Two editions of the India Science Festival (ISF) had concluded when science communicator Sarah Hyder Iqbal joined its organising body, the not-for-profit Foundation for Advancing Science and Technology (FAST) India. The first edition, hosted in 2020 at Pune’s premier Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), had boasted 13,000 attendees and about 60 speakers. “[The Festival] might prove to be a turning point in the history of our brilliant, perpetually interesting, mad, magical country of ours,” remarked neuroscientist and author V. S. Ramachandran, who was one of the speakers at the event.
Under Sarah’s leadership, the festival continued to flourish. By the fifth edition in 2024, the final one that Sarah curated before leaving the organisation, the number of attendees had grown to 23,000. That year, FAST India also introduced the India Science Book Fellowship, one of India’s few well-funded fellowships supporting the writing of popular science books.
Arguably, one of Sarah’s contributions triumphed over the rest: making public engagement experts an integral part of the festival. Over half of the 63 people listed as speakers on the 2022 edition website (the first that Sarah curated) were professional science communicators, journalists, writers, or illustrators. In contrast, the 2020 edition website lists only two professional science communicators, journalists or writers among its 59 speakers.
By 2025, the festival had become an unofficial annual meeting ground for science communicators in the country, including those who weren’t affiliated with academic institutions. I was one of them.
Sarah Hyder Iqbal at the India Science Festival 2024. Source: Sarah Hyder Iqbal
Between 2022 and 2025, I attended four editions of the ISF, mostly moderating fireside chats and panel discussions. The ISF gave me the opportunity to interview influential and important figures such as US-based journalist and author Angela Saini, University of Chicago computational social scientist James Evans, and wildlife historian Raza Kazmi. As an early-career science journalist and communicator who had recently quit a doctoral degree, the festival brought me unmatched visibility and validated my decision to pursue this path.
More importantly, the ISF also provided me with a sense of belonging. When I entered the science communication scene in 2020 as Labhopping’s coordinator, things were in a rather nascent, nebulous stage. There was a lot of excitement… and a lot of isolation. There were some communicators who were helping science institutions take their science to the public and others who worked independently. Some of us identified as science journalists, while others identified as science communicators, writers, podcasters, video-makers, or artists. Most of us knew of each other only through online platforms. Subsequently, the ISF became the physical space that brought some of us together.
Between our sessions over two very hectic days, we would find time to coalesce into small groups. There was lighthearted banter and, most importantly, space for us to offer each other hope and support as we navigated our vulnerable career trajectories.
Then came January 2026. As per details on their website, only seven out of the 71 speakers in the latest edition of ISF were professional public engagement experts. Most science communicators who had been regulars at the festival, including me, were not included in the programming.
To understand this shift, I spoke to eleven individuals, including four former employees of FAST India and several volunteers tasked with organising the festival. I also reviewed ISF’s brochures for seven editions of the festival. I found that the drastic dip in science communicators’ participation as speakers is symptomatic of a larger, more fundamental change in the nature of the festival.
This is the story of one of India’s biggest public-facing science gatherings and how it is caught between science communication on one hand, and industry priorities, technological spectacle, and organisational churn on the other.
“Those [attendees] interested in tech should have something to participate in. And those more interested in physics and biology—even the most esoteric concepts—should have that. If they want a deep dive, they should have that, and if someone wants to do more hand-on things, they should get to do that.” — Sarah Hyder Iqbal, Ex-Consultant, FAST India
Science festivals in India
Festivals weren’t the Indian science ecosystem’s first attempts at public engagement. The 1960s saw the birth of people’s science movements to challenge superstitions and increase scientific literacy among the public. One of their strategies was Vigyan Jathas, science processions that targeted rural areas “as a means of social upliftment and to promote critical thinking to bust superstitions and other harmful practices,” Sarah writes in a 2024 Journal of Scientific Temper paper. These jathas were precursors to today’s science festivals.
The earliest contemporary science festival in India I could track down was the 1993 National Children’s Science Congress, organised by the central government’s Ministry of Science and Technology. Since then, science festivals have become increasingly commonplace, particularly in the last decade. For example, in 2015, the Ministries of Science and Technology, and Earth Sciences launched one of the bigger science festivals in the country, the India International Science Festival (IISF), to showcase the nation’s advancements in science and technology. According to the data available on the IISF’s website, the latest edition drew more than 40,000 participants from India and abroad.
