Science journalism and science in India

I am a huge fan of Columbo, the legendary American detective series from the 70s. It's the only show I'll make a point of recording to watch. Why? Like so many people, I can't resist a good mystery. But more than that, I love to see Columbo ask all his seemingly-irrelevant little questions, slowly piece together the evidence and somehow pull it all together with a brilliant observation that catches out the bad guy or gall just when they think they've got away with murder.

That's how we journalists often work -- taking tiny pieces of material from here and there, to build up a story, all in the hope of revealing a bigger truth.

As a journalist, my favourite story came in 2007, when I started to investigate a global network of bogus universities, scamming poor students by selling them worthless degrees. When the piece finally aired on the BBC last year, it was the first time I felt I'd made a difference to someone's life - a real Columbo moment. But the truth is that, on a day-to-day level, a reporter's life is more often about simply communicating the news.

I wrote my first published science article - an interview with the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield - for a student newspaper while I was at Oxford reading engineering. After graduating, I eventually landed a traineeship with ITN, learning to be a television news producer. To my surprise, my engineering training came in useful. I picked up the technical side of the business quickly. After that, I joined the BBC as a local news reporter, and last year went freelance to devote my time solely to reporting on science and engineering.

It's been a rollercoaster, taking me all over the world, reporting topics like mathematical symbols and hardware hackers. Right now, I'm New Delhi while I research my first book, about science in India. The country is a hotbed of scientific activity - space missions, biotechnology, big pharma research - making it a goldmine of stories for any reporter.

Beautiful as it is, though, living in India is not easy. In Delhi particularly, the rates of attacks and sexual harassment against women are so high that it's rare to see a woman out by herself in the evenings. Being a female scientist in India is even tougher, as I learned while surfing the forums at Nature Network - a global social site for people working in science, run by the journal, Nature. According to the posts, women scientists routinely suffer sexism, sometimes outright abuse, at the hands of male colleagues.

The paradox is that this is one of few nations in the world with a female President, and just this weekend I watched a platoon of female soldiers at a military parade -- all proving that this isn't so much an institutional problem as one of attitudes and prejudices. Women do have access to the careers that they want, they just can't be guaranteed an easy time in the job. Like all abuse, though, nothing can be done about it until women speak out. Even on the Nature Network forums, the posts have been anonymous and nobody has felt comfortable naming names.

The sad fact is that female scientists feel too intimidated or afraid to make their negative experiences public. So for now, this is one important story that remains untold.

Angela Saini is an award-winning science journalist based in London, who is currently living in New Delhi. Her first book, Geek Nation, will be published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2011. Her website is: http://www.angelasaini.co.uk/