New Delhi, Sept. 5: Two Rajya Sabha MPs today asked the government why scientist Satyendra Nath Bose was never considered for the country’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna.

“No recommendation for conferring the Bharat Ratna in respect of Acharya Satyendra Nath Bose has been received so far,” junior minister Mullappally Ramachandran said in reply to the query from Trinamul’s Sukhendu Sekhar Roy and NCP’s Y.P. Trivedi.

Lamenting that India honoured its talents only after they won global recognition, Roy quoted from a Tagore song: “Ae manihaar amay nahe saje (this bejewelled necklace does not suit me).”

Many people had rushed to meet Tagore in Santiniketan after he won the Nobel Prize. That was when he composed the song.

The government’s reply comes a day after the director-general of CERN, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, said Bose deserved the Nobel Prize. His work in the 1920s provided the foundation of the Higgs-Boson theory that explains all subatomic particles and forces in nature except gravity.

Unlike the Nobel, the Bharat Ratna can be conferred posthumously.