Other festivals, such as the Great Indian Science Festival and the Mysore Science Theatre Festival, sought to cater more to local audiences. Most major science and technology institutions in India, such as the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Indian Institute of Science, and the IISERs, also organise student-led science festivals that draw sizable numbers.
More recently, science festivals focusing on specific themes have also begun emerging. For instance, since 2024, the Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, the National Institute for Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), and the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) have been organising Manotsava, “a first-of-its-kind National Mental Health Festival designed to spark dialogue, build community, and make mental health research accessible to all”. Each stall at the 2025 edition of Manotsava engaged 850+ people per day, according to its impact report.
Science has also found a dedicated home in some well-known literary festivals: for example, since 2023, the Hyderabad Literary Festival has featured a ‘Science and the City’ stream. And, in 2025, Pint of Science, a global science gathering that brings researchers to share their work with the public in local pubs, bars, and cafes, held its inaugural edition in India across three cities: Bengaluru, Pune, and New Delhi.
Kollegala Sharma addresses attendees of the Mysore Science Theatre Festival 2025. Source: Nandita Jayaraj
The ISF story
When the ISF entered this arena, it quickly stood out for its format, lineup, and funding (which, sources told me, hovered around a crore every year). It typically goes on for two days in the month of January and features participatory workshops, cultural performances, competitions, panel discussions, fireside chats, public talks, games, and booths set up by different science institutions and organisations.
“I never thought that science could be so much fun and come in so many different forms,” said a 14-year-old attendee of the 2023 edition. “ISF looks at [the festival] as an involvement of the public. The public has to be engaged with science,” affirmed Mysuru-based science communicator Kollegala Sharma, who has followed both ISF and IISF closely.
Kollegala contrasted ISF to the central government’s IISF, which, according to him, seeks to “inform the public”. This difference matters because the public information model of science communication has long been criticised for treating the public as a passive recipient of information. Public engagement, on the other hand, is a collaborative approach that fosters a dialogue between scientists and the public.
The ISF also stood out for its efforts to make global conversations on science and technology part of its lineup. According to information on the website, at least a fifth of each edition’s speakers were based out of foreign institutions.
Speaker backgrounds for different editions of the ISF. The spike in the number of foreign speakers in 2021 may be attributed to the event being held online. All numbers are approximate and computed from the available list of speakers on the ISF website; the website does not list all the speakers. The speaker list for 2024 was unavailable on the website. By Sayantan Datta
“We were very clear that the festival should have something for everyone,” recollected Sarah. She acknowledged that since the founders had a technology background, there was always a focus on future tech. Apart from this, “the SciComm team [responsible for organising the ISF] was given considerable freedom to curate and shape the festivals,” she added.
FAST India was founded by philanthropist and private equity investor Ashish Dhawan, and entrepreneur, techie, and angel investor Varun Aggarwal. Sarah, who came on board as a consultant tasked with curating the festival, had a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Oxford. Previously, she had led public engagement at DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance, a leading biomedical and health research funding organisation.
The idea was this, according to Sarah: “Those [attendees] interested in tech should have something to participate in. And those more interested in physics and biology—even the most esoteric concepts—should have that. If they want a deep dive, they should have that, and if someone wants to do more hand-on things, they should get to do that.” Something for everyone.
“SciComm ThinkLabs has opened up some new ways to understand and respond to the complex demand for better and more diverse approaches to building a more scientifically aware, critical public.” — Usha Raman, Professor, University of Hyderabad, & Advisor, SciComm ThinkLabs
ISF and science communicators
With Sarah’s entry, ISF began to include science communicators as key participants in the festival. Though other festivals also see a footfall of science communicators, most of them are there to represent the science institutions they are affiliated with. At the ISF, refreshingly, independent science communicators were invited to moderate discussions, emcee sessions, and participate in policy and research-related discussions.
“It was by design,” Sarah affirmed. “You need science communicators to realise such big science events. We need to build an ecosystem where science communicators are seen as much as other players in science.” She recollected that the leadership was supportive of this idea.
The move was so meaningful that the festival ended up inspiring participating youngsters into becoming science communicators themselves. “The ISF was my gateway to the field,” recollects science communicator Khushi Goel, who is currently finishing her postgraduate degree, but has been dabbling in scicomm ever since. Tejaswini Dhurde, who had volunteered at the 2023 edition, echoed her: “That was the first time that I got a glimpse of what science communication looks like in action.” She is now a science communicator with the Centre for Predictive Human Model Systems at Hyderabad.
