Science Museums Beyond their Four

Walls
by Saroj Ghose

Saroj Ghose (b. 1935) was educated as an electronic control engineer in India and the US. He has
been instrumental in developing a large chain of 26 interactive science centres all over India, including
the Science City at Kolkata. In particular, he developed a large fleet of mobile science exhibition buses
and outdoor science parks and brought in the concept of the high tech storytelling museum in the
country by setting up Kolkata Museum in the Town Hall and Parliament Museum in Delhi. He served
as President of ICOM from 1992 to 1998 and is the former Director General of the National Council
of Science Museums (SNCM) in India (1979-97).

The International Year of the Child, celebrated all
over the world in 1979, produced a spectacular
and much sought after gift for 3 million children
in Bombay. A municipal garbage ground, used for
dumping an ever-expanding city’s refuse for the
last 100 years, was transformed into a Garden of
Eden: a lush green park, full of flowers and
participatory exhibits, merging with the
landscape. It welcomed hundreds of children,
from toddlers to teenagers, usually escorted by
their parents or teachers. They jumped and ran
and shouted like any other children in a similar
situation. But these children were offered more
than simple amusement—the chance to press
levers, turn wheels, roll balls, pull strings, look
through peepholes and, finally, ponder over these
happenings and try to assimilate the information
they contained.
From science park to science centre
The idea of a science park emerged from
economic and strategic considerations. A fairly
large science centre, primarily participatory, had
been in the planning stage in Bombay for some
time and it was felt that about 50 per cent of the
total financial outlay for the project would have to
be spent on the building alone. While a building
of the required size would take at least three years
to construct, exhibits to fill up the building, if to
be developed mostly in-house, would take many
years more to complete. Once a project starts,
however, the people and, even more so, the
financiers hate to see it progress at a snail’s pace.
The question we raised therefore was whether
some activities could be initiated even though
there was no building. Could such activities not
be organized in consonance with the objectives of
a science centre and generate sufficient local
enthusiasm for a next phase? In a word, the
question was whether an outdoor science centre
could effectively be built in the first phase.
Together with this pressing need, the
International Year of the Child, much talked
about at the time, created a desire to achieve
something constructive. The programmes adopted
ranged from arranging mid-day meals in schools
or the administration of triple antegen injections
to children, to the holding of sit-in drawing
competitions and shooting a series of children’s
films. In many cases, it was feared that the effect

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108
would be ephemeral. An outdoor science centre,
a low capital intensive and less time consuming
project, would probably turn out to be a
permanent gift to the children of the city and its
surrounding areas with far-reaching effects on the
community as a whole.
The real problem lay in the definition of design
criteria. In the process, however, there emerged
an entirely new brand of science museum exhibits
—sturdy enough to stand up to visitors’ rough
handling, durable enough to face the fury of the
hot sun and torrential monsoon of Bombay, and
yet participatory, with moving and working parts.
The exhibits are designed to merge with the
surrounding landscape like a garden sculpture
and to be safe for children as well as adult
visitors. They provide entertainment but are
different from those in amusement parks. They
are more thought-provoking than action-oriented.
Above all, they are developed on basic concepts of
science.
The simpler exhibits are scientific versions of
commonplace park fixtures. A series of swings of
varying length urge visitors to note the basic law
of the pendulum: the longer the swing the slower
its movement. A slightly off-centred fulcrum in
a see-saw demonstrates the principles of the
lever—a small child derives enormous pleasure
and confidence in lifting up his parents on the
other side.
Other exhibits, however, are designed to go
beyond such commonplace park games. A swing
has been developed to demonstrate coupled
oscillation or sympathetic vibration. Two people
sit on two swings hanging from an oscillating
plank. If one starts swinging, the other visitor,
though sitting still, swings automatically. The
second visitor attains a maximum swing when
the first one, who initiated the swing, almost
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Science Museums Beyond their Four Walls
stops. But that is for a moment only. The first
visitor again gains momentum while the second
visitor almost comes to a halt. This process goes
on alternately.
