Thaindian News

Chennai, Jan 4 (IANS) In a move to attract more women to science and technology, the Indian Science Congress (ISC) next year will focus on the role of women in science, said Geetha Bali, general president-elect of the 2012 meet, here Tuesday. The theme of the next science Congress to be held in Bhubaneswar, Orissa from Jan 3-7, 2012 will be ‘Science and Technology inclusive innovation and role of women’. It will be the 99th science congress to be held in the country.

The ISC 2011 being held at SRM University here is the 98th congress to be held in India uninterrupted since 1914.

“Women represent 50 percent of our 1.1 billion population but their representation in science and technology is very less. Their potential has not been utilised,” Bali told IANS.

Bali, who is the vice chancellor of Karnataka State Women’s University, said there was a thinking that social science was more suitable for women.

“We want more women to come to mainstream science in India. I am trying to get more women scientists during the ISC 2011,” she said.

“We want that common people especially in rural parts of the country should be able to relate to science and the research being done in the field should reach the common man,” she said.

Bali will be the fourth woman in the nearly century-old history of ISC to head the Congress. The last time when a woman chaired the ISC was in 1999 when the meet was held in Chennai.

The sessions in the Bhubaneswar congress will be on preventing maternal and child mortality, assisted technology for disabled, science and education in rural areas, women in science, water scarcity and security.

Established on the lines of the British model of Conference on the Advancement of Science, the first science congress in the country was held in January 1914 at the Asiatic Society in Calcutta with 150 scientists both from India and abroad.

Chennai is hosting the congress for the seventh time, 12 years after the last one here in 1999.

Nobel laureates Amartya Sen, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Ada Yonath, Thomas Steitz, Tim Hunt and Martin Chalfie are among the over 7,000 delegates and 3,000 students participating in the congress.

There are 16 plenary sessions on topics like chemistry of the future, science policy for the next five years, space, climate change, energy security, drugs, therapy and prevention of cancer, biodiversity and recent advances in asthma research.