajirao) University! Dr Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, who won the Nobel Prize in 2009, studied there,” Nandita had pinged me, the day I got on the train to Baroda. My plan was to stay for three days. I assumed this was enough time to drop into several departments at the university, one of the oldest in the country, plus some more. But I had arrived at the worst time. The university was on its long weekend off for Dusshera and Gandhi Jayanti. Walking around, my lab-roving eye met only with the guards informing me of holidays happily.

And so, I extended my trip and was back at MSU’s campus on Monday. As I entered, the Mughal-styled domes and arches of the arts faculty had a gravitational effect on me. The atmosphere was like a scene from a bubbly campus film – several groups of chatty friends catching up, laughter everywhere, a guitar being played somewhere and new lovers walking hand in hand.

Drawn in by the college culture, I arrived at the entrance of the history and archaeology department. The inviting walkway into the building was lined with ancient sculptures. I kept an eye out for scholars who identify as female. Maybe I’ll meet an archaeologist, I thought.

On the first floor, there she was in her study surrounded by terracotta figurines from an era long past, seated patiently as if keeping the appointment we never made.

The entrance to the history department in MSU Baroda. Credit: Aashima Dogra

Connecting the dots to unearth a civilisation

Sushmita Sen Pramanik specialises in teaching and researching the art and architecture from early-historic India. The work that she does is slowly closing the wide gaps in understanding the trade and culture of our ancestors before the Indus Valley Civilisation matured and the city of Harappa was in all its glory around 3rd century BC. Her research lens is focused on the coins, toys and pottery discovered during archaeological excavations in Gujarat. As we began our conversation about her life and work, she first set the context.

“Look, what we know about Mesopotamia and Egypt we can call history as there is a long continuity of the historical data right from the ancient times. It is no more proto-history; it falls into the history category where they have found the script, which has been deciphered. Everything is documented in a very complete way without any breaks.”

“Whereas, here – the Indus Valley Civilisation, the third of three early far-reaching civilisations of the ‘Old World’ – we don’t find the script, only a few (inscribed symbols) are found on the seals. So we have to depend on excavation materials like ruins, jewellery, pottery shards and toys alone.”

“To call something ‘history’, you have to corroborate the writings you find. If we cannot corroborate, that is called proto-history.” she said zeroing in on the scope of her own research.

“And lastly, pre-history is what we guess only from stones about who lived in those times and in what conditions.”

Pramanik is an archaeologist, not a historian. The incomplete script and deciphering it is not her concern. Instead, her work aids historians by making inferences from the material culture left behind in the ruins of settlements found in Gujarat in the period known to archaeologists as early-historic (from 3rd century BC to 3rd century AD).

Why study archaeology?

Why should we study these items, I asked naively pointing at the bucket of figurines that sat next to us. “Quite a lot of reasons, my god,” she responded. “We try to understand the culture, the society, the economy, the religion…the complete socio-cultural aspect of people living in these lands in the ancient times. We get clues about the trade that was happening – that tells about the economy, what, where and how the craftsmen worked, lived and marketed.”

Giant timescale poster at the department. Credit: Aashima Dogra

All of these clues add up to the realisation of ‘civilisation’ and how it takes its course. Being too deep into the macrocosm we ourselves live inside, we might not have such a view without archaeology.

With the help of V. Gordon Childe’s writings, Sushmita described how a civilisation is born. “It takes place when you are able to have plenty. You have land situated in a place with lots of water that allows you to plough many areas. Then you have surpluses, with the surpluses you can have trade. As the trade happens you need to have some kind of authority to control the things that are being grown, brought in and sent out. As the trade grows, the economy grows and people have leisure time to develop crafts that can again be traded. As trade grows, insecurity grows, because now there are have many assets to protect – the grains and craft. So now the fortification comes up and the gates come up separating the people into different classes. With that you have architecture. Then well-defined trade routes connect the centre to the towns and villages. All these are part of a civilisation.”

Gujarat’s crafts weighed in

These parts of a civilisation are well attested by the excavations of the proto-history that Pramanik studies. For example, in almost all early civilisation ruins there is an acropolis, always situated on top of a high hill, a place with big rooms and many wells meant for the ones who control the city. In the case of early-historic civilisation of the Indus Valley, “the acropolis could be the residence of the royals or the head-priest – we are not sure which one.”

And then there is a lower city for all the common people, “the aera gera khera (tom, dick and harry) including the craftspeople.” In Dholavira, in Kachchh, Gujarat one of the five biggest Harappan cities, we also find a middle level, which archaeologist call ‘the belly’.“The middle belly houses the most important officers, the people who are in between the ruler and the commoners…the people who can influence the leadership.” There are gated walls separating the rulers from the officers and another gated wall separating the officers from the commoners. This could be the first recorded instance of the middle class.

“We have the port of Lothal (Gujarat), Kalibangan (Rajasthan), Banawali (Haryana), Rakhigarhi (Haryana), there are so many sites, and everything has a lower city and acropolis. But the belly is found only in Dholavira.”

A french map under showing the expanse of the Indus Valley civilisation. Courtesy: Aashima Dogra

Dholavira is an important city for another reason. It falls on the trade route between Mohenjo-daro (Pakistan) and many smaller towns, villages in ancient Gujarat like the coastal settlements of Nageshwar and Bhagatrav, “where people liked making and wearing shell bangles.” The diversity of craft found just at Gujarat’s archaeological sites suggest the area had a lot to offer and with that, it probably had an important role to play in the trade. Some fishing villages traded in conch shells, others specialised in beads that are found in abundance in some sites indicating they were being traded from here. The carnelian stones that are found in good numbers in south-east Asia were traded from Khambhat. “The civilisation was probably depending heavily on these villages.”

Taking on a mega-project

Sushmita’s PhD research was based on the trade reach of towns and villages in early-historic Gujarat. Recently, she updated the work and re-published it as a book named Ridge of Splendour – Trade and Commerce in Gujarat.

Pramanik’s book. Credit: Aashima Dogra

Today, the state takes pride in being culturally a merchant state; Pramanik’s book suggests that the origins of this culture might have taken roots from a time much before what the written records suggest. “The book talks about the Indian ocean trade involving merchants from Gujarat based on evidence in epigraphy (the study of ancient inscriptions) and numismatics (the study of ancient coins).” Both these archaeological modules, Pramanik now teaches her graduate students.

In her book, Pramanik suggests that the ancient Gujarati’s were probably the first sea-faring Indians.

In 2015, she received funding from the University Grants Commission (UGC) to pursue a project on terracotta toys and figurines from early-historic Gujarat.

