MY FEET WERE BARE, my eyes tightly closed. I could smell the rain-soaked earth, and hear the panting of a dog scouting about with her puppies. Staring into my eyelids, I felt a surge of panic. Finally, my fumbling hands found a metal plate. Raised dots formed reassuring contours against my fingers, mapping the layout of my surroundings. It felt like a Ludo board—four large squares marking out plant beds, smaller demarcations indicating suspended flowerpots, and the paths that divide them meeting at a sheltered arbour in the middle.

I was at the Touch and Smell Garden at Chennai’s MS Swaminathan Research Foundation a space designed to be explored by the visually-impaired. Before I closed my eyes and decided to walk through the garden on my own, Dr Rajalakshmi Swaminathan (no relation of MS Swaminathan), scientist at the Foundation’s Plant Molecular Biology Laboratory, who is in charge of the garden project, had taken me on a tour. A group of visually-impaired schoolchildren had scampered gleefully over the paths that now daunted me, as Rajalakshmi explained the garden’s origins to me.

“When [MS Swaminathan] received the Indira Gandhi Peace Prize in 1999, in his acceptance speech itself, he said he would put the prize money into a programme for children, to help them develop a scientific temper,” she said. In 2002, his foundation began the Every Child A Scientist (ECAS) programme, in Chennai, as well as in field sites in Kerala and Orissa. Under this scheme, underprivileged and tribal children were taught about biodiversity, and trained to use computers, and conduct scientific experiments.