Economy : The Chief Economic Adviser to the Ministry of Finance, Kaushik Basu, took over the Jury Chair for the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences in April. He spoke to V. Sridhar recently about the need to invest and nurture excellence in fundamental research in all branches of knowledge. The media in India, he says, pays far less attention to the sciences than those in the advanced countries. Excerpts - ‘Pursuit of knowledge is an end in itself’