For obvious reasons, exhibits demonstrating
the principles of mechanics are easy to make
and maintain in a science park. Sometimes
typical indoor science exhibits are blown up to
a larger scale, but with appropriate safeguards.
Exhibits to show that less effort is required to
lift a larger load drawn on an inclined plane or
if lifted with compound pulley blocks, are
typical examples. The use of three systems of
lever, of different types of gear including odd
types such as square, elliptical, planetary or
wormgears, lifting of water by an Archimedian
screw, turning of different types of water wheels
by jets of water or lifting a large group of
people standing on a platform by means of a
small hydraulic pump, add fun to the children’s
learning process.
Certain exhibits, though simple in principle,
create a sensation through their presentation.
Large parabolic reflectors made of fibre-glass
placed at a distance of 100 feet create an outdoor
whispering gallery. Two ancient-looking statues,
separated by more than 200 feet and connected
by a hidden underground plumbing pipe line
transmit the voices from one to another and
explain how in older days priests could have
deceived naive worshippers by demonstrating
that a god was speaking to them. This exhibit,
named Isis Speaks, is a particularly popular one
in the Science Park.
Excitement is everywhere. Roll a ball through
three successive loops to demonstrate the effect
of centrifugal force or along three different
channels to show it travels fastest on a cycloidal
path. Stand on a turn table and turn a large
Saroj Ghose
umbrella, you start turning in the opposite
direction. Again, turn on a turntable slowly with
both hands outstretched with a dumb-bell in
each hand. Now move your hands closer together
and you turn faster. Watch how the colour of the
landscape changes when you look through
changing and overlapping colour filters. Make
pipes chime, take readings from a sundial and
note the maximum-minimum temperatures,
humidity, atmospheric pressure and rainfall of
the day from weather station instruments. Most
exciting is to observe how an object becomes
weightless in a free fall. You may see this in a
science park without travelling into outer space.
Amidst the plants and trees stand large artefacts
such as a windmill, a railway engine, an early
horse-drawn or electric tramcar, a hydroelectric
turbine, a supersonic jet fighter and other
aircraft, a huge sundial or simply a garden
sculpture. Somewhere in the park stands an
aviary full of local as well as rare birds.
Elsewhere you find a pet area designed to evoke
a symbiotic relationship between children and
animals. A pool maintaining a natural eco-system
or pits infested with snakes and reptiles are
designed to present a well knit story on
ecological balance and the protection of the
environment.
In a science park, exhibits are displayed
among trees, shrubs, flower beds, ponds and
garden pathways, all picturesquely landscaped,
which is what makes the exhibits so interesting.
The entire area is surrounded by lofty trees.
Large bushy trees which flower at different
seasons give shade to rest and recreational areas.
Fruit-bearing trees attract birds. A large variety of
smaller ornamental plants, shrubs and seasonal
flower beds add colour to the green. Planting is
done systematically at the initial stage after
consulting landscape architects and
horticulturists. Rare specimens of plants, not
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growing in the locality, find a special place in a
science park. They include strange fruits, flowers,
medicinal and aromatic plants, spices, economic
crops such as tea, coffee, cocoa, rubber, cotton,
jute, etc. Greenhouses with cactii, succulents and
bonsai are places of special attraction. Sensitive
plants and delicate exhibits are guarded not by
fences but by multicoloured hedges. Serpentine
pathways layered with pebbles or red brick dust
lead visitors from one exhibition area to another.
What appears encouraging and rewarding is
the behaviour of the adults. Entering the park as
a casual visitor with the sole purpose of keeping
an eye on their children so that they do not get
lost, parents do not realise that they become fully
engrossed and absorbed and literally lose
themselves in the exhibits.
Thus the experiment which began almost half-
heartedly seven years ago and was accelerated by
then pressing circumstances, has now become a
characteristic feature of the many science centres
which have sprung up all over India in recent
years. All science centres, whether developed or
under development in India, start with a science
park. The science park starts the science centre
off well, creating great expectations in the
locality, giving an idea of the shape of the fully
fledged science centre to come and bringing in
even more money for the project.