For this work, she is combing all the museums and cellars of the Archeological Survey in Gujarat. This “second-digging” as she likes to call it, is time-consuming and tiring. “Because there are so many objects in the museums and cellars it’s hard to find what you need. These objects were kept there around 1965 before I was born and never touched again. So I have to visit every facility in Gujarat and dig them out for the second time for my research.”

After this, possibly an excavation will be needed if she doesn’t find enough figurines – the human statuettes. “These are quite rare, unlike beads and animal figures that are aplenty.”

What she is really after is the technique with which these figurines were made. “Their legs were made separately and then they were kind of luted (joined) together. This technique hasn’t been discovered before in this region.” Further, some figurines are hollow and some are solid. “Hollow ones are known to be from Ganga valley region, they haven’t been seen here before.”

It is a vast ethnoarchaeological study to understand how the potters would have worked during that time, also comparing it to the practices in Harappan times – late Harappa compared the early-historic time that Pramanik studies– there is another aspect of the research for which she is looking forward to working with contemporary potters in Gujarat.

A lot of travelling is ahead of her. “Yes. I have to go all over Gujarat to cover all the important excavated sites in Junagarh, Amreli, Kachchh, Bhavnagar….which are the important ancient sites.” She enjoys this work thoroughly but she admits she could do with some assistance.

“UGC did not give me any research fellow. They said you can do it on your own. The professors who interviewed me were historians and they did not know about the quantum of work required. Historians really need to understand the archaeologists,” she pleaded.“This is the difficult part for me right now in research. I am taking the help of my regular graduate students but they don’t come regularly, obviously because they are not being paid.”

Similar work has been done before but none that focuses on terracotta figurines nor that looks at early historic Gujarat specifically.

Personal highs and lows

As a young girl, Sushmita was glued to historical adventure novels. Her favourite was Robin Cook’s Sphinx about the curious happenings in the life of an Egyptologist. Her fascination with such stories, she said, could be the reason why she enjoyed her degree in archaeology from the first day. Though she had not planned for it and was “forced” into it.

“Why I was forced is very interesting. In Madras, I did 11th, 12th in commerce at Women’s Christian College. I got 65% or something like that, not bad for a commerce student I would say. But you won’t get commerce B.Com. This was the conversation: first, they asked general category or OBC? I said general. 98%? No. Get lost.”

From the south, she came to Baroda for a bachelor’s degree on a recommendation by alumni of WCC and MSU and stayed on do a PhD. She also was lucky enough to get a temporary lectureship at the university. Once her job was secured, she never left. “I got married only after everything was done, I had gotten a permanent job and I was 34. Bengalis are usually not in a hurry to get married,” she said grinning with pride.

It was smooth sailing after the wedding. Her husband set up a business in Delhi and the couple was together whenever he visited Baroda. She gave birth to her son in a few years and an ayah, a full-time caregiver, helped her raise him. Pramanik could also pursue her research further.

After a few years of productive life, Pramanik and her family hit rocky shores emotionally. “In business, there are ups and downs. My husband was facing some difficulties with it. And at the same time, the ayah left for good.” It proved very tough for Pramanik to handle her family that was going through many changes and her research at the same time. “For 3 to 4 years I was very low in depression. I did not write any paper, I did not feel like doing anything. I was just teaching and nothing else. Then my husband sold everything and moved to Baroda.”

“I was alone with my son and had to take care of him and secondly my husband had lost his business, left everything and came here. I was always worried about what will society say? Very frankly, I will tell you, that is what I was thinking about. I never thought he is going through depression himself; I never gave sympathy to him. It was all I, me and myself. And that is what I realised for myself later. From the day I realised this, my positive attitude started.”

In 2008, Sushmita was able to gather herself and her research took off again. “My promotion was due and there was an opportunity to write and present a paper at a conference in Thailand about connections of trade between Gujarat and Soth East Asia in early-historic period”

Now her son is almost 15 years old. Her husband took up a job soon after. The family is now “good and well settled” having bought a new house in Baroda recently.

The wheel, an instrument in the archaeology lab to get to the bottom layers of shards. Credit: Aashima Dogra

On Indian archaeology

From Pramanik’s point of view, Indian archaeology is flourishing. “There are many studies that lots of researchers are doing,” But the fixation on the central Harappa city is a sour point for her.

“I don’t know why people are so interested only in the Harappan culture. In pre-Harappan or early historic studies, there are very few people. There is some good early-historic research happening in Calcutta University, and also in Deccan College. It is coming up slowly, but too many people are into the late-Harappan culture.”

In the Indian archaeologist community, there are quite a few women but “of course most are men”. The requirement of archaeologists to venture out in the field, far away from present-day civilisations, might be deterring women to do this kind of research, Pramanik noted.

“This is one of the reasons why I opted out of late-Harappan history because you have to go to the field quite a lot for it. Right now, my son is in 9th – I cannot go on many excavations.”

“For fieldwork, women have to take somebody along with them. There is some amount of lab-work required in this area of research, to test the samples, date them, make thin films of the samples and study the composition. Some also study the osteology – the human or animal bones found at archaeological sites.”

“Most women are doing this kind of lab-based archaeology. There are women doing excavations too but if you do a comparison, men are more into the field, women are more into the lab. But there are women who have sacrificed family life and gone to the field.”

How An Environmental Biotechnologist is Turning Waste Into Wealth

With the help of a government grant, Vanita Prasad, a scientist-entrepreneur from Baroda, is developing an innovative solution to the mammoth problem of waste management in India.

Vanita Prasad. Credit: Aashima Dogra/TLoS

In the early 80s, the 12-year-old Vanita Prasad suffering from acute headaches was one of the few fortunate Indians to get a CT scan at AIIMS Delhi, a high-tech technology at that time. Prasad wanted to be a neurosurgeon from the day her brain was scanned. Years later, running out of luck needed to get into a medical school, she settled for biotechnology.

Since then, she has come leaps and bounds in research on environmental biotechnology. Her efforts and ideas can be the key to solving the riddle of waste management in India. Having been recently awarded the government-funded BIG (Biotechnology Ignition Grant) grant of Rs 35 lakh from the BIRAC DBT programme, the 45-year-old has now moved on from being a scientist to an entrepreneur.

With this generous grant came the 18-month-challenge of readying the product – a microbe cocktail recipe, ‘dry granulated sludge’ as she calls it, for mass production and commercialisation. “The BIG initiative is funding product-based research in the country, not basic research. It is there for making a proof-of-concept study, which one can patent and get ready for commercialisation.”

This will be her third patent. The first two process patents (a declaration of invention and ownership of a technological process rather than a product), were the result of her PhD work on waste management in vegetable markets and extracting hydrogen gas from this organic waste. All three technologies are set to be the shining stars in the portfolio of her startup, Revy Environment Solutions.

