In his sharply critical exposé, “A Trojan horse has breached the IITs,” science journalist Vasudevan Mukunth uncovers a profound crisis unfolding within India’s elite technological institutions. Mukunth details how the Indian Knowledge System (IKS)—an initiative formalized under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020—has veered from a legitimate historical reclamation of ancient Indian science into an institutionalized embrace of pseudoscience.
Highlighting “special sessions” at IIT-Mandi and IIT-Kanpur that utilized flawed electroencephalogram (EEG) protocols to hunt for past-life memories and deployed astrology to predict engineering outcomes, Mukunth warns that substituting theological dogma for empirical verifiability risks alienating India from global academic standards and precipitating a severe internal brain drain.
Using Mukunth’s critique as a vital entry point, we must confront a broader, deeply troubling reality: India risks systematically undermining its own scientific future.
By forcing a highly politicized, poorly understood version of ancient lore into modern laboratories, the current state apparatus is not decolonizing the Indian mind—it is provincializing it.
The fundamental flaw in India’s current educational policy is its inability to distinguish between historical scholarship and theological revivalism.
Every scientifically literate nation takes pride in its ancestry. There is no historical dispute over India’s monumental contributions to the global treasury of knowledge. The foundational linguistics of Pāṇini, the mathematical breakthroughs of the Kerala School, the conceptualization of zero by Brahmagupta, and the advanced metallurgy of Wootz steel are globally recognized, verifiable facts. They were achieved precisely because ancient Indian thinkers adhered to rigorous observation, debate, and rationalism.
The modern tragedy, however, lies in the conflation of these empirical triumphs with mythological narratives. When state-mandated curricula treat Puranic accounts as literal technology, the scientific method is abandoned. This is no longer just a top-down rhetorical shift; it is structurally codified. Under the Ministry of Education’s IKS division grant guidelines, competitive research funds—traditionally reserved for breakthrough quantum computing or materials science—are systematically diverted through specialized sub-clauses requiring empirical validation of Vedic texts.
At the curricular level, as outlined in IIT-Delhi’s academic program restructuring, mandatory undergraduate courses under the IKS umbrella now weaponize credit incentives: students can bypass rigorous, mathematically intensive electives by enrolling in courses that evaluate the “metaphysical properties” of traditional materials. By attempting to merge faith and falsifiability, the state does a profound disservice to both, reducing genuine historical achievements to mere props for contemporary political theatre.
Yet, state mandates alone cannot hollow out an elite ecosystem; a crisis of this scale requires internal complicity. Scientists do not abandon methodology overnight simply because a federal minister delivers a speech; they do so because the structural architecture of survival within the university changes.
Over the past decade, the internal governing bodies of the IITs have undergone a quiet but radical transformation. The Ministry has systematically altered the performance metrics for institutional ranking and individual promotion.
Per the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) methodology documents, institutional weight is now explicitly tied to “contributions to national heritage frameworks” and indigenous knowledge dissemination. For an assistant professor fighting for permanent role, or a department head eyeing a major institutional block grant, compliance becomes a survival mechanism. When the Department of Science and Technology (DST) allocates its discretionary funding preferentially to projects that explicitly align with the IKS directive, dissent becomes financially unviable. The cost of standing up for empirical purity is research starvation and career stagnation; the reward for institutional compliance is a streamlined path to administration.
The rot within the IITs is not driven by sudden theological conversion, but by a highly rational surrender to careerist incentives.
Science is not defined by its geography; it is defined by its method. It belongs to no single civilization. The danger of the current trajectory at elite institutions like the IITs is the dilution of this universal standard. In a healthy scientific ecosystem, inquiry moves from observation and hypothesis to rigorous testing, attempts at falsification, and transparent peer review. In contrast, dogmatic inquiry starts with a pre-ordained conclusion, using confirmation bias and state mandates to manufacture legitimacy.
When research methodologies are twisted to accommodate theological conclusions—such as building “familiarity” with a subject before testing them for past-life memories—the core of scientific inquiry rots from within. This environment replaces institutionalized doubt and an unyielding demand for verifiability with a mandatory deference to ancient texts, teaching students what to believe rather than how to question. Furthermore, because state funding and institutional prestige are explicitly tied to proving a specific civilizational narrative, researchers are heavily incentivized to engineer data that satisfies ideological benchmarks rather than objective reality, embedding a systemic confirmation bias directly into the laboratory.
The long-term consequence of this ideological shift will not be the birth of a unique, self-reliant scientific superpower, but rather the profound isolation of India’s academic community.
Global science operates on a currency of trust, peer review, and shared rational standards. If India’s top technical universities compromise their academic integrity to pursue metaphysical projects, international institutions and global markets will inevitably adjust their metrics; indeed, recent international ranking metrics, such as the QS World University Rankings, have progressively weighed “international research collaboration” and “academic reputation”—indices directly jeopardized when domestic institutions prioritize localized dogma over universally verifiable outputs. The prestige of the IITs was built over decades on a foundation of fierce competitive merit and rigorous, secular technical training. Dismantling that reputation for domestic political consolidation is an act of intellectual self-harm.
Furthermore, this institutional decay risks triggering a devastating, renewed brain drain. India’s brightest minds, recognizing that local laboratories are increasingly governed by dogmatic loyalty rather than empirical excellence, will seek refuge in global universities that maintain a strict boundary between state ideology and scientific research.
True intellectual decolonization does not require retroactively mapping modern quantum mechanics onto Vedic hymns, nor does it require validating pseudoscientific claims to appease nationalist pride.
India already possesses the perfect blueprint for scientific decolonization in the legacies of pioneers like Jagadish Chandra Bose and Prafulla Chandra Ray.
Operating under colonial subjugation, these visionaries did not retreat into myth-making. Instead, they mastered the universal language of modern science, built rigorous empirical frameworks, and forced the global scientific establishment to respect them as absolute equals. They proved that an Indian scientist could be deeply rooted in their cultural identity while remaining unyielding in their commitment to rationalism—demonstrating a brand of intellectual courage that refused precisely the type of careerist, institutional surrender formalized by modern NIRF compliance structures.
The country must choose whether its elite institutions will remain factories of world-class innovation or be reduced to echo chambers of civilizational grievance.
