[1] In December 2014, it was announced that Anand J. Bodas and his copresenter Ameya Jadhav, who claim that aircraft more advanced than today's versions existed in ancient India, would be allowed to speak at the Indian Science Congress and present a paper on aviation in the Vedic age.
Scientists from the Indian Institute of Science studied the text in 1974, concluding that "craft is a decided impossibility” and that the Vaimānika Shāstra was written no earlier than 1904.
[4] In late December 2014, Ram Prasad Gandhiraman, a scientist at the NASA's Ames Research Center, started a petition to prevent the paper from being presented at the conference.
[6] S. M. Deshpande, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, who has written a paper with four others on aircraft in Sanskrit texts, said that we should not reject such claims as pseudo-science outright but examine them with intellectual curiosity.
Mukunda, another professor at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, who was a co-author of the paper, criticized the organizers and said that both sides of the debate should be presented.
[7] Roddam Narasimha, director of National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL), said that there is no credible evidence that aviation existed in ancient India.
[3] Noted Indian astrophysicist and founding director of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Pune, India, Jayant Narlikar reacted to the controversy saying that it was good to be proud of ancient Indian science but scientists should not make claims about things they did not have proof of.