Scientists or Spies?

Ecologists in India, as well as other parts of the world, acted throughout the 1950s and 1960s as if their research funding did not have any political or ethical import. Ecologists had been accustomed to taking money from any funding source and attempting to do their own work while also fulfilling grant requirements. In doing so they often implicitly supported institutions or policies that they might not have actually supported. The now controversial Bharatpur bird-banding project, in the late 1960s, the first large-scale study of bird migration in India, receiving funds as it did from the US Army is a case in point. It led in complex and unfortunate ways to a tighter government control over ecological research projects.