“Revy’s portfolio will be much bigger but the granulated sludge that I’m working on now will be the first product to come to the market.”

Prasad’s goal is to fulfill the country’s urgent need to put its waste to use, specifically convert it to energy. According to a report for Energy Next, currently, only 154 MW of energy in India is being generated from industrial and urban wastes in a year. The potential, however, is 4GW-6GW, which is enough to power two cities like Delhi.

“I want to make my technologies commercial. I have the proof-of-concept of them already. This is my dream,” she asserted.

Updating India’s bioreactor software

Prasad describes her company’s first marketable product – a dry granulated mixture of 56 carefully chosen microbe – as a “software update” of the existing, yet redundant, anaerobic bioreactors in the country. This ‘software’ is many steps ahead of the currently used ‘flocculant sludge’ or a colloidal mix of bacteria from cow dung and other sources.

“There are lots of waste treatment anaerobic plants that are not working optimally or not working at all,” she added. “Even if you have planned for 75% waste to be degraded by the microbes, only 45 or 50% do. Slowly it became a problem and that’s how these bioreactors started to fail. Naturally, in India, people don’t want to go ahead with this technology called UASB (Upflow anaerobic sludge blanket). If the UASB unit is not working, the whole Effluent Treatment Plant (ETP) gets choked up. Now even environment consultants don’t want to incorporate it.”

Prasad, on the other hand, having studied and audited these waste treatment plants, felt this is the best technology. It works fine abroad, why not in India, she wondered.

She realised that the design of the bioreactors which many farming communities and industries own might be advanced, but they don’t have the advanced microbial culture to treat the waste efficiently. The hardware was fine but the software wasn’t so good.

Indian anaerobic digestion plants have also been suffering from an unmet dependency on foreign companies. “When I worked in Paramount Environment consultancy in Baroda, we got this technology from Biothane, a multinational corporation. Nowadays, bringing the right bacterial cultures across the borders is problematic, due to the threat of biological weapons. Lots of regulations make it difficult for these cultures to be brought in.”

Being an advocate of anaerobic digestion, this state of affairs bothers Prasad. But she has the solution. “Now I am producing this granulated sludge, which will be an indigenous product to be marketed after a year or so.”

The microbe doctor

Anaerobic digestion is hardly high-tech; it is a natural process that takes place spontaneously in landfills or wherever decomposition is happening. The techniques of biotechnology make this process go faster by employing specially designed bioreactors and cultures. As a byproduct of the decomposition, biogas or even hydrogen can be obtained to be used as fuel.

To get the best mixture of bacteria into the bioreactors, Prasad doesn’t perform any genetic engineering or modification of the bacterial DNA, although such ‘super-cultures’ are available in some parts of the world, she informed me. She is simply isolating microbes that can efficiently work on particular waste.

From her PhD research on the metabolism of the waste-decomposing microbes and their applications in industrial ETPs as an environment consultant, Prasad’s viewpoint is one of a doctor’s. “A doctor will look at your blood glucose level, your cholesterol levels and tell you what is wrong. There are some parameters that are the operating values for these reactors. If you provide me with the data from a reactor, just like a doctor I can give you a prescription for your choked bioreactor.”

“Basically when you have a complex biological material, any protein, carbohydrate, etc. in the wastewater, decomposition of these by microbes takes place in a long chain-like process.”

For example, in the dairy industry that Prasad has ample experience in, the ‘waste’ is the effluent left over from the production of milk products. It contains lactic acid, cheese, whey or other compounds made up of fat, carbs and proteins. The industry cannot just dump this waste somewhere – that would be polluting and illegal. For degradation, the effluent has to undergo four chemical reactions. First hydrolysis, then acidification, then acetogenesis and lastly the methanogenesis. All this happens in the same reactor. Different bacteria work at different stages.

“What I am making is a consortium containing all these bacteria: acetogens, hydrolyses, methanogens – bacteria who are last in the food chain.” This mixed culture has to work robustly in a bioreactor and also make economical sense for mass production – this is Prasad’s current workload.

“Right now I have lab-scale UASB reactors. With the BIG fund, I was able to fabricate those reactors in my lab. There are two reactors that can accommodate ten litres of waste each.”

Pointing at pictures on her slideshow she presented at the 2017 National Summit on Innovation and Technology she explained, “These lumpy granules are the microbial cocktail. The reactor, the hardware, is filled in with the granules, the software. When you have these microbes here and the water to be treated passes through it, the compounds are eaten by the microbes.”

“This water will be cleaned and you get a gas from there, which can be used for making electricity. There is a gas that is burning over here,” she said pointing out a small flame. “Whenever you come in my lab you will see this burning gas that can be used as a direct fuel for cooking, heating or electricity.”

“This is a really simple technology, no electricity is required. There is no waste here. Waste is, in fact, the raw material for this reactor. You put waste water here and you get a gas here. All biological molecules get degraded.”

After the patent is filed, Prasad faces the challenge of setting up a pilot plant and inviting investors for mass production. “Right now, I am getting into entrepreneurship for which I am attending a lot of workshops so that I can start speaking the language of investors.”

“Industries need the product in very huge volumes. Right now I have a client asking me to provide two tonnes of culture. This means 2,000-metre cube of culture. I don’t have the manufacturing unit to provide this. This is a huge investment but as an entrepreneur now I can see that a market is there. And demand is very high”

The environment solutions consultant

As she moves forward from lab-scale to commercial scale, Prasad has behind her, over 16 years of experience working as the R&D head and environment auditor with two consultancies.

After her PhD in Delhi, the newly-married Prasad moved to Baroda with her husband. “I knew that Gujarat is in the industrial belt and there is a lot of waste water management to be done so I decided to come along with him. ”

It was easy to get the position of a lecturer at nearby colleges at the outset of her career but Prasad craved for more hands-on research. After a temporary lectureship at MSU (Maharaja Sayajirao University) Baroda, she joined as R&D head of Paramount, an environmental consultancy offering water treatability solutions to big projects in industries and government tenders.

“All over India wherever the site was, the sample from the treatment plant came to our R&D office. We did the analysis and offered cleaner and economical solutions. I was an environmental auditor, approved by the Gujarat Pollution Control Board that gives us the authority to audit any industry.”

For an audit as well as, an environment impact assessment needed before any project, a team of experts including geologists, microbiologists and field specialists is needed. Prasad spent many years leading such teams.

“While at Paramount I met with an accident; unfortunately my tail bone got fractured.” Prasad was left with a debilitating physical condition, unable to sit or stand for more than a few hours. She had to resign. R.V. Kadam, director at Paramount and a father figure to her, realised what a loss this was for the environment consultancies in Gujarat and also for the very driven Prasad. He offered her a part-time consultancy position at the newly formed Day Star Green technologies. “In India at that point of time, flexibility in work was not available. But recognising my aptitude and potential, I was offered this position.”