The museum on wheels
The very idea of taking a science museum or
science centre beyond its four walls began to take
shape in a different way more than 20 years ago.
India, at that time, had only two science
museums more than 2,000 kilometres apart. The
science planners were concerned with the need
to create a scientific temper in the community, so
as to bridge the age-old gap between science and
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society. Science communication was considered
equally important in the context of scientific
research and industrial development. In a
country with a very low literacy rate and with
few school going children in rural areas,
museums were found to be a good vehicle for
non-formal science education. Moreover, with
increasing democratization, museums became
much more accountable to the people at large.
Serious consideration was given to the question
of taking the message of science to the large rural
population. If such people could not come easily
to science museums located in big cities, why
should the science museums not go to the
people? If it is difficult to make such people
museumminded, why not make museums
people-minded? From such thinking emerged a
A remarkable effort to bring science to the people: an exhibition bus in Kolkata, India, today.
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Science Museums Beyond their Four Walls
series of outreach programmes encompassing a
large crosssection of society.
The idea took root. The first attempt was to
reach the rural interior through science
exhibitions on wheels. Science museums and
centres in India now run a fleet of eight large
exhibition buses which move through the rural
areas, stopping at one place for three days before
moving to another some 20 miles away. Such
exhibitions on wheels remain opertive for nine
months a year and come back to the science
museums during school vacation periods for
major repair and overhaul. Somewhat expensive
to start with, mobile science exhibition buses
have enormous mobility and penetrating power
compared with conventional travelling exhibits
Science Exhibition Bus, Kolkata, India, 2012 © Biswarup Ganguly
Saroj Ghose
which are sent by truck or train and set up in a
hall.
Exhibition sites are usually a village school,
which is the only available infrastructure for
such activities and is generally a common
meeting place for people of all ages. Exhibits
are conceived and developed on subjects
relating to local needs. Agriculture, energy, the
use of electricity, water, earth science,
nutrition, public health and other such topics
are covered by the mobile exhibitions. To make
them more effective and to keep to the
tradition of participatory science centres, the
exhibits are invariably three dimensional,
participatory or, at least, animated. Each mobile
unit consists of twenty four exhibits telling a
story and mounted on two levels in a bus. Half
of the exhibits placed on the floor of the bus
facing the outside are at eye level for visitors
outside the bus and the remainging half are
placed on the upper level for visitors standing
inside the bus. Each unit has its own generator
for non-electrified areas and is supplemented by
audiovisual programmes.
The design of these mobile exhibits takes into
consideration a range of practical problems and
apparently contradictory requirements. The
exhibits must work but with a minimum of
moving parts because of travelling conditions.
They must be simple and easy to maintain on the
road yet must be ingenious in order to create and
hold interest. For in-terchangeability of exhibits
between units operated by different museums, all
exhibits must be encased in uniformly sized
cabinets. Yet, at the same time, they must look
different to break monotony. Texts must be in
the regional language for better understanding
and easily interchangeable for a country where
language, including scripts changes almost every
300 miles.
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Moving the exhibition every three days for
nine months a year, according to a schedule
drawn up well in advance and keeping all
exhibits working on the road, requires very
careful planning and logistic support. The
experience of the Indian Science Centres is that it
is far easier to conceive, create and commission a
mobile unit than to keep it running.
Other means to bridge the gap
Our experience has gradually revealed that it is
not possible to achieve the target of reaching the
people with mobile science exhibitions alone. It
has turned out to be a good exposure-oriented
programme, but has failed to sustain its initial
impact, as the same place cannot be visited
frequently enough in a country as large as India.
The mobile units generated a demand from the
rural interior not only for more visits of such
units but also for some kind of round-the-year
activity. A chain of small district science centres
in different zones of the country has gradually
grown up out of this demand. These District
Science Centres are essentially low capital
intensive and activity-oriented. Exhibits are used
only for supporting such activities. They are not
museums as such, rather they are non-formal
educational institutions in the true sense of the
term.
