Author: Jaideep Mazumdar
Publication: Swarajyamag.com
Date: August 2, 2019
URL:   https://swarajyamag.com/science/the-forgotten-acharya-who-revealed-ancient-hindu-chemistry-to-the-world

Snapshot

- Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray, who was born today 158 years ago, was considered to be the father of chemical science in India.

- Sadly, not only has this doyen’s birth anniversary gone unnoticed, few know of his book that revealed to the world ancient Hindus’ knowledge in various sciences.

Today (Friday, 2 August) happens to be the 158th birth anniversary of Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray, a brilliant scientist, educationist, historian, entrepreneur and philanthropist, who is considered to be the father of chemical science in India.

Acknowledged to be the first entrepreneur in India’s pharmaceutical and chemical sector, Ray was also a fierce nationalist who stirred his students at Calcutta’s Presidency College with “science can wait, swaraj cannot” call.

But what students of chemistry in India have not been told about this forgotten Acharya, whose birth anniversary went largely unnoticed, was that he wrote a two-volume masterpiece on ancient Hindu chemistry. Ray’s seminal work — A History Of Hindu Chemistry From The Earliest Times To The Middle Of The Sixteenth Century A.D — won him plaudits and revealed to the world the path-breaking advances made by ancient Indian scientists.

The two-volume book — the first was published in 1902 and the second in 1907 — also busted the myth that modern-day chemistry owes its origins to the alchemists of western Europe who derived their knowledge from the Arabs. Acharya Ray proved that the Arabs, in turn, had derived their knowledge of rasashastra (as chemistry is called in Sanskrit) from ancient Hindus.

Ray (1861-1944), who founded Bengal Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals, India’s first pharma company, in 1901, pored through voluminous ancient texts like the Upanishads, Vedas, the Arthashastra and other ancient texts with the help of renowned Sanskrit scholars. He is credited with getting international recognition for not only ancient Indian chemistry, but also ayurveda.

His book reveals that in the eighth century CE, the caliphs of Baghdad ordered extensive translation of ayurvedic texts into Arabic and Persian and sent many of their renowned scholars to India to study ayurveda.

Ray conclusively proved that the Greeks, too, derived their knowledge of the sciences from the ancient Hindus. For instance, the ancient Hindus had solved the forty-seventh proposition of the first book of Euclid 200 years before the Pythogoras.

Ray’s book highlights the surgical and medical treatises of Susruta and Charaka in the pre-Buddhist era. Ray discovered, and wrote about, a highly interesting gathering of medical experts and alchemists from other ancient civilisations “somewhere in the Himalayas” around 1000 BCE!

A very interesting aspect of Ray’s work here is the comparison between the medical treatise of Charaka, one of the principal contributors to ayurveda, and the Atharvaveda. Ray concludes that the Atharvaveda (the fourth Veda) seems archaic in comparison to Charaka’s treatises since the Atharvaveda only talks of plants and vegetable products used to treat ailments while Charaka’s treatises contain alchemical formulas using gold and lead.

Gold was considered the elixir of life and lead the dispeller of sorcery. Thus, concludes Ray, Atharvaveda was at least a thousand years older than Charaka’s treatise, which means that the fourth Veda would date back to around 1500 BCE since Charaka lived in the third century BCE. Ray’s book contains supporting Sanskrit texts, variants and illustrations derived from ancient Hindu texts, and translations.

The book (in two volumes) is an invaluable treasure trove of information on the alchemical ideas in the Vedas, the advances made in chemical and pharmaceutical sciences during the ancient times in India, what the Arabs learnt from the ancient Hindus and a lot more.

The book conclusively proves that ancient Hindus made huge advances in alchemy and medical sciences as well as surgery, and the rest of the world imbibed knowledge of the sciences from them.

The book also has very interesting formulas on the Hindu method of preparing calomel (a purgative), how caustic alkali used to be prepared in the ancient times, the preparation of makardhwaja (an ancient aphrodisiac and medicine used to treat sexual deficiencies) and many more such gems.

In the preface to the second volume, Ray very authoritatively states: “ancient Hindu astronomy and mathematics were not less advanced than those of Tycho Brahe, Cardan and Fermat; the anatomy was equal to that of Vesalius, the Hindu logic and methodology more advanced than that of Ramus, and equal on the whole to Bacon's; the physico-chemical theories as to combustion, heat, chemical affinity, clearer, more rational, and more original than those of Van Helmont or Stahl; and the Grammar, whether of Sanskrit or Prākrit, the most scientific and comprehensive in the world before Bopp, Rask and Grimm”.

And he conclusively proves all that in his book.

Ray graduated from the University of Edinburgh before completing his doctoral studies and returning to India in August 1888. The next year, he started teaching chemistry at Presidency College. His research in nitrites is considered seminal.

A prolific scientist, he wrote 107 papers in all branches of chemistry by 1920. He was knighted in 1919, and founded the Indian School of Chemistry (the first chemical research institute in the country) in 1924.

Ray was an ardent nationalist from a young age and as a student in the United Kingdom, he wrote an essay ‘India before and after the Mutiny’ which, though critical of British raj and containing dire warnings to the British about their misrule over India, won many plaudits.

Sadly, not only has this doyen’s birth anniversary gone uncelebrated, few know of his book that revealed to the world the rich body of knowledge in various sciences possessed by the ancient Hindus.

Already sent to KD

How The Yogi Adityanath Government Brought UP’s State Transport Corporation On Track 

Author: Shantanu Gupta
Publication: Swarajyamag.com
Date: April 11, 2020
URL:   https://swarajyamag.com/infrastructure/how-the-yogi-adityanath-government-brought-ups-state-transport-corporation-on-track

Snapshot

- One of the many areas where the Yogi Adityanath administration has excelled is in the turnaround of UP’s flagging transport sector.