Even a few hours of work at Day Star Green, filling up as an R&D head at the new company, took a toll on Prasad’s health. She realised it was time to take a break that her ambition did not desire but her body needed. The family moved to Singapore, where Prasad recovered and had all the time to write projects that she had been thinking about for years. She visited Singapore’s premier institutes Nanyang Technological University and National University of Singapore and discussed the feasibility of her projects with the experts there. “My ideas were applauded, which gave me the confidence to pursue what I am doing now.”

On her return to India after her recovery, Prasad rejoined Day Star Green but the time had come for Revy to gain ground.

“By that time I had written and presented some possible projects that had been applauded. I really want to do something on a commercial scale with the patents I held from my PhD. I told Kadam sir that I want to pursue these projects independently and there were some grants I was ready to apply for, offered by the Indian government to develop some markatable products.”

Her mentor, as always, gave her the confidence and the support she needed. “He is always there as my mentor and always helping me. He keeps saying when I am doubtful: “no madam you can do it”. He is 75 years old and he is there every moment; if I want to ask any question he is there to answer them.”

Suicide at 45?

Prasad’s company Revy will provide the same environmental treatability and consultancy she worked on in Paramount and Day Star Green along with the products she is preparing now.

This is a lot of work but there is no stopping Prasad. “People tell me I have decided to commit (social and career) suicide at the age of 45. Maybe they don’t see a mother and a wife starting a research-based company independently at my age.”

The family – her husband and two adolescent sons are by her side. She gets all the encouragement from them.

“I don’t have a daughter, both my kids are boys. They are all males in the family and I’m the only female. I am here because they are supporting me. I’m here because of my kids and my husband,” she said holding back emotions. “Not only are they supporting me from the housework but they are morally supporting me. My kids say: ‘Mumma you had taken a step back to raise us. And now we can take care of ourselves. So you have to start it all again.’ They have given me the motivation I need. When your kids are wise enough to tell you, ‘don’t worry I’ll take care of my own studies and grades, you go on with your dreams’ you feel motivated.”

A Filmmaker and Ethnographer Retells Stories of Indigenous Art

Nina Sabnani, a filmmaker, illustrator and researcher in ethnography of numerous indigenous artist communities across India, talks about how stories must be constantly retold to keep them alive.

Nina Sabnani. Credit: The Life of Science

Passing through the many corridors of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, I finally arrived at the Industrial Design Centre (IDC), IIT’s design school. IDC might have started off very ‘industrial’ but it is now brimming with creative expression and campaigns to acknowledge traditional indigenous Indian art. A prototype of the next Indian post box was on the right and a schema defining best product design practices on the left and in front of me, several glass doors, beyond which sat Nina Sabnani, filmmaker, illustrator and researcher in ethnography of numerous indigenous artist communities across India.

Sabnani, in spirit, is a storyteller. She tells real stories through her short documentary animation films. “I was always interested in animating other people’s art – not my own. If I look back, two things have really guided me in some sense. One is working with communities and the other is retelling of stories in a current context,” said the 60-year-old as we started the conversation in her neat office spotted with Rajasthani Kaavad shrines, Bhil paintings from Madhya Pradesh and stacks of all the films she has made in her long journey.

Her own story started in Baroda at a fine-arts college, where she trained to be an artist. After this, she spent 26 years studying and teaching at National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad – India’s premier design school.

“I did not do my masters immediately after my college. I felt like learning was being presented like going through the rut… I wanted learning to be a more fun thing so I did my masters only when I was 41-42.”

“In between [her NID phase] I got the Fulbright fellowship, I went to Syracuse, USA, to do my masters. That opened my mind to new technologies. I was introduced to new media and things like that.”

“It was very exciting but I did not know quite what to do with it,” she said reflecting on the time when she was introduced to the new world of computer animation whilst still enamoured by hand-done stitches, patchwork and embroidery in Gujarat. The fascination of vibrant art created with painstaking hours of handiwork by artist communities in India pushed forward by strong culture and traditions, never left Sabnani.

“But still if I look at it through the rearview mirror, then I think my time abroad liberated me from this dichotomy of hand versus machine. I use them both. In my work, they really come together. I see technology as a very positive thing for my work.”

“With the kind of software we have now, I’m able to animate with traditional crafts and still retain the aesthetic and the tactile…sensorial part of the crafts that I like very much.”

Retelling stories through animation

“How do stories stay alive? Because they are constantly retold,” Sabnani declared her central philosophy mid-interview. Later she handed me four CDs from a huge stack. When I watched her films, one by one, I began to really understand her work. These films are the equivalent of a research paper for Sabnani, much more accessible and a lot more colourful.

The first film Sabnani made was based on a series of four Madhubani paintings she bought at an exhibition in 1981. The fact that the art was themed on an anti-dowry sentiment struck her. This film and all the other ones that came after have been a channel for such an indigenous voice coming out of traditional art.

Her second film titled Mukand and Riaz was an ode to her father. “He had come to India as a refugee during the partition but he had never ever talked about his story. This was a story I decided to tell with my father.”

“When he was very ill, he felt that he had to share his story with somebody and I was a good listener I think. I wrote down the story of how his friend (Riaz) who was a Pakistani Muslim helped him (Mukand) escape with his family.”

Mukand and Riaz is set against the bloody massacre over religion during the 1947 partition. The timely film came out in 2006 when the country was reeling from the gruesome communal riots in Gujarat. “In a riot-torn Gujarat [where her father had always lived], he had never done anything proactively to bridge these communal gaps. So it was for him.”

The film was crafted in cloth with applique work and embroidery by artists from Gujarat. “I did not want my father to look like a cartoon character. And it was appropriate since he worked in the textile mills there.”

“One week before my father died, I had finished the film to show him,” she said, still showing signs of the giant relief.

Non-linear stories with the Kaavad

After her father passed away, Sabnani felt she needed a major shift in her life. “I just did not want to go on making one film after another. I wanted to do something more reflective.”

She had heard about the research opportunities at IDC and decided to apply. But the question lingered – research what?

Sabnani was coming from a background where new media and non-linearity was an emerging field of study. “I started looking at old traditions, storytelling traditions as non-linear kind of modes. If you look at the Phad of Rajasthan, nothing is connected to anything, they never tell the whole narrative. And it is also multimedia because they sing, they dance, they light it up. I attempted to connect my excitement for new media with my passion for older traditions.”