FAST India’s engagement with science communicators went beyond involvement in the festival. In 2023, FAST-India launched SciComm Thinklabs, a collaborative effort seeking to “study and develop recommendations to strengthen the science communication ecosystem in the country”. Sixteen science communicators and researchers were signed up—myself included—to survey the overall landscape of the ecosystem in a six-month long exercise.
Participants of SciComm ThinkLabs at India Science Festival 2024. Source: Sarah Hyder Iqbal
The surveys led to some of the few existing systematic documentations of India’s science communication landscape, the gaps therein, and the specific requirements of our science communicators. The working groups also made community-driven recommendations, proposing frameworks for science communication training and implementation in the country, and residency programmes for science journalists.
“SciComm ThinkLabs has opened up some new ways to understand and respond to the complex demand for better and more diverse approaches to building a more scientifically aware, critical public,” according to Usha Raman, a professor of communication at University of Hyderabad and one of their advisors. South Africa-based science communication researcher Marina Joubert, another advisor, said: “Networks of science communicators in other countries could benefit hugely from following [SciComm ThinkLabs’] example.”
Unfortunately, ISF’s own stint with this network of science communicators did not last.
Two trends
In 2024, SciComm Thinklabs came to an end, but not before it released a report, several questionnaires, some preprints, and a host of recommendations. The group disbanded, and the endeavour vanished from public consciousness—partly because people got busy, and partly because “FAST India probably didn’t think it was a priority,” Sarah told me.
The science communicators the project enrolled, however, continued to participate in the ISF—until the 2026 edition, when their number in the festival’s lineup fell drastically to less than 10 per cent.
Speaker profiles for different editions of the ISF. “Miscellaneous” refers to speakers whom I could not categorise into other categories (e.g., publishers, vice-chancellors and institution heads, etc.). Unlabelled portions represent 6.3 per cent or less. Abbr. STS: Science, Technology, and Society Studies. All numbers are approximate and based on the available list of speakers on the ISF website; the website does not list all the speakers. The speaker list for 2024 was absent on the website. By Sayantan Datta
That wasn’t the only thing that changed. The leaching of public engagement experts from the ISF stage coincided with another trend: an increased focus on commercially viable and industrial aspects of science and technology. Of the 30 sessions listed for the first day in the 2026 edition, six were on artificial intelligence (AI), two were on quantum technologies, two were on India’s “space odyssey”, and two were on leveraging science in war and defence. The programme on the second day too was replete with sessions on AI, robotics, precision medicine, quantum technologies, blockchain, and translating laboratory findings to marketable products.
Sessions like these were present in the past editions too, but this year, they took the lion’s share. Unlike previous editions, where their proportion hovered roughly between 20-30 per cent, this year, they formed close to half of the programme.
As the number of sessions on translational, commercial, and industrial aspects grew in the 2026 edition, the number of sessions focusing on the relationships between science, history, art, and society fell sharply.
“The organisation’s leadership had a clear vision for certain aspects of the festival—specific topics, speakers, and panels that they felt should be presented in a particular way. For the rest of it, we definitely had a very interesting, creative playground.” — Shruti Sundaresan, Ex-Programme Manager, FAST India
Changing priorities
Several factors might have contributed to these shifts. For one, ISF’s recent editions correspond with a period in which artificial intelligence and quantum technologies have received unprecedented policy attention and public investment. In 2024, the Indian government allocated over Rs. 10,300 crore to nurture “India’s AI innovation ecosystem”. A year earlier, in 2023, the government sanctioned Rs. 6,000 crore to “create a vibrant & innovative ecosystem in Quantum Technology”.
Session profiles at different editions of the ISF. “Miscellaneous” refers to sessions that I could not categorise into other categories. Unlabelled portions represent six per cent or less. All numbers are approximate and estimated from ISF brochures. Some sessions could be categorised into multiple categories; in those cases, I have placed them in the most relevant category. By Sayantan Datta
The topics of focus also appear to align with the interests of some of ISF’s prominent funders. According to the ISF website, sponsors of the 2026 edition included the defence firm Zen Technologies, manufacturing enterprise Kirloskar, life-sciences research company Indegene, the electric vehicle company Ather, and Cactus Communications, self-described as a “technology company that specialises in expert services and AI-driven products which improve how research gets funded, published, communicated, and discovered”. Several senior executives from sponsoring companies appeared as speakers. Similarly, when Bajaj Auto Ltd. funded the 2025 edition of the festival, three of the company’s top officials featured in the speaker list. Different editions have also featured speakers from global technology giants like Google, Microsoft, and Adobe.
