Letter: Why the answer to the soil lies in the stars

Sir: In 1988, Rajiv Gandhi rhetorically asked a conference of astronomers that I attended in Delhi why India, centre of many of the world's problems described by Lord Gladwyn (Letters, 4 December), was spending any money at all on astronomy and space research.

Answering his own question, he said that as Prime Minister, he could not succeed in persuading Indian farmers to act in a planned way, planting seed, fertilising crops and maximising the harvest, simply by telling them what they had to do.

As the leader of India, he had to inspire his citizens and demonstrate what his nation could achieve by science, making everyone believe that what they did would make a difference. By reaching for the stars, he said, India could bring the solution of down-to-earth problems within the grasp of its people. Acknowledging that much remained to be done, Rajiv Gandhi linked the holistic scientific attitude in India to the country's progress in feeding itself.

The pure sciences such as astronomy change people's minds; the noble pursuit of science is a confidence-building motivation to people to solve human problems and, on many levels, it gives them the intellectual equipment to do so. Perhaps a Third World leader, Rajiv Gandhi, could see this clearly because he was in the midst of scarcity, compared with a leader of our own world, Lord Gladwyn, confused by too much.

Yours sincerely,

PAUL MURDIN

Cambridge

5 December