Phad art introduced her to the tradition of Kaavad – a portable shrine that opens up it’s many layers to retell old legends carried forward by a community of artists and storytellers from Rajasthan.

Inspired by the Kaavad, Sabnani organised a storytelling conference to showcase her own creation – an interactive Kaavad. One of the people who had come to the conference remarked: “This is appropriation!” This sent Sabnani deeper into reflection over her work: “Like a typical designer, I had appropriated what I liked in the craft and made it into whatever [suited me]. Then I thought haan, she’s right… this is appropriation, I cannot do this. I don’t even know what it is all about.” Another conference attendant said: “iska toh Ph.D. ho sakta hai. (this topic is extensive enough for a Ph.D.)”

These two comments stayed in Sabnani’s mind forever and inspired her Ph.D. topic. “I decided, I must find out more about Kaavad tradition and the community.”

Accepted at IIT as a 50-year-old Ph.D. student, she spent the next five-six years with Kaavad artists and storytellers in the eastern part of Rajasthan, in a village called Bassi.

The film It’s the Same Story encapsulates the reasons the Kaavad is carried in the first place and dwells deeper into how different versions of the same story are told by different storytellers. “In our research, there were two Kaavad storytellers telling the same story in different ways. I decided to tell both in my film, to understand that there are so many ways to look at the same thing.”

Sabnani believes that summarising what one has learnt from their research is a challenge for her. She has explored through her films, different methods of enveloping the findings of her ethnographic research.

Her aim has been to bring the true context and inspiration behind traditional art into her films so that without saying this is research, it reaches people and makes them think about a new way of looking at something. “Ultimately, research is a new kind of knowledge, isn’t it?”

Research that empowers communities

“I have studied animation and practised animation, but I also use animation as a way to research,” Sabnani said.

Since working with the Kaavad storytellers, she has been more interested in working with communities and seeing animation as a way of learning about them. She explained her uneasiness with the distance brought on with the camera pointed at a community by an outsider as if it was a wildlife documentary: “When you do live action filming, you are always operating with this invasive eye, looking at them with a camera.”

“Whereas, in this kind of research, the communities end up producing their own art, the film and their own representation of their reality. And we are animating that with their voice.”

“Now all my work is more research-oriented rather than just making films.”

Her most recent film We Make Images retells a myth of the Bhil people of Jhabua district in Madhya Pradesh. It examines the artist community with the question: Why do the Bhil paint? With moving and pulsating Bhil paintings by Bhil artists themselves, the film unravels the community’s fixation with painting trees on walls, pots and pretty much everything so that the rains don’t stop pouring down and the prophecy laid down by their Badvaji (shaman) continues to be fulfilled.

“If I want to to learn about this community, one way to do it is by sitting down and filming them, talking to them and learn, interviews them, watch them and write down everything.”

Leaving this method behind, Sabnani is able to take Participant Observation method of ethnography to the next level. The medium of her work (animation) allows for a clear tangible outcome (a film) to be produced in collaboration between the researcher and the subject.

“We usually start with a workshop where they are painting, they are showing us how to paint. I learn everything about what goes into the making of the painting, the subjects and what is he/she is doing.”

“Further, when the film is being made, the artist can say ‘oh not this way’, the element will not move like this, this won’t happen like this…all of these things that he is unable to tell me [if he doesn’t participate in the making], because he doesn’t know what I don’t know,” she laughed.

“In this way, animation becomes a way of doing research with the participants, in collaboration and it also a way of representing the ethnography. What you have observed becomes a part of the film, it becomes tangible and accessible.”

As she talked about bringing research methodology closer to the subject, I couldn’t help drawing the connections to scientific research conducted in most labs. She then brought up the question: who is research for? “It tends to be [presented] as if you are speaking to other researchers, and it speaks a language which people find very hard to understand, mostly it stays in libraries or it is presented in some conferences.”

“The participants are outside of it – they don’t get anything. In this way, they get something, at the end of the research process, they have a film, which has their voices, their art, their life stories which make them feel empowered in some sense. So one looks at animation as a way of empowering communities also.”

As one of the subjects of her research on Kutch artists said after watching the film The Stitches Speak that Sabnani made with them: “This is not our story, it is our history.”

Today as the Professor of Visual Ethnography at IIT, Sabnani continues nurturing her own research process and that of her students. Some of the topics she is involved in through her Ph.D. students include the notion of domesticity in Hindi cinema, using images as prompts instead of words in the classroom to elicit essay writing and the non-formal art training that children of Bhil artists get in their lifetime.

Learning is now one of Sabnani’s special interests. As her own journey has professed, learning is not a time-bound activity, restricted to one period of a student’s life; it is instead a lifelong journey. From her rich experience, stems mentorship (she has put together this online course) and of course all of IIT.

“We made a pitch for an open design school at the [HR and Education] ministry recently and we have been given a year to work on two courses, which will be online. They are based on blended learning so partly you come to a place of study and partly you learn on your own, at your own pace.”

Plotting Climate Change and Diarrhoea in Varanasi

Nidhi Singh, a researcher at Banaras Hindu University, wants to provide evidence on the link between climate change and the increase in vector-borne and other diseases in Varanasi.

Nidhi Singh. Credit: Aashima Dogra

When I first arrived at the massive Banaras Hindu University (BHU), passing through its many temple-like faculty buildings, I was handed a long list of contacts of senior female scientists pursuing research in different departments. It was Rajesh Mall, a climate scientist at the university who opened the door for me to all the amazing people I met in Varanasi.

Surprisingly, among all the people I met, those most enthused about their science, were Mall’s own PhD students. They are not scientists yet but are training to be. Every day the group meets at its desk to talk about a huge entangled mess of a problem – climate change. However, the term that brings doom and gloom to most minds is just a problem Nidhi Singh and her colleagues in Mall’s optimistic research group are rearing to solve.

Singh researches the impact of climate change on humans. Not human impact on the climate but the other way round. “We know that climatic parameters like temperature and humidity play very important role in spread and transport of diseases like tuberculosis, diarrhoea, malaria, kala-azar and pneumonia. Similarly, a person having cardiac issues can get troubled in high temperatures like 48-50℃. Heat stress is another problem due to loss of water and dehydration in extreme temperatures.”

Singh works with local climate data from the past 30 years and disease incidence data from a big local hospital in Varanasi. She was born and raised here and plans on staying here as long as BHU offers her a lectureship unless she is offered a post-doctoral fellowship abroad. When she is done with her research, she hopes that the people of Varanasi will be in a better position to make informed steps to reduce the devastating impacts of climate change on the public health of the oldest city in the country.

Singh is a young, charming and confident woman. She talks about her research profusely and is able to describe the work and its limitations very clearly, something not so common among people of science.

