Anand Parthasarathy

Most nations highlight their achievements in all fields of enterprise, when it comes to educating their young people. They see no conflict between opening minds to a world view, even while stressing their own heritage to instill national pride.

In India, professional education, especially in English, has largely drawn on western source material, which has tended to overlook many significant innovations across a wide swath of fields and disciplines, which had their roots in what is broadly called the indigenous or Indic culture. While we learnt of the achievements of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, centred around  Britain and the Ruhr in Germany, the world’s first iron bridge across the Severn river in the UK built in the mid-18th century and the Bessemer process of steel-making that dates to the 1840s, the technology of fabricating corrosion-resistant iron had been  perfected in India by  the 5^th century  CE (formerly known as AD), of which an exemplar is the Iron Pillar in Delhi, still in existence, whose inscription dates it  to the Gupta era  and the reign of Vikramaditya ( 375-414 CE)…read more on NOPR