ਯਸ਼ ਪਾਲਯਸ਼ ਪਾਲ

Yash Pal (1926-2017) was a physicist from Jhang in Punjab who studied cosmic rays, helped build India's space programme, led the University Grants Commission, and became one of the country's best loved explainers of science on television. He is not the Hindi novelist Yashpal (1903-1976), a different man with a similar name whose famous novel was Jhutha Sach. The two are often confused because their names look almost the same, but their lives and work had nothing in common.

Early life in Jhang and Quetta

Yash Pal was born on 26 November 1926 in Jhang, in Punjab Province of British India, in what is now Pakistan. Jhang was also the birthplace of Abdus Salam, the theoretical physicist who later won the Nobel Prize, and the two boys grew up in the same town. Yash Pal spent his early childhood in Quetta, where his family lived until the city was struck by a devastating earthquake in 1935. He was pulled alive from the rubble of his home along with his brother and sister, and the rebuilding of the town meant he could not attend school for a year. He was later raised in Kaithal district in Haryana.

Education interrupted by Partition

From 1945 to 1947 Yash Pal studied for a BSc Honours degree in physics at the Lahore campus of the University of the Punjab, where he was active in the students union. As he entered his final year, Partition tore his studies apart. He was visiting Delhi because his father had been transferred there, and the riots that followed Partition meant he could not return to Lahore. A group of students and teachers who had migrated from Lahore, with support from the Delhi University physicist D. S. Kothari, turned disused Second World War army barracks in Delhi into classrooms, and Yash Pal finished his studies there. He received his MSc in physics from Panjab University in 1949. He then went to the United States and completed his PhD in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1958, working under the cosmic ray physicist Bruno Rossi.

Cosmic rays at TIFR and the road to space

Yash Pal began his career at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Bombay, now Mumbai, as a member of its Cosmic Rays group. After his doctorate he returned to TIFR, where he stayed until 1983, studying the high energy particles that rain down on Earth from space. When the Government of India set up its Department of Space in 1972 and began an independent space programme, Yash Pal was asked to lead its new applications arm. He took charge as the first director of the Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad in 1973, while remaining on the faculty of TIFR. The centre became one of the Indian Space Research Organisation's major units, designing the payloads carried by India's space missions.

Building institutions: the UGC years and beyond

From the early 1980s Yash Pal moved steadily into the work of building and running India's scientific and educational institutions. He served as secretary general of the Second United Nations Conference on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 1981 and 1982, then as chief consultant to the Planning Commission from 1983 to 1984 and secretary of the Department of Science and Technology from 1984 to 1986. In 1986 he was appointed chairman of the University Grants Commission, a post he held until 1991. As chairman he pushed for inter-university centres funded by the commission, on the model of the Nuclear Science Centre in New Delhi, and institutions such as the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune grew from that idea. He also served on the United Nations Advisory Committee on Science and Technology for Development and on the scientific council of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. From 2007 to 2012 he was chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

Why is Yash Pal called the people's scientist?

Yash Pal became a household name in the 1990s through Turning Point, the weekly science programme on Doordarshan. With his flowing white hair and plain, patient way of speaking, he explained everyday science in language anyone could follow, and the show became the longest running science serial ever broadcast on the national network. He also advised on televised science programmes such as Bharat ki Chaap and answered readers' science questions in a regular column in The Tribune. In 2009 UNESCO gave him its Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science. He spoke openly against superstition and astrology, which he regarded as unscientific, and he argued all his life that science belonged to ordinary people, not only to laboratories.

School and university reform

Yash Pal cared as much about schoolchildren as about satellites. His work in school education began in the early 1970s with the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme, which tried to teach science through experiment and observation rather than rote learning. In 1993 the Ministry of Human Resource Development asked him to chair a national advisory committee on the overburdening of school children, and its report, Learning without Burden, is still regarded as a landmark document in Indian education. He later chaired the steering committee that drew up the National Curriculum Framework of 2005. In 2009 he chaired a committee on higher education whose report, Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education in India, argued for the idea of the university as a place of broad learning and proposed major structural change. He also took a public stand for regulation: in a case he brought to the Supreme Court, Prof. Yashpal versus the State of Chhattisgarh, he challenged a law that let private universities open without proper approval, and he won in February 2005, after which 112 such universities had to close.

Honours and legacy

Yash Pal's honours included the Padma Bhushan in 1976 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2013, India's third and second highest civilian awards, the Marconi Prize in 1980, the Indira Gandhi Prize for Popularization of Science in 2000, the Meghnad Saha Medal in 2006, the Kalinga Prize in 2009 and the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award in 2011. He died of age related illness on 24 July 2017 in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, at the age of 90. His legacy is unusually wide: the cosmic ray research of his early career, the Space Applications Centre he founded, the inter-university centres that grew under his chairmanship of the UGC, the Learning without Burden report that still shapes debate about Indian schooling, and a generation of viewers who first met science through Turning Point. For many Indians he remains the friendly face that made the universe feel close.