The small Goan settlement of Marcel — known to its own people as Mashel — sits in the Ponda uplands of North Goa district, and it is from this village that one of modern India's most consequential scientists takes his name. Raghunath Anant Mashelkar was born there on 1 January 1943, when Goa was still under Portuguese rule. He would go on to lead India's largest chain of public laboratories, to be elected to the Royal Society in London, and to argue India's case in patent offices around the world. The village surname he carries has followed him into every one of those rooms.

A childhood of extreme scarcity

Mashelkar's father died while he was still a small boy, and his mother took the family out of Goa to Mumbai, where she supported them through menial work. His early years were spent in genuine want: schooling in a crowded municipal system, study done wherever light was available, and no certainty from one year to the next that education would continue at all. He has spoken often of walking without footwear well into boyhood and of the narrowness of the margin on which his future rested.

That future turned on two things. The first was an outstanding matriculation result. The second was a modest scholarship from the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, which paid the fees that his family could not. He entered the University Department of Chemical Technology in Mumbai — the institution now known as the Institute of Chemical Technology — and took his bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 1966, followed by a doctorate in 1969. He then spent several years abroad on postdoctoral research in Britain and the United States before choosing to return to India rather than settle overseas, a decision that shaped everything after it.

Science at the National Chemical Laboratory

Mashelkar joined the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune, where his own research lay in polymer science, transport phenomena and the engineering of complex fluids. His technical work on the behaviour of polymeric solutions and on reaction engineering earned him standing in the international chemical engineering community, and he published prolifically across those fields.

In 1989 he was appointed Director of the National Chemical Laboratory, a post he held until 1995. His management there was unusually outward-facing for an Indian government laboratory of the period: he pushed the institution to earn contract research income from global industry, insisted that scientists measure themselves against international benchmarks, and treated intellectual property as a serious output rather than an afterthought.

Leading CSIR and defending traditional knowledge

In 1995 Mashelkar became Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the umbrella body for dozens of national laboratories, and held the office for more than a decade. He is widely credited with reorienting CSIR towards patenting and commercialisation; by the early 2000s the organisation was filing more international patent applications than any other body in the developing world.

His most publicly visible battles, however, were fought over what belonged to India in the first place. He was a central figure in the successful challenge to a United States patent granted over the wound-healing use of turmeric, an application of a substance used in Indian households for centuries. He was similarly involved in the campaign against a European patent covering the fungicidal use of neem, and in the long dispute with the American firm RiceTec over claims relating to basmati rice. These cases were not merely symbolic. They exposed how easily long-held community knowledge could be enclosed by patent systems designed elsewhere, and they led directly to the creation of India's Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, a searchable record intended to make such grants impossible in future.

Alongside this, Mashelkar developed and popularised the idea he called Gandhian engineering — the principle of getting more performance from fewer resources for more people. It became a framework for what is now widely discussed as frugal or inclusive innovation, and he applied it in advocacy for affordable medicines, low-cost prosthetics and accessible technology.

Honours and later work

Mashelkar has received all three of the higher Padma awards across three decades:

Padma Shri, 1991
Padma Bhushan, 2000
Padma Vibhushan, 2014

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1998 and a Foreign Associate of the United States National Academy of Engineering in 2003 — a rare combination for an engineer working principally from India. He has served as President of the Indian National Science Academy, chaired the National Innovation Foundation, sat on numerous government committees, and served as Chancellor of the Institute of Chemical Technology, his own alma mater, from 2014 to 2024.

What Marcel means

Mashelkar's life is frequently cited in India as evidence that talent is distributed far more evenly than opportunity. A boy from a Goan village, orphaned of his father and raised in urban poverty, ended up shaping national science policy and arguing on behalf of Indian farmers and healers in foreign patent tribunals. He has spoken repeatedly about the obligation that success of this kind creates, and much of his later career has been given over to mentoring, to advocacy for inclusive innovation, and to insisting that Indian research should be judged by whether it changes ordinary lives. For Marcel, the connection is not incidental: the village name is attached to every paper, patent challenge and citation he has ever produced.