Scientist, rebel & reformer – Calcutta Telegraph

Yash Pal

New Delhi, July 25: The Manmohan Singh government had returned to power for its second term a month earlier, with a stronger mandate and without the Left's leash - intent on allowing foreign universities virtually unfettered access to India's domestic higher education market.

At 82, scientist-educationist Yash Pal was getting frailer. But on a June morning in 2009, Yash Pal, aided by a brown walking stick, walked into then human resources development minister Kapil Sibal's third-floor office at Shastri Bhavan, to tell him the government was wrong.

Singh had in February 2008 appointed Yash Pal to head a panel to prepare a blueprint for higher education reforms. Now, 16 months later, he handed in the panel's report, explicitly cautioning against throwing open India's education market without rigorous regulations.

Wavy-haired Yash Pal, a pipe-smoking cosmic ray physicist who pioneered satellite television in India, sought to propagate science and rationalism by transforming himself into a TV star, and coaxed universities to break out of silos to collaborate in research, died yesterday. He was 90.

His resume brimmed with standard markers of success - the first director of the Space Applications Centre (SAC) in Ahmedabad in the 1970s, secretary of the department of science and technology in the early 1980s and chairman of the University Grants Commission later.

Millions of Indians who watched television in the early 1990s recognised him through his appearances on a science TV show called Turning Point. And since 1991, successive governments turned to him for blueprints to reform school and higher education.

But to many who knew him the longest, Yash Pal was also a rebel - a man who would merrily breach protocol to assert his views, even at the risk of offending the day's political leadership.

"He never hesitated to speak what he believed in, to those in power," recalled Anita Rampal, veteran educationist and Delhi University professor who knew and worked with Yash Pal from the 1970s. "That's a trait we're going to miss even more in today's climate, where academic leaders are not so forthright."

Born in 1926 in a town called Jhang in what is now Pakistan Punjab, Yash Pal moved with his family to Jalandhar - where his father, a government employee, was transferred - and then to Delhi, where he witnessed the joy of Independence and the pain of Partition.

He bore the determination common to many of his generation, to study more despite the challenges of a young nation seared by violence and hobbled by poverty. As refugees from Pakistan poured in, he worked with Daulat Singh Kothari, fellow physicist and one of India's preeminent educationists in its initial years after Independence, to turn war-time barracks in the city into classrooms.

His passion to take science to the masses long preceded the official positions he held across governments of all hues. V. Siddhartha, a retired Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) scientist, was 10 years old when in the mid-1950s, Yash Pal visited his private school in New Delhi.

Yash Pal was those days flying weather balloons using cosmic ray lead plate array detectors.

"Yash was persuaded by the school principal to allow me to watch a flight," Siddhartha remembered today. Siddhartha stayed at the school overnight, woke up at 4 am, and sat in a jeep that took him to the launch site - the roof of a Delhi University building. The balloons were tracked by a World War II British military radar mounted on a truck-trailer.

By the 1960s, Yash Pal was working at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he earned his PhD, and then returned to TIFR to continue research before he was appointed director of the new SAC in Ahmedabad.

Rampal, who had started science teaching schools in Hoshangabad, Madhya Pradesh, in the 1970s, was surprised when Yash Pal, then at the TIFR, visited her.

They worked together to set up Eklavya, a rural science education programme that attracted scientists and teachers from premier universities across India, like the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Indian Institute of Science and TIFR.

"Scientists from the big science institutions didn't always think that much about linking their work to society," Rampal said. "Yash Pal was different, and his support was critical for the success of Eklavya."

As secretary of DST and then chairman of the UGC, he encouraged government funding for rural science education programmes like Eklavya, Rampal said. "He opened up these institutions that were closed before him," she said. "He was a collaborator, an ally, a mentor who went out of his way to encourage and promote those he believed in."

Bureaucracy frustrated Yash Pal, said Rampal, who recalled how he often told her about a sense of helplessness when he was at the UGC.

But he nevertheless succeeded in creating premier hubs of collaborative research like the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune and the Nuclear Science Centre in New Delhi.

Even those theoretically in his line of fire admired him.

"He would look at higher education in an integrated manner, and refused to accept walls between different streams of education," recalled Sukhdeo Thorat, who was chairman of the UGC when Yash Pal, as a part of his 2009 recommendations, suggested the body be merged with other regulators - like the All India Council for Technical Education and the Medical Council of India, and be reformed to ensure greater autonomy for universities and colleges. "Freedom and autonomy of higher education were critical to him."

The school education reforms Yash Pal proposed in the 1990s as head of a panel set up by the Narasimha Rao government remain a benchmark frequently cited by educationists. In the mid-2000s, when the Singh government asked him to help draft a National Curriculum Framework, he withstood bureaucratic pressure to propose new-age textbooks, Rampal said.

But Yash Pal was also open about his policy views even at times when they were sharply contrary to those of the political leadership of the day. Sibal wasn't the first to realize that.

In 1990, the Rajiv Gandhi government had been voted out of power, and Sam Pitroda, one of Rajiv's closest aides, was no longer welcomed the way he once was in government policy circles.

But Yash Pal, as President of the Indian Science Congress that year, used his address in Kochi to laud Pitroda's contribution to the spread of telephones across rural India, pleasantly surprising the US-returned technocrat who was present in the audience.

More than 25 years later, Yash Pal took on the Congress government in Chhattisgarh - at a time the party also ruled at the Centre - after it had pushed through a controversial law that had in two months spawned dozens of private teaching shops that could call themselves universities.

Yash Pal approached the Supreme Court, which struck down the Chhattisgarh law. "When he thought something was wrong, he acted on it," Thorat said.

As he aged, his hearing had started failing him. But the naughty twinkle in his eyes remained - as did the search for his approval among educationists.

Rampal recalled the comfort she felt each time he responded to her ideas with an approving nod and a hug. The last time they met was a year back, at a television studio where they were on a debate panel.

After the show, she recalled, she held his hand to walk him down the stairs. "'Aah,' he told me in his typical way," Rampal said today. '"You realize I need help.'"

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Scientist, rebel & reformer - Calcutta Telegraph