Episode 11: In Talks with Dr Raghunath Anant Mashelkar

Recorded On 15^th May, 2026
IIn this final episode of the series, ‘What Shapes Us’, Padma Vibhushan,Dr. Raghunath Mashelkar, Fellow of the Royal Society, former Director General of CSIR, and pioneer of the Gandhian Engineering and Inclusive Innovation movements in India - sits down with Vidya to trace a journey from a one-room tenement in Mumbai to the leadership of forty national laboratories and one of the most consequential careers in Indian science.

From a father who died when he was six and a mother who walked from job to job to keep two meals on the table, to a Marathi-medium municipal school where a teacher’s convex lens experiment changed his life, to the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Inventors, and the global campaign that produced India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library.

The conversation moves through all five Es. Dr Mashelkar begins, characteristically, by saying endowment is the E he did not have. He studied under streetlights, walked barefoot until he was twelve, and went to secondary school only because a housemaid working for a Gujarati family in Chowpatty gave his mother her savings of twenty-one rupees. His greatest endowment, he says, was his mother - an uneducated woman who taught him that scarcity and aspiration is a deadly combination, and who, when he scored 97 out of 100 in mathematics, would sit him down and ask where the three marks had gone.

A second turning point lands at the Union High School. Principal Bhave, a science teacher. One afternoon, he focused a convex lens on a sheet of paper until it caught fire, turned to the young Raghunath, and said - If you focus your energies, you can achieve anything. Decades later, the same image would become his framework for leadership: bringing forty CSIR laboratories together as Team CSIR, then sixty thousand scientists across nine nations under the Global Research Alliance.

Through Effort and Equality of Opportunity, the conversation turns to the work of the last twenty years. The fourteen-month legal battle that overturned the US turmeric patent and seeded the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, now consulted by patent offices in seventeen countries. And the Anjani Mashelkar Foundation, named for his mother and now in its fifteenth year, whose FX Healthcare Kit measures twenty diagnostic parameters in ten minutes for a hundred rupees, is already in use across sixteen countries, and is now being rolled out into public health centres in Goa, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.

The episode closes on the phrase he keeps returning to - access equality despite income inequality. Or as his uneducated mother taught him long before he could put it in those words: your destiny is in your own hands, and what matters is what you do with the lottery you were dealt.

To download the episode transcript, click here