‘I've Been Called a Girl Geek'

With her book Geek Nation just released, Angela Saini talks about India's aspirations to being a scientific superpower...Excerpts from an interview...

...Where is all the innovation happening, then, if not at these prestigious research institutes?

There are shoots of Indian innovation all over the country. One example in my book is that of Open Source Drug Discovery, a revolutionary project to collect research into tuberculosis from small-scale researchers across India, pool it on an open-access website and use this to come up with a possible cure. Another is the Spoken Web — a technology being developed by a team of Indian researchers working for IBM in New Delhi — which is a way of building audio information networks that can be accessed through simple mobile phones and landlines.

Does India have lessons for the world in practical science and technology?

Absolutely! India has already shown a skill in doing things more cheaply and with fewer resources, and there are already signs (for example in the OSDD project) of it developing models for scientific research that are completely antithetical to existing ones. Pharmaceutical research is traditionally closed and expensive, yet here are hundreds of scientists willing to dilute their credit and give away their work for free, for a common cause. That's inspirational. Interestingly, we sold the Chinese translation rights to Geek Nation even before it was launched, which suggests to me that India's neighbour is also keeping a close eye on where the country is headed.