Scientific Heritage of the North-West of India : A Comprehension

The scientific heritage of the North-West, for which the University of Panjab at Lahore was created in 1882 by bifurcating the domain of Calcutta University, is very inspiring.

Sir Ganga Ram was a peer of Sir M Visvesvaraya. Birbal Sahni, S S Bhatnagar and A S Paintal had progressed to become the first Paleo-Botanist, the first Chemist and the first Physiologist from India as FRS. Mathematician Sarvadaman Chowla was a contemporary of S Chandrasekhar (Nobel Prize, 1982) at Cambridge. Bhatnagar’s PhD student Brahm Prakash had been inducted by Homi Bhabha to propel the Nuclear Fuel program. Har Gobind Khorana (Nobel Prize, 1970), Abdus Salam (Nobel Prize, 1979), R P Bambah, Gurbaksh Singh, Nitya Nand, Sukhdev, F C Kohli, Satish Dhawan, Yash Pal et al. were all students at Lahore in 1940s.

INSA published biographies of 40 inspiring scientists from the past in 2009, seven of them belong to the North-West. Seven out of the 41 Presidents of INSA have also been from this region. These include the father of Indian Pharmacology, Sir Ram Nath Chopra and the Civil Engineer A N Khosla. Sir Sahib Singh Sokhey was nominated as a member of the first Rajya Sabha as Meghnad Saha got elected to the first Lok Sabha. Punjab born B P Pal served as the first DG, ICAR. The three World Food Prize winners, Gurdev Singh Khush (1996), Surinder K Vasal (1998) and Rattan Lal (2020), had studied at PAU Ludhiana. Eight Indians have won this Prize since 1987.

About the Speaker:
Arun Grover obtained his MSc (Physics) from Panjab University in 1972 and PhD from TIFR in 1979.  He was associated with TIFR for several decades and retired as a Senior Professor of Physics.  Later on, he became the Vice Chancellor of Panjab University. Currently, he is an honorary professor at  Punjab Engineering College (Deemed to be University), Chandigarh.