These factors explain to some extent the changing focus of the sessions. But they don’t explain why science communicators and public engagement experts were left out. To understand that, I was encouraged to look at the changing composition and roles of the organising team.
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When Shruti Sundaresan joined the ISF team in 2020, she had already proved her mettle at organising large-scale science festivals. In the preceding year, she had worked with, in varying capacities, the Edinburgh Science Festival, the University of Malta’s “Science in the City” festival, and the Abu Dhabi Science Festival. Shruti was joined by Sarah in 2021 and fellow science communicator Utsav Thapliyal in 2022.
Together, they made a formidable team and became the ISF’s most recognisable faces.
“The organisation’s leadership had a clear vision for certain aspects of the festival—specific topics, speakers, and panels that they felt should be presented in a particular way. For the rest of it, we definitely had a very interesting, creative playground,” Shruti reminisced. Bringing in science communicators and public engagement experts was a part of this endeavour.
Given Sarah’s seniority and Shruti’s experience, the management’s intervention in the ISF programme was reportedly minimal. But once the duo moved on from the organisation (Shruti in 2023 and Sarah in 2024), the management intensified its control, according to several ex-employees responsible for organising the ISF. Utsav left in 2025.
The only one to remain was science communicator and science outreach expert Shriya Naidu, who had joined the team in 2023. Having worked in different outreach roles for about three years at IIT Gandhinagar, Shriya, like her predecessors, was well-immersed in the Indian science communication scene and experienced in organising public-facing events.
However, by the time the others left, it seems that the nature of the role of science communicators at the ISF and FAST India had changed. In the early years of the festival their roles covered curation, logistics, and operations. By the time Shriya joined the organisation, the focus “had shifted to people who can execute instead of those who could bring their own ideas,” Shriya told me. Others who have worked with the festival as volunteers or consultants echoed this.
In 2025, Shriya left, too.
Children participate in an activity at the India Science Festival 2024. Source: Shruti Sundaresan
“I would have been okay with all the AI talk, if the ethics of AI use and its wider implications on the public were discussed adequately.” — Tejaswini Dhurde, Science Communicator, Centre for Predictive Human Model Systems
A need for balance
While it is not automatically wrong or even unexpected for a festival to align itself with national interests, hot topics, or funders’ priorities, this cannot compromise the quality of science engagement. This risk is exacerbated in the absence of the watchful eyes and active involvement of independent science engagement professionals.
Moreover, there is evidence suggesting that representatives of large corporations are simply less effective at science communication. When Georgia Institute of Technology researchers surveyed science communication practices at the 2024 Atlanta Science Festival, they found that booths hosted by educational institutions and organisations were more effective at their job than those hosted by large corporations. “In approximately half of the interactions at educational institution booths and organisation booths, exhibitors asked attendees if they had questions, but this occurred only once during interactions at large corporation booths,” they explain in their 2025 Frontiers in Communication paper.
Further, in the absence of science communicators, such events may end up giving a narrow and lopsided view of state-sanctioned and commercialisable science and technology topics. “I would have been okay with all the AI talk, if the ethics of AI use and its wider implications on the public were discussed adequately,” commented Tejaswini, the Hyderabad-based science communicator who attended the 2026 edition.
It was science communication researcher Dietram Scheufele who introduced the term “mediated realities” to describe the role of science communication. Most people’s understanding of science does not come from direct interactions with scientists, he explained, but through efforts that interpret and filter scientific developments for them. In keeping science communicators out, ISF seems to have left out Indian science’s most important mediators.
Note: The author is a co-awardee of a Small Research Grant by FAST India’s India Science Book Fellowship. The author reached out to one of FAST India’s current employees responsible for organising the ISF 2026; they declined to comment. The author also wrote to FAST India and one of its founders with a questionnaire requesting a response. This copy will be updated when/if they respond.
This is the third piece in the Labhopping Summer Science Trilogy 2026, supported by our donors. Keep Labhopping Science Media Forum running by making a contribution via Razorpay.
Featured Image: Gaganyaan astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla clicks a selfie with participants at India Science Festival 2026. Source: Instagram
