Homi Bhabha died in a ✈️ crash, Vikram Sarabhai died in a hotel room.
According to a book by Gregory Douglas called “Conversations with the Crow” where he has detailed conversations with the second in command of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (in charge of covert operations) – Robert Crowley, he (Robert) talks about how the CIA killed India’s nuclear physicist Homi Bhabha and Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri.
Further, as we all know Nambi Narayanan was falsely implicated in spy scandal to try and finish off his career (& his life perhaps).
VIKAS – the engine designed/created by Padma Bhushan Nambi Narayanan has enabled 53 successful launches for the Indian space program, including the Chandrayaan, Mangalyaan and several PSLV missions. And has not had a single failure. This engine has basically been the backbone of India’s space program for the past several years / decades.
Nambi Narayanan’s brilliance, achievements, patriotism and innocence is well documented in both his book and the recently-released movie – Rocketry.
Now, in addition to these 3 cases, there are many Indian scientists who have had unnatural deaths & mysteriously met their end, from more recent times.
This is an incomplete compilation from the period 2008-13:
In 2008, Jaswant Rao, an assistant mechanical engineer in Indian Rare Earths, was suspected to have taken his life.
In 2009, Tirumala Prasad Tenka, a scientist with the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology at Indore, hung himself at his residence. In a suicide note he apparently alleged ‘abuse by seniors’ as the reason.
JUNE 8, 2009: L. Mahalingam, a 47-year-old senior scientific officer at the Kaiga Atomic Power Station in Karwar, Karnataka, went on a morning walk and never returned. Five days later, his highly decomposed body was fished out from the Kali river. His family did not believe it was him, until a DNA test confirmed the identity, as he had showed no indication of suicidal tendencies. After his death, the rest of the Mahalingam family suddenly shifted from Karwar to Tamil Nadu literally overnight.
NOV. 24, 2009: More than 20 workers at Unit 1 and 2 of the Kaiga Atomic Power Station fell ill after drinking tritium-laced water. The source of radiation was a water cooler used by the workers. The cooler, located in the Reactor Building (RB), was common to Unit 1 and Unit 2. The water was laced with tritiated heavy water. Tritium is a strategic material and so, highly guarded. Only very few authorised personnel have access to it, that, too, after going through a controlled access system manned by the Central Industrial Security Force. When the incident came to light, authorities in India’s nuclear establishment said tritium contamination was ‘negligible’ and that ‘the incident was minor’. Union Minister of State for Science and Technology Prithviraj Chavan told the media that it was an ‘inside job’. Chief of the Atomic Energy Commission Anil Kakodkar concurred. It was only a matter of time before the culprit would be found out, they said. Nobody has been caught so far.
DEC. 30. 2009: Two young researchers, Umang Singh and Partha Pratim were two promising scientists in a team of researchers in the chemistry group. They were burnt to death in a mysterious fire in the modular lab of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre’s (BARC) radiation and photochemistry department. These 2 were the only researchers from their 10-member team who were present on that fateful afternoon when the mysterious fire burnt down the lab. No fire extinguishers were at hand and the fire tender ‘lost its way’ and reached the lab 45 minutes too late. The fire had consumed everything in the lab, including the two scientists. To this day, neither Umang’s family nor Partha’s family knows the exact cause of the fire. That there was nothing inflammable in the lab only deepened the mystery. The third-floor lab, situated in the high-security BARC complex in Trombay, was one kilometre away from the nuclear reactors.
FEB. 22, 2010: Mahadevan Padmanabhan Iyer, a 48-year-old mechanical engineer at the BARC reaction group, was found dead in his staff quarters in Anand Bhavan in south Mumbai. First, the death was put down to a heart attack. Slowly, it changed to “suicide”. The autopsy, as asked for by the family members to determine true cause of death, conducted by forensic experts at Mumbai’s Grant Medical College concluded that Iyer died after being hit on the head with a blunt weapon. The killer has not been apprehended.
