For starters, none of the pieces they run on this page is original. All of them are picked from either science journalism organizations, like Discovery Magazine, PhysOrg, io9 or LiveScience, or from the blogs of prolific science journalists, like Ed Yong, Tom Levenson or Jennifer Ouellette. I'd have appreciated it had an effort been taken to contextualize those stories to an Indian audience, but all that's done is a textbook copy-paste manoeuvre.
[caption id="attachment_21377" align="aligncenter" width="254" caption="N. Ram, The Hindu's (now former) editor-in-chief"]
[/caption]Further, the stories that the editor chooses to print on that day on that page are stories that have no time-value, i.e. the stories won't get stale even if they're read after a week. Things like muscles we thought we never had, weird animals, and some new images snapped by NASA's space telescopes make it there, and when I read them, I learn nothing knew that could be relevant except in a quiz.
News that never gets old will always be more of information than knowledge because the need of the hour keeps changing. And it keeps changing because our needs change the moment we read the paper and learn something new. Our needs change because we're constantly using knowledge of the world around us in different ways to move ahead, learn more and do more.
In such an environment, I'd like to know more about what's going on - particularly in science because science has been tipping the power scales in Asia's favour for the past few years. We could use such a shift away from the West to give ourselves an increasingly valuable competitive advantage. But no - it is India after all, and we, the newspapers, must feed only what the hungry want, not what the hungry deserve. And that's politics, dance, music and cricket.
I don't understand why only one page out of 20, or effectively only one page out of some 140 accounting for the entire week, is devoted to science and technology. For all that the nation touts to be its future and one of its major exports to the world, science news in the Indian publishing industry is as good as not represented. They can possibly have no excuse for this: there's enough going on just at the city-level to fill an entire page every day.
All I'm asking is, get science stories from the web - no issues - edit them a little, give credit to the original authors, and publish them on that day itself. There are new technologies being born and culled everyday, new inventors and innovators coming into the scene, new products, processes and techniques finding their way into our lives. There's news-value in all of those stories, so make use of it. (I myself read more than 150 articles per day, and that's after filtering out an equal number from my feeds.)
To conclude: dear The Hindu, don't ditch science because you think no one's eating it. No one's eating it because you're ditching it.
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