Bengaluru: A week ahead of National Science Day, February 28, young researchers from around the country were keenly waiting for a result. And no, not for an exam.
Early last year, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) launched a programme named Augmenting Writing Skills for Articulating Research (AWSAR), inviting PhD scholars and postdoctoral fellows to write about their research as popular science articles. The top three entries from among PhD scholars would be awarded Rs 1 lakh, Rs 50,000 and Rs 25,000; one winning entry by a postdoc would win Rs 1 lakh.
In addition, the DST also announced that the top hundred entries from PhD scholars and the 20 from postdoctoral fellows would be awarded Rs 10,000 each together with a certificate of appreciation. The first award ceremony was conducted on Science Day.
This year’s winners were Ashish Srivastava, Ajay Kumar and Nabanita Chakraborty among the PhD scholars and Paulomi Sanghavi, a postdoctoral fellow. They were felicitated at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
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“The primary focus of this new scheme is to tap [into] the latent potential of researchers towards writing popular science articles,” said Ashutosh Sharma, secretary of the DST. He added that they had received over 3,000 entries on a variety of topics.
Researchers communicate their findings with their peers through technical research articles. Their language is typically very dense and almost always inaccessible by an untrained reader. Popular science articles, on the other hand, require no specialised knowledge to understand and often employ simple, lucid language.
Paulomi Sanghavi, a postdoctoral fellow at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, and winner of the best story in her category, told The Wire, “I have always been interested in writing, but this is the first time I have written about my own research in a non-scientific manner.”
She is new to science writing but thinks it will help her become a better scientist. “This exercise compelled me to think about my work from the perspective of a general audience and helped me evaluate as well as criticise the significance and quality of my work,” she said.
The DST followed a three-step evaluation process. First, all entries were screened to ensure they met the prescribed format and guidelines. Second, an expert panel of eminent researchers and science communicators judged the entries for clarity, scientific accuracy and whether each entry made for a compelling read. Third, two independent reviewers compiled a shortlist from the previous step and then checked them for plagiarism.
Finally, the authors of the top 10 entries by PhD scholars and the top three by postdoctoral fellows were invited to interact with the panel. And based on that, the final winners were announced.
Ajay Kumar, a PhD scholar at IIT Madras, bagged the second prize. “My story was a casual conversation between a father and his curious teenager son about the severe environmental pollution and the contribution of the father’s research in mitigating [it],” he told The Wire.
In the story, he describes the design and promise of a device to produce clean energy, called solid oxide fuel cells – Kumar’s area of work at IIT Madras. He said his story was inspired by a conversation with his son. “Him being a reference made it easy for me,” he said, “even though I am very new to this.”
Now Kumar hopes the DST’s recognition will help him popularise his research and maybe also help secure funds for it.
- This exercise helped me evaluate as well as criticise the significance and quality of my work
AWSAR was conceived by the National Council for Science and Technology Communication (NCSTC), a division of the DST, to “build capacity for informed decision-making in the community and promote scientific thinking”. The council is creating communication portals to improve science’s reach using different forms of media.
The NCSTC has implemented programmes to teach school children the scientific method and arranged for them to interact with researchers. It has also been creating portals online to communicate science on multimedia channels.
India has a growing number of science journalists but fewer scientists than is ideal actively engaging with the public. This is a problem because scientists are best placed to communicate research in their respective areas.
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Reports have documented different barriers to their participation. Perhaps the biggest of them is that many scientists don’t think science communication is important.
But even those who want to communicate their work are sometimes at a disadvantage because they’re not familiar with the craft of communicating. To this end, the DST conducted four science-writing workshops in Dehradun, Kolkata, Chennai and Chandigarh in 2018, with over 500 scientists in attendance.
Sharma said that to maximise “outreach to young researchers and encourage them to write their own research in easy to understand format, we are planning to have at least eight to ten workshops in 2019”.
He hopes that this will serve to encourage more scientists to communicate their work in ways accessible to the people. The DST, he said, also plans to make these articles available in the public domain. The AWSAR website has a PDF booklet with details of the winning entries, though not of the entries themselves.
“We are planning to collate all the awarded and appreciated stories in the form of an ebook or a published compilation,” Sharma said.
Manal Shakeel is doing her PhD on animal behaviour at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru.