Friday, July 08, 2005

Director Balaram


Today's Hindu has a profile/interview (presented in the format of a report by Divya Ramamurthi) of Prof. Balaram, who took over as the Director of our Institute on 1 July 2005.

Surprisingly, this report appears in the 'Karnataka' section of the print (Bangalore) edition of the Hindu; I don't know if it was even published in other cities. Since it is about the new leadership at an 'Indian' institute -- and one that was lavished with a 'windfall' (as Divya Ramamurthi called it) of Rs. 100 crores in this year's Central budget -- I would have expected this profile/interview to be important enough to be given a place in the 'Nation' section of the newspaper. Well, perhaps the good folks at the Hindu have other ideas ...

If you wish to know more about Prof. Balaram, and his views on the state of higher education and research in India in the fields of science and engineering, the best place to go to is the journal Current Science, which has been carrying his signed editorials for, um..., so many years.

I had a post in April on some reports (which were unofficial then) that Prof. Balaram was going to be our Institute's new Director.

5 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    Abi, I had gone thru few of his writings earlier. His article on Law, Science and Climate change was very good.

    Informative post!

  2. Anonymous said...

    Many thanks for linking to your previous post which I hadn't noticed before. Also for linking to Balaram's Current Science article. It's indeed refreshing to see people speaking so outspokenly.

  3. Anonymous said...

    Hey....nice to know that Balram has taken over the Institute! He was one of my early inspirations in science (when I was doing my b.tech.....got to meet him many times when I did my summer projects in IISc)

  4. Anonymous said...

    I see that Dr. Balaram too is from CMU. Is he the first biologist to head the Institute? For some strange reason the IITs seem to have been originally planned as purely physical science based research centers. This is hard to understand. Caltech was doing pioneering work on evolution in the 30s. TIFR has always had a very strong program in life sciences.

  5. Anonymous said...

    Kary, Anand, Sunil: thanks for your comments. Prof. Balaram's editorials are absolutely great! So, I was shocked and sad when his recent editorial opened with these words: "This will be my last regular appearance in this column"...

    Shiva, during 1994-98, IISc's Director was Prof. G. Padmanaban, a biochemist. I believe he was the first biology person to hold that position.

    Several IITs now have a biomedical engineering program. And thanks to Arun Shourie, IIT-K now has a full-fledged biotechnology department. However, you are right: the IITs do lack programs in 'pure biology'.