There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from loving something and watching it stumble. Anyone who has grown up in India, or grown up thinking about India, knows this feeling intimately. India has a rich intellectual heritage, the heritage that gave the world zero, chess, surgery, and the decimal system, and then you watch the evening news. Schools were demolished, and children got sick after eating the mid-day meal. A family is lynched for eating non-veg. A river choked with marigolds and plastic bags is called holy while children downstream drink from it and fall sick.
This is not a condemnation. It is a question worth sitting with honestly: what happens when a civilization’s rituals outpace its reasoning?
India is not short on brilliance. The proof is scattered across every major research lab, tech company, and hospital in the world. Indian doctors and nurses run wards in UK. Indian engineers built large parts of Silicon Valley. Indian mathematicians are working on problems that most people cannot even articulate. A significant number of scientists working at NASA are Indians. The talent was never the issue. The issue is what happens to that talent at home, and more importantly, what happens to the hundreds of millions who never get the chance to develop it at all.
When a child in rural Bihar grows up without a functional school nearby but with a newly constructed temple at the village center, we are making a choice. It may not feel like a choice, it may feel like devotion, like community, like tradition, but it is a choice nonetheless. And choices have consequences. That child’s curiosity, her questions about the sky or the body or the way things work, will go unanswered. She will grow up making decisions about health, agriculture, money, and politics without the tools to interrogate them. This is not her failure. It is ours.
The relationship between religion and science in India is complicated, and it deserves more nuance than either side usually gives it. Science does not ask anyone to abandon their faith. It asks something far simpler and far more radical: to follow evidence. To change your mind when the facts change. To distinguish between a belief that comforts and a claim that can be tested. These are habits of mind, and they can coexist with prayer, with ritual, with a deep sense of the sacred.
The greatest scientists who ever lived held beliefs that others found irrational. But in their laboratories, they followed the evidence. That discipline, that willingness to be proven wrong, is what makes science different from opinion.
The irony at the heart of much of modern India’s contradictions is that the things people hold most sacred are often being destroyed in the name of that very sacredness. The Ganga is considered the holiest river in India. Millions of Hindus believe that its waters purify the soul, wash away sin, and carry the dead peacefully into the next life. And yet the Ganga is among the most polluted rivers on earth. Industrial effluents, untreated sewage, and yes, the very flowers and lamps offered in devotion, all of it flows into her. The river is not suffering despite people’s reverence. In some measurable ways, it is suffering because of it. The solution is not to stop loving the river. The solution is to understand what a river actually is a living ecosystem, not a deity, and to protect it accordingly. Science and love of the natural world are not opposites. They never were.
Education is where all of this begins and ends. Not education in the narrow sense of passing examinations and memorizing answers. India has plenty of that, and it produces graduates who struggle to think for themselves. Real education: the kind that teaches a child to ask why, to read critically, to understand that the world is knowable, that diseases have causes and cures, that crops can be improved, that the environment responds to human behavior in ways that can be measured and therefore managed. This kind of education does not make people less Indian. It makes them more capable of being the Indians they want to be.
Consider what a generation educated in basic science could mean in practice. Fewer children dying from preventable diseases because their parents understand vaccination. Farmers losing less of their harvest because they understand soil chemistry and weather patterns. Women making informed decisions about their reproductive health. Citizens who can tell the difference between a credible news source and propaganda designed to inflame. Communities that manage their water tables instead of exhausting them. These are not abstract benefits. They are the difference between a life lived in grinding uncertainty and one lived with some measure of agency and dignity.
India has everything it needs to be the country it keeps telling itself it will become. It has a young population, a demographic dividend that will expire if it is not invested in now. It has a diaspora that has proven, repeatedly, that given the right conditions, Indians can lead the world in almost any field. It has democratic institutions, however imperfect, that provide a framework for change. What it often lacks is the political will to prioritize education and scientific thinking over the management of sentiment.
Other countries have made this journey. South Korea was poorer than Ghana in the 1960s. China’s scientific output was negligible two generations ago. Both made deliberate, sometimes brutal choices to invest in education and applied science as national priorities. The results are visible to anyone who checks a technology index or a health statistic. India has its own version of this story to write, and it need not copy anyone else’s.
None of this requires giving up on who we are. The festivals, the languages, the philosophies, the music, these are worth preserving. Culture is not the problem. Confusing culture with policy is the problem. Treating mythology as science is the problem. Building identity on division rather than aspiration is the problem.
India has always had people who understood this. Nehru built the IITs. Homi Bhabha built a nuclear program. Vikram Sarabhai put India in space. Verghese Kurien turned a milk-deficient country into the world’s largest milk producer. These were not people who rejected India’s soul. They were people who believed that India’s soul deserved better than poverty and superstition. They were right then. They are still right now.
A lot of people believe that educating their children will make them disown or forget their own culture and tradition. Surely, our culture and traditions aren’t that weak to be just forgotten easily.
We need both religion and science in our lives. While science teaches us to fly, our religion and our culture hold us back and keep us grounded.