The first set of activities, aimed to supplement
school science education with a composite
programme called ‘Build your own Laboratory’,
started with the formal training of school science,
teachers in the use of effective teaching aids and
science kits and development of such aids with
the help of schoolchildren. In the second phase
of this programme, science centres helped rural
schools in setting up science hobby centres to
cultivate creative faculties as well as to develop
teaching aids from scrap materials which did not
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require costly machines or experienced
technicians. The entire activity is aimed at
involving schoolchildren under the leadership
and guidance of their own teachers. The third
phase involved science teachers again in
delivering demonstration lectures with the help
of teaching aids prepared on subjects covered by
their school curricula.
Apart from such activities to supplement
formal education in schools, the science centres
organize various activities in the areas of non-
formal education, general awareness and science
communication. On the one hand, they involve
school students and teachers in science fairs,
science camps, competitive science seminars,
quizzes and so on, while on the other they
involve young children as well as adults in wide-
ranging activities of general interest such as
computer programming, amateur telescope
making and environmental studies. These
activities are being decentralized progressively
from big cities to district towns, then to villages,
quite often with organizational support from
various governmental agencies which already
have some kind of infrastructure in rural areas.
Many of the activities are multifunctional and
regenerative in character. For the science
museums in India, science no longer remains in
an ivory tower nor do the museums themselves
remain inside their show cases. Both go to the
community in an attempt to bridge the
communication gap.
It is precisely this growing link between
science and society that is gradually converting
Indian science museums and centres into action-
oriented and utility-based institutions, which may
even become powerful tools for social
transformation. Activities now extend to farmers,
workers in small industries, tribal groups,1
jobless housewives, school dropouts and
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Science Museums Beyond their Four Walls
physically handicapped persons. It now seems
possible that within another two decades,
museums may be a widely recognised forum for
ushering in material and intellectual changes in
our people’s scientific concepts, technological
attainments, social structure and value systems.
Time alone will determine whether this
transformation will take place.
Ensuring a basic infrastructure at the national
level
Several years ago, at an international conference
on science museums and centres, an elated
museum administrator declared that she was
going to build a science centre unique in
approach and character, which would be
developed entirely outdoors without any building
or massive infrastructure. Indeed, if such
activities as described above could be generated
in and for the community outside the four walls
of a museum, she asked, do we need a museum
building at all, particularly when more than half
of our resources are eaten up by that mammoth?
Whatever the objectives of a science museum or
centre—communication of science, fostering a
spirit of inquiry and creativity, inculcating
scientific temper in the community or imparting
non-formal science education—the buildings or
infrastructure are only the means and not the
end. The question therefore hangs on whether a
successful science centre needs any massive
infrastructure at all. Before jumping to any
conclusions, one has to remember that behind
the extensive outreach activities of Indian science
centres remains a strong infrastructure where
ideas generate, programmes take shape and
activities regenerate. Science museum exhibits
can be purchased from outside but an interactive
science centre itself cannot be bought at any
price. It has to be developed meticulously
through a creative process and this process of
Saroj Ghose
creation and sustenance require some kind of
minimum infrastructure.
India has learned through her failures. Back in
the early 1950s a chain of twenty-six or so
activity-oriented rural science centres, called
Vijnan-Mandir (Temple of Science) were set up in
agro-based areas in different parts of the country.
India needed a green revolution for which its
barely literate farmers had to be exposed to
improved techniques and implements, not
through books and literature (there was no
television at that time), but through a non-formal
medium. The Vijnan Mandirs had audiovisual
displays, exhibits, training facilities and utility
services such as soil testing, etc. and a group of
motivated young people to run them. Within a
decade, the entire chain was in a shambles.
Audio visual material, once prepared, was never
updated; projectors had no spares; training
programmes stopped for lack of instructors; soil
could not be tested for want of chemicals and
new concepts became fewer and fewer. At a
much later stage, a task force set up by the
Planning Commission identified the primary
cause of failure as lack of guidance, co-ordination
and infra-structural support. The Vijnan Mandirs
had to function in isolation without any back-up
for the creation of new exhibitions, organisation
of new activities, continuous updating of
information and extension of training facilities.
