Science in India

I did post last year about how Hindu fundamentalists in India - including the PM! - believe silly things in the same way Creationist Christians do:

During the 2014 inauguration of a hospital in Mumbai, Modi pointed to the scientific achievements documented by ancient religious texts and spoke of Ganesha, a Hindu deity with an elephant’s head: “We worship Lord Ganesha, and maybe there was a plastic surgeon at that time who kept the head of an elephant on the torso of a human. There are many areas where our ancestors made large contributions.” Modi did not respond to a request from Reuters that he expand on this remark.

and now, Hindu "ancient science" beliefs got an airing at an Indian science congress:

At this year's annual meeting of the Indian Science Congress from Jan. 3 to 7, senior research scientist Kannan Jagathala Krishnan dismissed Albert Einstein's theory of relativity as "a big blunder" and said Isaac Newton didn't really understand how gravity works.

Nageswara Rao, a vice chancellor at Andhra University in South India, said that Ravana, a demon god with 10 heads, had 24 kinds of aircraft of varying sizes and capacities — and that India was making test-tube babies thousands of years ago.

Dinosaurs were created by the Hindu god Brahma, said Ashu Khosla, a scientist with expertise in paleontology at Panjab University in the North Indian city of Chandigarh.

Not exactly the kind of remarks you would expect at an event whose mission is to advance and further the cause of science, to stimulate discussion on scientific theories and to create an awareness of science-related issues, especially among children — and that is funded by the Indian government's Ministry of Science and Technology.

Krishnan, Rao and Khosla were addressing a group of 5,000 children assembled from all over the country at the event's Children's Science Congress. Their lectures were posted on YouTube and reported widely by the press. The congress organizers were red-faced, and the scientific community in India was outraged.