Shanti Swarup Bhatnagarਸ਼ਾਂਤੀ ਸਵਰੂਪ ਭਟਨਾਗਰ

Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar (1894 to 1955) was a chemist from Bhera in Punjab who became the founding director general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and planned the chain of national laboratories that still anchors research in India today.

Early life in Bhera and Lahore

Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar was born on 21 February 1894 in Bhera, then a town in Shahpur district of the Punjab Province of British India. Bhera is today a tehsil of Sargodha district in the Punjab of Pakistan, which is why Sargodha is the district linked to his name on this page. His father, Parmeshwari Sahai Bhatnagar, died when the boy was only eight months old, and he was brought up in the house of his maternal grandfather, an engineer. In that house he developed a love of science and engineering, building mechanical toys, batteries and string telephones, and from his mother's family he also inherited a gift for poetry that stayed with him all his life.

He was schooled at the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic High School in Sikandrabad and in 1911 joined the newly established Dayal Singh College in Lahore. There he became an active member of the Saraswati Stage Society, and a one-act Urdu play he wrote as a student, Karamati, won the society's prize for the best play of the year. He then studied at Forman Christian College, Lahore, taking a BSc in physics in 1916 and an MSc in chemistry in 1919.

London and the chemistry years

A scholarship from the Dayal Singh College Trust was meant to take Bhatnagar to America, but wartime shipping made that impossible, and he joined University College London instead, working under the physical chemist Frederick G. Donnan. He earned his DSc in 1921, with research on the physical chemistry of emulsions and colloids, the study of mixtures in which fine particles of one substance are held within another. It was the field that made his name.

Back in India in 1921, he became professor of chemistry at the newly established Banaras Hindu University, where he stayed for three years and composed the university anthem, the Kulgeet, still sung there. He then moved to Lahore as professor of physical chemistry and director of the University Chemical Laboratories of the University of the Punjab, remaining until 1940. These Lahore years were the most active research period of his life. With K. N. Mathur he developed the Bhatnagar-Mathur Magnetic Interference Balance, an instrument for measuring magnetic properties that ranked among the most sensitive of its time and was exhibited at the Royal Society in 1931. His book with Mathur on magnetochemistry became a standard work, and his research ranged across emulsions, colloids and industrial chemistry.

Bhatnagar also put his science to work for industry, solving practical problems for mills and oil companies. His best known case came from the Attock Oil Company at Rawalpindi, working for Steel Brothers, whose drilling mud hardened on contact with saline water and clogged the drill holes. Bhatnagar saw that the problem was one of colloidal chemistry: adding an Indian gum lowered the viscosity of the mud while making it more stable against salt water. Steel Brothers were so pleased that they placed a large research fund with the university, which was used to set up a Department of Petroleum Research. Work under the scheme covered the deodorisation of waxes, raising the flame height of kerosene and finding uses for waste products of the oil industries. Bhatnagar refused any personal payment from such work and insisted the money strengthen the university's laboratories instead.

Why is Bhatnagar called the father of research laboratories?

Bhatnagar is called the father of research laboratories in India because he created the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and personally planned the network of national laboratories that gave the country its research infrastructure. In 1940 he was appointed director of the new Board of Scientific and Industrial Research, and he persuaded the government to back industrial research with serious funding. Those steps led to the constitution of CSIR as an autonomous body, which came into operation on 28 September 1942 with Bhatnagar at its head, later as its first director general.

In 1943 the CSIR governing body approved his proposal to establish the first five national laboratories, among them the National Chemical Laboratory and the National Physical Laboratory. By the time of his death, twelve national laboratories had been established under his leadership, including the National Chemical Laboratory at Pune, the National Physical Laboratory at New Delhi, the National Metallurgical Laboratory at Jamshedpur, the Central Fuel Institute at Dhanbad and the Central Food Technological Research Institute at Mysore. After independence in 1947 he worked closely with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru on building the science and technology infrastructure of the new nation.

Honours and later life

Honours followed the work. Bhatnagar was appointed OBE in 1936 and knighted in 1941 for his contributions to science. In 1943 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of the highest distinctions in world science. He served as secretary of the Ministry of Education and as an educational adviser to the government, and in 1953 he became the first chairman of the University Grants Commission of India. In 1954, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan. Alongside CSIR he helped set up bodies such as the National Research Development Corporation, bridging the gap between laboratory research and industry, and he led the negotiations that opened the way for oil refineries in India. He died of a heart attack in New Delhi on 1 January 1955, aged 60.

Legacy

Three years after his death, CSIR instituted the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in his honour. Given each year to outstanding Indian scientists, it is now among the most prestigious science awards in the country, and it keeps the name of the Bhera-born chemist in front of every new generation of researchers. The laboratories he planned still form the backbone of publicly funded research in India.

Bhatnagar also belongs to a remarkable generation of scientists born in Punjab who reshaped modern science. Like Abdus Salam of Jhang, who won the Nobel Prize and built an international centre for theoretical physics, and Har Gobind Khorana, who shared a Nobel Prize for work on the genetic code, Bhatnagar carried the classrooms of Punjab to the top of world science, and he did it by building institutions that would outlast him. For Bhera and for Sargodha district, he remains the most distinguished son of the soil in the world of science.