With a view to developing a science museum
movement in the country, the task force urged
the establishment of a central coordinating
agency to pool and optimise available resources,
to carry out the free exchange of exhibits and
personnel between museums under its control, to
promote research and training facilities for
sustained growth of activities and the
development of new science centres in the
country. The task force recommended a four-tier
decentralized system in order to reach the people
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at large. Four large science museums or centres
at the national level were to be developed in four
zones of the country. These national museums
were to set up a strong infrastructure for the
development of new science centres and the
generation of new exhibits and activities in each
particular zone. At the second level, six Regional
Science Centres were to be created in various
State capitals with a limited exhibit development
capability to give organisational support to even
smaller science centres in the zone. At the third
level, twenty District Science Centres were to be
set up for outreach activities in the particular
district. At the grass roots level, mobile science
exhibition units, controlled from the local
District Science Centre, were to travel through
the interior.
It was an ambitious but realistic plan. A
National Council of Science Museums was set up
to ensure overall co-ordination and support.
Three national level science museums and
centres are now functioning in Calcutta,
Bangalore and Bombay. A large science centre is
being developed in Delhi. One Regional Science
Centre has been set up at Patna, while four more
are being developed at Guwahati, Bhubaneswar,
Lucknow and Bhopal. Four District Science
Centres have been set up in the eastern, southern
and western zones of the country, while ten more
are being planned during the current five year
plan period. New ‘museobuses’ are being
developed for each science centre. A central
research and training laboratory is being built up
for the proper development of manpower
resources. It is a well co-ordinated activity aimed
at total implementation of the plan.
Although there are certain features in common
in terms of contents, the museums carefully
avoid regimentation in concept and approach.
The Birla Industrial & Technological Museum at
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Calcutta and the Visvesvaraya Industrial &
Technological Museum at Bangalore, the two
national level science museums in the east and
south zones of the country put the emphasis on
industrial and technological subjects like motive
power, electro-technics, timber, paper and pulp,
metallurgy, nuclear energy, transport,
communication, petroleum and mining, with a
balanced approach towards artefacts as well as
didactic exhibits. The two museums also have a
section on popular science, primarily presenting
physics-oriented demonstration exhibits. The new
Nehru Science Centre in Bombay (Fig. 54) is
largely participatory with indoor and outdoor
exhibits and an overall emphasis on teaching
science through fun and entertainment. The
fourth national level centre at Delhi is going to
be different from the other three. It is designed
to reflect the country’s 5,000 year-old heritage in
science and technology, and establish a
continuum up to the present developments in
agriculture, energy, nuclear science, electronics
and space.
Museums have evolved considerably since they
first came into existence several centuries ago.
India too has covered much ground since
achieving independence in 1947: technology in
India is undergoing rapid changes, from
traditional intuitional skills to industrialization
and sophisticated modern applications. The
country’s science museums and centres, while
living through a major experiment, are
themselves experiencing the cultural shocks of
rapid change. This ongoing experience re-shapes
their priorities, goals and philosophies. It is a
dynamic process, adapting to the needs of time
and shifting its emphasis continuously.
Stabilization will be reached some day, but
whether that will signify the peak of development
or a kind of stagnation is an open question.
Note
1. See article by S.K. Bagchi, ‘Science Museum and Social
Relevance—An Indian Experiment’.

The character and format of the various

regional and district science centres also vary.
There are certain core exhibits and activities
common to all centres in the general areas of
science methods, world of perception and basic
science communication. Utility-based activities
and supporting exhibits are, however, typical of
each particular area. Because of the vast territory
and the diversity in social and cultural patterns,
requirements and relevance are different in
different places. Such regional and district
science centres are oriented more to specific local
needs and problems such as soil treatment,
harvesting, pest control, water management,
fighting epidemics and chronic diseases,
nutrition, improvisation of techniques in
handicrafts and small industries, local
environmental protection and so on.

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