On one summer morning in New Delhi – very possibly on August 17, 1987 – Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi summoned his top biotechnology advisor,...
On one summer morning in New Delhi – very possibly on August 17, 1987 – Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi summoned his top biotechnology advisor, S Ramachandran, for a brief meeting.
Ramachandran, a towering figure in his field, was a quintessential product of the Indian establishment. From modest origins in Tamil Nadu, he had made his way first to Benares Hindu University, and subsequently to the United States, where he obtained a doctorate in biochemistry in 1961 from the University of Illinois.
The 1960s saw the first major wave of immigration – “brain drain” – from India to the US. But unlike many of his peers who chose to stay behind in the US, Ramachandran returned to India to work for Hindustan Antibiotics Limited in Pune. Within two decades, he would rise to the top of Delhi’s technocracy as Member-Secretary of India’s National Biotechnology Board, an institution the Indian government had presciently created in 1982.
In 1986, Rajiv Gandhi appointed him secretary to the newly created Department of Biotechnology. These were heady days in New Delhi: a young prime minister with a super-majority in the Lok Sabha was willing to wager India’s future at the cutting edge of technology. As Science magazine famously billed it, Gandhi had begun...