Like most climate scientists, she sifts through large amounts of data every day. For the last two years, she has been working with data from Sunderlal Hospital, housed inside the BHU campus, 50 metres from her institute. Every year the hospital treats thousands of patients suffering from TB, diabetes, diarrhoea, malaria and kala-azar. The large patient data generated is invaluable for Singh’s work.

It’s already known that climate changes involve a rise in temperature, more extreme rainfall, and an accompanied increase in vector-borne diseases and some other diseases like diabetes and cardiac problems. If you put the number of disease incidents and the climate data across on the same plot, both graphs will flow together, as if climate change is responsible for rising number of diseases.

Singh wants to provide evidence for the same thing, but over a specific population – the people of Varanasi.

Sunderlal Hospital, where she has been getting her data from, is the biggest and oldest in the area. You would expect lots of reliable data, but Nidhi still finds lots of hurdles. “The hospital doesn’t have all the records of past years. We can only get data from last decade but not before that. Another problem is that they don’t provide us with all the data and we have to fight for it. We have to go through a large procedure. Large numbers of people coming to the OPD daily are not recorded; we have limited data on only the admitted patients. There are also no records of what socio-economic background these patients are coming from.”

Singh needs data – and lots of it. The validity of her work depends on it. Since the data she has been relying on has proved frustrating, she is now preparing a new device to fit into her research methodology.

She is currently writing a questionnaire that she will take to several local hospitals to generate her own data. She hopes to find at least 500 patients for each disease dataset.

At the conclusion of her PhD project, Nidhi will have found a relationship between the trends of the changing climate and diseases. “Local communities can then take seasonal mitigative steps like widening sewers and directing the flow of water.”

“The policies and plans the government makes are based on the data that scientists have done research on. So, unless and until we have knowledge on particular areas it would be tough to deal with problems locally.”

When I asked her about how she felt about being a woman in science in this country, she looked a bit dumbfounded and then responded, “At work I don’t feel if I’m a woman or a man. Here I’m just a research scholar.”

“My family praises me and they don’t pressurise me to get married. I am 28 now and I have zero pressure. Similar is the situation with most of the research scholars in this institute… so it’s very nice.”

The Environmental Biotechnologist Who Is the Only Woman Director at BHU

Kavita Shah, an environmental biotechnologist at the Institute of Environmental and Sustainable Development, BHU, talks about how resourcefulness can be a crucial asset to further a career as a researcher.

Kavita Shah, an environmental biotechnologist at the Institute of Environmental and Sustainable Development, talks about how resourcefulness can be a crucial asset to further a career as a researcher.

Kavita Shah. Credit: Aashima Dogra/TLoS

As I waited outside Kavita Shah’s office, she was inside, shaking hands with a delegation that was conferring her the title of one of six directors of Banaras Hindu University (BHU). “As of now, I am officiated,” she told me later, hardly controlling a beaming smile.

She is now the only woman to hold this top position. Before this, she was one of the only two female deans in 17 departments at the 100-year-old university.

The climb to the top hasn’t been easy. But Shah tells the story of her 22-year-old scientific life as if she was describing events of a vacation full of adventure.

She started as a Zoology student at the women’s college at BHU named Mahila Mahavidyalaya (MMV). She earned a Ph.D. from the same university soon after. Following stints in Japan, Geneva and North East Hill University in Shillong, she found herself coming back to teach at BHU.

Central library at the huge temple-themed BHU campus. Courtesy: Life of Science — Central library at the huge temple-themed BHU campus. Credit: Aashima Dogra/TLoS

Scientist without a lab

When BHU offered her a lectureship, Shah was very confused. “I thought I had interviewed for a position in the faculty of science at BHU, not for MMV (which operates separately from the main faculties of the university). This was one thing I was not expecting.”

At this time, Shah was already a researcher pursuing post-doctoral projects that required a functional lab to carry out experiments.

Shah decided to take up the challenge. What followed was two years of elaborate administrative procedures, several meetings and pleas for funding to set up a Central Instrumentation Laboratory (CIL) – a deck of important scientific instruments including spectrometers, microscopes and lasers – inside an examination room at MMV.

“Research at MMV had totally stopped years back. I was the first researcher to set up a laboratory. I had to convince the higher authorities that the science building of MMV is not justified without a CIL and that I was willing to bear all the pains required to set up one.”

“For the laboratory, I got just a bare room with four walls. Finally, I did all the designing, drafting, AC sanctions, ducting, water channels with proper lines, electricity, wiring and equipment. In fact, I was in charge till I left MMV and joined this institute.”

“Even today, the same instruments that were bought with the first sanctioned [Rs] 50 lakh are still in use.”

Kavita in action at the lab. Courtesy: Life of Science — Kavita Shah in action at the lab. Credit: Aashima Dogra/TLoS

Biochemistry to the rescue

Even in her science, Shah shows enterprise. She jumped from enzyme biochemistry into environmental biotechnology with the idea of using the same enzyme that she worked on as a chemist. From this enzyme, which comes from waste left behind after a rice harvest, she has developed sensors for detecting biomolecules, nanoparticles, pollutants and dyes.

In Shah’s crown, two jewels shine the brightest. One is the enzyme-based sensor of the neurotransmitter dopamine, for which she was recently decorated with the Women Scientist Award 2011 from the Biotech Research Society. The ‘rice-peroxidase-enzyme-biosensor’ is a novel discovery that can monitor levels of dopamine in neurological patients to help administer proper dose of the drug to patients with Alzheimer’s/Parkinson’s diseases. “We have patented this sensor already and we are working to refine it for higher sensitivity. We are also looking into commercialisation of this.”

Kavita's awards. Courtesy: Life of Science — Kavita Shah’s awards. Credit: Aashima Dogra/TLoS

The second highlight of Shah’s research are the biosensors and bioreactors she developed to break down pollutants in local small-scale dyeing industry.

“Dye houses are small units using chemicals affluent. They discard the waste water directly in the soil after dyeing, but this water ultimately comes to their own tap water and drinking water or their agricultural land. It gets accumulated in the water table and then there is no way to remove it. To avoid such contamination, we are preparing to give dyers the small instruments at a very low cost so that the contaminated waste water can be treated. So that they can at least protect themselves and throw waste-water in the soil without contamination. The main toxic part can be removed partially – that is our main aim. We have a prototype for testing it. We haven’t published any papers yet.”

Along the way, Shah managed to earn several grants from home and abroad. The result is 75 scientific publications.

Amusingly, all along the interview, she managed to keep hidden the juicy details when I prodded for specific information on unpatented and future work. She avoided and skimmed through with slick diplomacy.

