While Bengaluru’s Indian Institute of Science and IIT Bombay are among the top places for research in India, Kolkata boasts an array of institutes from where researchers have contributed to more natural-science and health-science journals.
The year is 1895. A young Indian scientist and teacher at Calcutta’s Presidency College is researching wireless communication. His contemporary Guglielmo Marconi gets the Physics Nobel but, according to multiple accounts, it’s a photo-finish in which Jagadish Chandra Bose may have been ahead by a whisker.
Cut to 2024. Kolkata, home to the Bose Institute, is nominated as India’s science capital by Nature. The British scientific journal, which used research papers generated during 2023 as the yardstick, ranked Kolkata (84) ahead of Bengaluru (85), Mumbai (98), New Delhi (124) and Hyderabad (184). What bodes well for the city’s future in basic science is that its researchers have contributed to more natural-science and health-science journals than those in cities like Edinburgh, Helsinki, Geneva and Frankfurt that already have a formidable reputation for research.
