India's R&D: Reaching for the Top

摘要

Five years ago, during my presidential address to the Indian Science Congress, I made a prediction: "The next century will belong to India, which will become a unique intellectual and economic power to reckon with, recapturing all its glory, which it had in the millennia gone by," I told the gathering of 5000, among them the country's prime minister. It must have sounded crazy. How could a country with so many impoverished people, and so many illiterates, rise to have such a central global role? What possibly could have given me the confidence to make such a prediction?