Ashutosh Sharma and Soumik Chowdhary BARC scientists, committed suicide by hanging in 2010.
Akshay P Chavan, another BARC employee, allegedly committed suicide by jumping from the balcony of his flat in April 2010.
30 April 2011, Dr. Uma Rao, a 63-year-old retired scientist and former president of the Indian Women Scientists’ Association, was discovered dead at her home near the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) campus. Even though her death was ruled a suicide, her family members disputed the conclusion, calling the investigation inadequate.
12 May 2012, Mohammad Mustafa, a scientist at the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research, Kalpakkam (IGCAR) next to Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, was found dead with his wrists slashed. The police official said, “We have recovered a note purportedly written by Mustafa stating that nobody is responsible for his death”. The note was never released to the media and no further investigation happened.
October 7, 2013, two chief engineers KK Joshi and Abhish Shivam assigned to India’s first nuclear-powered submarine, INS Arihant, were found dead on railway tracks under Pendurty railway station limits of East Coast Railways. Relatives said there were no obvious indications of injuries, which the police confirmed. It was believed that they were assassinated somewhere, maybe poisoned, before being placed on the railway tracks to make their deaths look accidental or suicide-related. The incident was concluded by the Ministry of Defense (and the media) as an accident, and further investigations were been ruled out. When relatives and neighbours expressed doubts about the incident, pointing out that there were no obvious injuries to the bodies, which proved that they did not die after being hit by a passing train and both of them were likely killed somewhere else and their bodies were kept on the railway tracks, then the Police were assigned to look into the case, which was deemed inconclusive. No CBI or other agencies were involved.
Further to these, if you take a big-picture view over the 15 years from 1999-2014, the BARC has documented 680 staff fatalities. At the same time, the Baroda Heavy Water Plant recorded 26 deaths, while the plants in Kota and Tuticorin reported 30 and 27 deaths, respectively. During this time, 92 people working at the Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research in Kalapakkam have died, with 16 of them being suicides.
Further, a RTI query in 2016 revealed that At least 70 people, including scientists and engineers working with the various establishments and research laboratories of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) have died due to unnatural causes in the last eight years. The DAE is the nodal government body to work in the development of nuclear power technology, applications of radiation technologies in the fields of defence, agriculture, medicine, industry and basic research. DAE comprises five research centres, three industrial organisations, five public sector undertakings and three service organisations. Out of these, 13 organisations replied to the RTI query. Of these, eight establishments said that their employees had died. The maximum number of deaths were of officials belonging to Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, 38; Atomic Minerals Directorate for Exploration and Research, 15; and Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research, 12. The other five deaths took place in various other organisations belonging to the DAE.
I am almost a 100% sure that some of these have been murders inflicted by external enemies of India + internal enemies of India who aid & abet them for money or power. It is genuinely pathetic. What’s worse is that none of these seem to have gotten the kind of attention they deserve…
While no unnatural death should go unexplained, these are even more critical since the dead had been working in highly sensitive establishments dealing with nuclear energy / space. In the age of terrorism when the “enemy within” angle is more than just a threat perception, the security of our scientists should be of utmost concern to the authorities. And, their deaths should be above doubt. Even if one of these incidents, remains unresolved, it is sufficient reason for India’s scientific establishment to sit up and worry. Unfortunately, most of these incidents, which have occurred many many years ago, still remain a mystery and there seem to be no major effort to get to the bottom of these deaths.
India needs to worry. All of these people represent the scientific intellectual capital of the country. Just as we protect the political capital of the country represented by our President, PM, CMs, et al, we should be protecting all of the scientific intellectual capital of the country, represented in our scientists, as well!
Hope we correct this in the future and protect our scientific intellectual assets better…
P.S. This subject needs a proper movie or series to be made… Someone of the research & filmmaking caliber of Neeraj Pandey / R Madhavan needs to take this on…