On the 163rd birth anniversary of Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray, Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari paid tribute on Sunday, 2 August 2026 to the man widely regarded as the father of chemical science in India — a polymath whose legacy spans the laboratory, the lecture hall, and the ledger of modern Indian industry.

Gadkari remembered Ray as 'an eminent chemist, educationalist, historian and philanthropist,' invoking the full breadth of a life that was never confined to a single discipline. Born on 2 August 1861 in Raruli-Katipara, in what is now Bangladesh, Ray would go on to reshape Indian science from the ground up.

The chemist who built a laboratory and an industry

Ray's most enduring scientific contribution was the isolation of mercurous nitrite in 1896 — a discovery that drew international attention to Indian chemistry at a time when the colonial world barely acknowledged the subcontinent's scientific capacity. But Ray refused to let discovery stop at the journal page. In 1901, he founded Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works, one of India's earliest indigenous pharmaceutical and chemical enterprises, turning scientific knowledge directly into industrial self-reliance decades before it became a political slogan.

He taught at Presidency College, Calcutta, where his students included figures who would themselves shape Indian science. His two-volume 'History of Hindu Chemistry' was a scholarly assertion that India's chemical tradition was ancient, rigorous, and worthy of global study.

Why ministers keep returning to Ray's name

Gadkari's tribute is part of a consistent pattern of official commemoration of pre-independence scientists and intellectuals — figures whose contributions to industry, education, and national confidence sit at the intersection of heritage and aspiration. Ray represents something specific in that canon: a scientist who was equally an entrepreneur and an institution-builder, qualities that resonate with contemporary policy emphasis on indigenous manufacturing and scientific self-sufficiency.

On a birth anniversary that falls every year, it is the why of remembrance that carries weight. Ray did not just discover — he built, he taught, he wrote, and he invested his Nobel Prize prize money and personal savings back into Indian science. That full picture is what Gadkari's tribute, brief as it is, gestures toward.

A century and a half on, the father of Indian chemistry still has things to teach about what it means to turn knowledge into national capability.