She did, however, hint at some exciting projects her research group is undertaking including one which questions the burning ritual on the river Ganga based on alarming levels of silting seen there.

“We are working on water quality management and different components that are yet not been reported as pollutants in Ganges. Also on the burning ghats – to what extent is it [the ritual] contributing to the socio-economic factors and is it actually required or it is something extrapolative.”

Indian universities and scientific institutes could use more leaders like Shah. Her vision is clear and her endurance shines through. Her people skills have clearly been a major asset that has helped her along the way.

Oh, she can also play the sitar.

Receiving the Women Scientist Award 2011. Courtesy: Life of Science — Receiving the Women Scientist Award 2011. Credit: TLoS

The trick is devotion

The secret to Shah’s success seems to be her resourcefulness – she is able to recognise what is needed to get the job done. She fully accepts the situation and finds her way around it.

In her experience, there are only two kinds of women who can go very far in research: those who have support from their families and those who rebel against the oppression.

The trick she says is devotion. “As a woman researcher, you cannot deny that you have to take care of family and in spite of that, you have to excel in your work. In that view, I can say that a person who is not devoted can never be a good researcher, especially a woman.”

“Definitely a woman needs to contribute at the both ends and it is not possible to leave everything and completely devote towards research.”

Below are Shah’s comments on how universities and families could take steps towards equality.

How can science become more equal?

It is important that higher authorities in universities are more open-minded. A very cordial relation and a spirit of mentorship are needed. Women should be given an equal platform to have their say. They cannot be just sitting in a crowd and totally unheard.

Main positions should be given to women to show that they can also be good administrators. Women are more humanitarian in approach because their instinct is like that. I feel at least one senior position should be occupied by a woman.

Any comments on the family system and society?

I am associated with a local girl’s school. I notice that by the time they are in class 12 they are married so they are deprived of further studies. Parents need counselling, but there are other constraints like poverty, big family size or safety issues. The unawareness of scholarship schemes by the government is also a problem.

What about after marriage?

I did all my education after marriage. I did my MSc, B.Ed, Ph.D., a couple of post-docs, then taught at NEHU and completed three more post-docs here. So I would say it’s all your will. Women tend to give up for the family, they succumb to the pressure and give up. It is that point where they need to think judiciously. When you start looking for a way the way comes to you. It is you who pave your own way.

This piece was originally published by The Life of Science. The Wire is happy to support this project by Aashima Dogra and Nandita Jayaraj, who are traveling across India to meet some fantastic women scientists.

When Are Women More Likely To Stay in Science?

Two science journalists have discovered that even though women are doing all kinds of research, there is a visible lack of women scientists in the country.

Public lecture held at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Credit: TLoS

This week, we take a break to look back at what we’ve found in the eight months of around 50 interviews with women at scientific institutions in India for our project The Life of Science.

Our crowdfunding campaign is doing great – in fact, we hit our target a month in advance, though the campaign is still open (please continue to contribute, more funds -> more travels -> richer data). And recently, we gave a public lecture at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi about the project and science communication in general. The discussion at the lectures emphasised the urgent need for dialogue. Here are some of the things we are reflecting on.

There are many women in Indian science…

The numbers, though still unsatisfactory for a gender equal space, are much more than suggested by media reports, national awards for scientists and top management at scientific institutes. The lack of women in these publicly visible channels is breeding a misleading perception. This absence of role models for young women considering a future in science does no service to gender equality in the academic world. One of the questions asked at the lecture was, “Are there any scientific disciplines that suit women more?” The answer that we find is no. Women have been and are doing all kinds of research in this country. Examples found on this site show that women, if they possess will and support, can do any kind of research that interests them, be it biotechnology, geology, electronics, physics, sociology, economics, energy, mathematics, ecology.In a nutshell, where you are on the gender rainbow has nothing to do with the aptitude or capability to do science.

… but not enough

There are very few women working at the scientific institutions we have visited. At one of India’s premier science institutes, Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, there are only three women among the seventy scientists. At Banaras Hindu University, there are only two women Deans (Kavita and Ramadevi) in seventeen faculties. More often than not it happens that we are met with the male boss who introduces us to one or two women in the department. When we ask: “Any others?”, “No, that’s it” is the response.

Is the problem starting in the classroom? As one researcher who works in the periphery of linguistics and electronics remarked during the open forum for women scientists that followed our talk at IIT-D, “There are a handful of female students in class. And even these few do not ask any questions during my lectures. You feel like an anomaly [when your kind is so few in number].”

Open forum for women scientists at IIT-D. Credit: TLoS

Having a spouse in science helps

A significant proportion of our married subjects’ spouses are also scientists. Some of these couples, like Monica Bhatnagar, Kusala Rajendran and Prajakta Dandekar are in a scientific partnership with their spouses. Clearly, a ‘science-spouse’ helps women stay in science. Many of our subjects that run their own lab have said that a lot of their female students drop out after settling down with family life. Institutes committed to equality must stay open and make efforts to hire couples, like IISER Pune is doing. Many Indian institutes (including CSIR, some IITs and PRL) have made it difficult for worthy couples to be hired, citing controllable risks of nepotism during promotions or ‘ganging up’.

There is also a notion of ‘competition’ among spouses, as was discussed during the open forum. The panel at the event, composed of six women scientists; all but one, had science-spouses. They agreed that such a problem can be easily managed and have not come in the way of their science or personal lives.

Support system is crucial

In the context of the Indian patriarchal family system – where most of the responsibility of childcare falls on the mother and family life is at the apex of a woman’s priorities – taking up research is hugely challenging. Choosing family life over research life is a major cause for dropping out of academia.

The scientists we have interviewed are either rebelling by putting off marriage or are benefitting from a support system that helps them manage their two lives. This support system comes in form of supportive parents (many help raise children), nannies, maids and importantly creche facilities provided by institutions.

Most scientists we interviewed who mentor female researchers have expressed concern over family expectations of getting married as soon as M.Sc/Ph.D. degree is done with and then abandoning research. As Mayurika Lahiri, a cancer biologist who started a daycare centre at IISER Pune put it, “Standing up to your parents is something most girls are not doing. Especially after so much education, what’s the point of abandoning your real interests?”

There is also something to be said about ‘the need for women to take their own decisions’, which is the one clear scientific finding of studies on women empowerment (two of our subjects have reported this). When women are taking their own decisions about when to get married, when to have children and if to continue their research along with family life, they are more likely to stay in science.

Finding time to do science

Neetu Singh, assistant professor of biomedical sciences at IIT-D, who organised the open forum for women scientists had collected questions from female students in her department. Some of the recurring questions were – “Is it possible to pursue research as a nine-five job? And how can one compete with those who put longer hours in the lab?” suggesting that the prospective scientists seem to be concerned about the time-consuming nature of research.