- Today, after decades of decadence, the UPSRTC is finally making profits and is set to grow further.

State-run transport corporations across India are known for being loss-making entities.

According to the Ministry of Road Transport’s Annual Report 2018-19, 55 SRTUs reported a combined loss of Rs 14,213.34 crore in the financial year 2016-17.

As of August 2019, the Telangana State Road Transport Corporation (TSRTC) had accumulated losses of Rs 5,270 crore and loans of nearly Rs 1,800 crore and as on May 2019, the Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation (APSRTC) had accumulated losses of Rs 6,445 crore.

This was achieved by expanding services to new routes, exploiting technology to the fullest, cracking down on unsafe and unauthorised private bus services, saving on expenditure, tapping effectively on non-fare revenue and providing quality experience to passengers.

This is how the Yogi Adityanath administration went about this project.

First, 38,000 unserved villages in Uttar Pradesh, where UPSRTC has not reached in the last 72 years of its formation, were targeted.

By smartly re-engineering and re-routing the routes of the existing buses, almost 26,000 new villages were included in the routes of UPSRTC fleet by January 2020.

To everyone’s surprise, these new rural routes provided  the ‘bus occupancy’ of 80-85 per cent, as compared to the average 60 per cent bus occupancy of UPSRTC. This in turn increased the revenue of the state corporation without much extra expenditure.

UPSRTC also did strategic agreements with neighbouring states, so that passengers could do long-distance inter-state travel. This opened a new revenue stream for the corporation. Agreements were entered into with Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Haryana, Jammu & Kashmir and also with Nepal in the last three years.

Another big problem the UPSRTC and UP Transport department faced was the loss of revenue because of unauthorised private bus services. Such buses were mostly being run by unscrupulous private players, without permit and without following any safety norms.

Before 2017, only 751 routes (20,044 km) were formulated. In the last three years, 93,838 routes 2,42,699 km) have been formulated by the Yogi Adityanath government.

This formulation of routes is helping check the unauthorised private bus services (a.k.a. Daggamari in UP) and now passengers are moving back to UPSRTC.

Better contracts for canteens and shops at more than 250 bus stations and advertisement rights on its 12,000 plus buses made the corporation tap into the non-fare revenue stream.

Usage of technology played a big role in revival of UPSRTC. Electronic Vehicle Tracking, e-ticketing through Integrated Transport Management System (ITMS), Smart Cards for regular commuters, provided levers to Adityanath’s officials to keep track of each and every bus.

40 per cent of UPSRTC’s operational expenditure is on fuel. Pilferage of fuel is a common problem in the transport sector. UPSRTC adopted a sensor-based Automated Fuel Management System in a tie-up with Indian Oil, to check fuel pilferage.

To attract more passengers to UPSRTC bus services, the Yogi Adityanath government has taken a series of measures to improve the service quality and safety of passengers.

Measures like ensuring availability of two drivers for long distance and night journeys on national highways and expressways, compulsory health and eye check-up of drivers for the safety of passengers, equipping depots and on-route inspection teams with breathalyzers to completely rule out the possibility of drunken driving, ensuring a 13-point technical check-up and a 31-point fitness check-up of all buses and deploying speed governors in all buses to avoid accidents are increasing the confidence of passengers in UPSRTC.

Pilot initiatives like Water ATMs at bus stands, child care rooms at bus stands, Meal on Road app and Divyang Stalls, Twitter-Seva and toll free number for passenger feedback, 52 Pink buses with CCTVs and panic buttons for women passengers are returning an encouraging response.

Improving the quality and hygiene of bus stands is one major step taken by the Yogi Adityanath government.

Most of the bus stands are at prime locations and so, developing bus stands on a Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode is an initiative the government is working on.

Moving to the Uttar Pradesh Road Transport Department, it has taken a complete digital RTO avatar.

Under the current state government, UP has become the first state to adopt hundred percent e-challans, first to start issuing all Pollution Under Check (PUC) certificates through an online system, and the second state after Haryana to issue 100 per cent of permits to commercial vehicles online.

Currently in UP, 100 per cent of the driving licence application process is online, 100 per cent of new vehicle registration process is online, using Sarathi and Vahan platforms of the central government.

To further reduce human intervention and corruption in issue of driving licences, the state has started installing sensor-based Automated Driving Testing Tracks (ADTT).

Automated tracks are already functional in Kanpur and Bareilly and 20 more such tracks are coming soon.

Such governance and technology initiatives have not gone unnoticed.

The UPSRTC won many awards in the last three years for its stellar performance. ASRTU, Delhi, has awarded UPSTRC the “Profit Making STU’ award in 2018.

ICEPTI-2020 awarded UPSRTC the National Public Transport Excellence Award-2019, for its rural connectivity drive.

Six depots of UPSRTC got the Best Depot Award for petroleum conservation by PCRA in 2019.

In March 2019, UPSRTC got the ELETS Award for the effective usage of IT in implementation of citizen-centric services.

UPSRTC also made it to the Guinness Book of World Records by parading a chain of 503 buses together at the last Kumbh in Prayagraj.

The 15th finance commission especially mentioned that the net earnings of the UPSRTC have started moving to a positive trajectory from 2017-18 and there have been significant improvements in the earnings per km and significant reductions in cost per km.

The contrast with previous regimes can be easily understood by the fact that Gayatri Prajapati, Transport Minister of the previous Akhilesh Yadav government, is in jail on charges of rape and molestation,while in 2018, the then Transport Minister of the Adityanath government, Swatantra Dev Singh, got the ‘Transport Minister of the Year’ award by SKOCH.

Yogi Adityanath completed three years in office on 19 March 2020 and many leaders can learn a lot from this saffron-clad Yogi.