While the cheer in India over two Indian-origin academics being awarded two of the maths world?s top honours is understandable, it also starkly underscores the fact that for far too long we have been content with a sense of reflected glory without doing enough to foster such talent at home. Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University won the Fields medal, considered the maths Nobel, for his work on the geometry of numbers which led to the solutions of a large number of problems in number theory while Subhash Khot of New York University won the Rolf Nevanlinna prize which is given for ?outstanding contributions to the mathematical aspects of the information sciences?.
We should have ensured by now that Indian universities are able to facilitate pathbreaking research such as Bhargava?s and Khot?s. But how far we are from this is evident from the QS University Rankings for 2013. The best that India could manage was the 222nd rank for Indian Institue of Technology, Delhi, in this list of the world?s best. Another giveaway of our rather uninspiring academic ecosystem is a recently-released US government study which found that Indians make for the second-largest number of those who enter US universities with F (academic) or M (professional education) visas. Ironically, even as we celebrate the twin honours for the Indian-origin academics, we must also square up with the fact that most of the Indian students in US universities are pursuing STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) courses, another finding of the study.