To this, the panel responded: Science is truly not a nine-five job. Like in Singh’s case, sometimes a midnight lab visit is required to check on growing bacteria. But they all agreed that this is the best part. As Deepti Gupta, Professor of Textile Chemistry and head of Infrastructure Committee at IIT-D said, “perhaps you can’t surf the internet as much.”

Singh added, “But science is actually quite flexible, so you are not bound from nine-five. You have the freedom to do whatever it is you are interested in and manage your timings yourself. If I don’t feel like coming at nine, I won’t. I can come at 11.” Another panellist added that the flexibility in research work also offers work-from-home possibilities. Moreover, all research doesn’t have to be time-consuming. The panel resounded that students must examine their aptitude themselves and decide what makes them happy and choose based on what they truly want to do.

Managing aspirations

In the environment where girls are programmed for their role as caregivers, there seems to be an issue of self-image that doesn’t match with that of a scientist. Amitabha Bagchi, an associate professor in the computer science department, put it eloquently, “We need to tell prospective scientists that research doesn’t demand 100% confidence at every stage.” Sarita Ahlawat, another professor who bounced back into science, weighed with her own example: “I became a serious researcher at 35 after taking a break from science. I followed my husband everywhere and thought he was a better scientist than me. When he was planning his scientific path, I was planning for children – one child at 30, second at 32… Women need to demand help when they needed.” And the panel echoed. In our research, scientific mentors inside the laboratory have also shown to play a big role in bringing the numbers up.

Lack of openness

At a session on science communication with IIT-D students and a few faculty on October 19, we attempted to motivate young scientists to communicate their research as it happens. We provided some tools and tips to help them do this. We will be adding a list of resources here next week. As we travel from one institute to another, we find that science in India is largely operating under the same rules as a golf course: no outsiders allowed. This practice goes against the philosophy of science that is rooted within the sphere of society.

The scientific method of hypothesis and inductive inquiry to get results must remain central while communicating science also. With this in mind, it is possible to break the cycle of unresponsive scientists and irresponsible journalists. Currently, in India, the link between society and science is broken. To fix this public engagement by scientists as blogs, updated websites, citizen science initiatives, outreach events and talking to science journalists can help.

Sexual harassment is hush-hushA poignant moment during the open forum was when a researcher complained about sexually suggestive whistles on campus. To this, the panel responded with disbelief, shaking heads and denial on the basis of campus being a liberal place. “Such a thing would never happen,” they said. Ten minutes later, incidents of physical sexual harassment were brought up by faculty and students, including one incident of harassment at a scientific conference involving a foreign victim. The participant protested against the victim-blaming that ensued after the conference incident. Moreover, the organisers failed to take proper action and the only outcome was a general announcement asking conferences attendees to “behave themselves”.

Deepti Gupta, the only female committee head at IIT testified frankly. She said, “Sexual harassment is a total taboo in committees. We don’t talk about it. Don’t want to face it.” Such a scenario, where the authorities are resigned to sexual harassment is no safe place for anyone to be – man or woman, science or no science.

An Oceanographer Explains Why We Should Explore Earth’s Complex Climate History

Ayusmati S. Manaskanya, an oceanographer at the National Institute of Oceanography in Goa, believes than an understanding of the Earth’s climate history can help make better statistical models to predict future climate.

Ayusmati S. Manaskanya, an oceanographer at the National Institute of Oceanography in Goa, believes than an understanding of the Earth’s climate history can help make better statistical models to predict future climate.

Ayusmati S. Manaskanya. Credit: The Life of Science

Under the Bay of Bengal, a three-meter deep layer of the planet’s surface lay undisturbed for the past 10,000 years until the crew aboard the scientific vessel Marion Dufresne extracted it. The French ship boasts of a state-of-the-art ‘corer’ named Calypso that dug into this seabed at the Krishna-Godavari basin off the shores of Andhra Pradesh.

The ‘core’, composed of sediments that settled underwater, thousands of years ago, was packed and stored carefully. Eventually, it found its way to Ayusmati Manaskanya in Goa, who was embarking on her Ph.D. project in 2013.

Since the day she met her sample, Manaskanya has been studying it thoroughly. First, she geologically dated it to confirm that the sediment was formed 10,000 years ago. She then made subsamples and began a multitude of experiments to test the biological, geological and chemical, together called the biogeochemical composition of the core.

Its atoms and molecules tell the story of the past, making the core an archive that equips Manaskanya to estimate the paleoclimate – Earth’s climate when this sediment formed thousands of years ago.

Guessing the paleoclimate to model future climate

“Actually the most common way oceanographers study the Paleoclimate is with fossils of ancient organisms foraminifera,” Manaskanya said as we started the interview about her research. The sulphur and calcium carbonate from the fossils are inorganic ‘proxies’ for past climate. But Manaskanya uses another strategy; her focus is on the core’s organic geochemistry.

Each of the organic elements (which are what the bodies of lifeforms are predominantly made of) like carbon, oxygen and nitrogen are preserved under water in different forms or isotopes, which vary in the number of protons and neutrons in their atoms. For example, some of the oxygen atoms are heavy and some are light. By comparing the ratio of heavy and light isotopes in the core to a geological standard, Manaskanya can get clues about the past climate.

“These isotopes not only answer questions about the paleoclimate, but also fill the gaps in our understanding of the nitrogen cycle, carbon cycle and the overall biogeochemistry involved in the ocean,” she said.

Another ‘proxy’ that Manaskanya studies, is the indicative marine plants that compose her sample. Studying the carbon isotopes in the core can tell which kinds of plants lived at that time. This is a major clue to the monsoon patterns that existed at the time when very few humans roamed the planet.

Besides earning Manaskanya her Ph.D. degree, these proxies will serve as the missing piece of an important puzzle. “Until now, it has not been possible to accurately model future climate patterns because of the complex and restless nature of our planet’s climate. Knowing the major events in the Earth’s climate history will enable us to make better predictions and prepare, say when a cyclone is going hit our nation.”

Manaskanya shows her ability to look at the big picture, as all Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) scientists are expected to while explaining the applicability of her research. “With our analysis, we can report important weather events that have happened in the past. With this information, my colleagues in the physical oceanography department – the mathematicians – can make better and better statistical models to predict future climate.”

“For example, we can observe events like the El Nino, which occurs every two-seven years. In this way, the frequency of a weather event can be predicted. We can say that this kind of event will repeat in this particular year or predict that monsoon will be heavy in this year or warn the country of a cyclone that could impact its economy with so much severity. Such predictions can enable preparation that can save lives and secure the future of the country.”

Being discovered as a scientist