Discussion on Session on Knowledge or Technolocracy

Main Discussant: Vinod Jairath:

Ramchandraiah’s last presentation makes the point. When I was looking at the abstracts, I had not heard the speakers, one of the first things that struck me was that it is a very different perspective from the speakers from the US and Italy on the one hand and the Indian presentation on the other. You can see immediately that the approach to or the view of this problem is very different.  Sheila’s abstract had the last sentence “we could have knowledge-abled citizens” and the other presentation was concerned with the  question of ethics on the one hand. On the other hand if you look at the situation in India, or countries like India, there is much greater emphasis on inequalities, on marginalizations, on exclusion, and also the forms of resistance and alternatives. I think there is much greater emphasis on these aspects. So in that sense if we look at the question of knowledge society or knowledge and society it looks a bit different.

One can see that there are commonalities. In the presentation Sheila concluded by saying, the question of power and powerlessness is very-very central and that is where I think everyone agreed that is a very central question.  Only thing is that in countries like India you may find that 600-700 million Indians (these are the figures that are generally quoted) are excluded and not only excluded they may be more and more being pushed out as was suggested by Ramchandraiah’s presentation. It is not simply that you are bypassed, but that  a dalit colony must be removed far away. So it’s a very-very large population that is very adversely affected by this new modern knowledge society.

We do have debates on nuclear energy, on large dams and large-scale displacements or generally what is called development displacement. We do have debates on genetically modified crops, the monopolies of certain corporations,  the question of terminator seeds and so on…We also have a committee to look at the ethical question you know,  we have an institutional system which should be looking at GM crops, evaluating them etc. However the whole thing reeks of corruption. It just doesn’t work. You don’t find the citizen’s voices being heard.

I thought that a very important question from the perspective of third world societies and  it is actually important for everyone,  is the question of limits to growth and the limits to consumption. This  hits us more with the present day crisis. But I think this question of limits to growth and consumption, also relates to knowledge production where you see colossal losses through mindless obsolescence.  Newer and newer innovations are making so much of technology and technological products obsolete constantly. These are important questions.

Now I am not going speaker by speaker, but over all I think Sahasrabudhey showed some kind of optimism in the new movements and people’s knowledge working in certain areas.

We have a basic question-- Do the poor and marginalized reject the modern science and technology regime?  Is that what we are saying when we are talking about alternatives? Or if given a choice, if they are actually given that freedom, will they also ask for their share of modern science and technology? And that’s a very important question. And then if indeed every citizen of these countries is asking for his and her share of modern science and technological life style, then what is this world going to look like. And again the old question of limits to growth.

And that is why when we are talking about democratization and I think Sheila had posed this question that democratization can be seen in many different ways. We have to dwell on this --  what should democratization mean? Does democratization simply means that those who were excluded, should now be included in the mainstream processes? We do see this process in India.   Every body wants to go to the same kind of schools, everybody wants to have automobiles, and everybody wants to have to consume the same amount of water as the inhabitants of ISB. Then is this the kind of democratization that will work?

We may find that there is a certain kind of democratization in the sense that people have greater access to the decision making processes. But at the same time the dominant paradigm which does not recognize any limits, which constantly wants to innovate, create newer and newer products, consume more and more. I thought it was interesting to bring in the kind of questions raised by Gandhi or Paulo Freire or Frantz Fanon.  Do you want to merely remove the Englishmen from India and carry on with the English rule? Does Swaraj mean that ( Gandhi ). Similarly,  the kind of question that Paulo Freire raises -- Do you want to simply remove the oppressor and keep the system of oppression intact ?  Are we saying that democratization should merely change the composition of the decision makers, but the dominant paradigm of endless growth, of endless progress that should be retained?

I think these two questions are very intricately interlinked. The question of democratization, what kind of democratization, what should we understand by democratization. At the same time, we have to think in terms of an alternative paradigm of development and growth. We don't understand these processes, because a lot of scenario of optimism that Sunil mentioned, still lies very marginalized. They  could be basically more a matter of survival than free choices. At the same time possibly, these alternative experiments could lead simultaneously to democratization and an alternative way of thinking. I think it would be worthwhile to investigate the linkages between these two processes. Thank you.

Mariachiara: I read about the important move to create bio-diversity registers containing traditional knowledge in order to counteract and stop in a sense the attempt to patent the resources and existing knowledge in India. From an external point of view I thought this is a great initiative and it’s a way really to have a say, in this still crystallizing world of intellectual property rights. What is the internal Indian perspective on that. Because this endorsement by the  government doesn’t really seem very reassuring in terms of sharing this knowledge or to allow the people having and possessing this knowledge to participate in the process.

Sunil: There are two aspects to broadly speaking to this question of privatization of knowledge. The case of patenting is a part of this larger issue is privatization of knowledge.

The move doesn't click with the civil society organizations unless they are very heavily equipped and resourceful to be able to fight patent cases in courts abroad. As in  the case of  Haldi-Turmeric  in the French court or somewhere, the cases are not fought here where the contention is made. It’s a global institutional framework which we cannot reach.

From the point of view of the peoples’ empowerment or their epistemic empowerment, these are not even the tip of the iceberg, in the sense, it’s nowhere in the center. It  only makes noise in certain type of public realm.

What is a far greater necessity is the requirement of market facilities or institutional mechanisms at the local level,.  There have been some very preliminary attempts on the part of some social movements. There was meeting in Bangalore of some social organizations,  trying to form committees at the local level in the local market. Thisis not so much to preserve the global brand, but to start a process in which the interests of the knowledge process at the local level are safe guarded, are not trampled upon or bulldozed out by the larger global forces. Attempts of the Indian government are extremely poor. But it is the main agency and the largest agency they get noted. They have very little relevance and Indian government has not initiated these kind of processes.

Sastri: They are very busy otherwise shall we say?

Vinod: I think there have been some attempts. They started creating village level registers where they identified each and every plant and what the possible benefits  of each one of them, are. At one point of time,  they created these records in detail. This is done mainly in collaboration with NGOs. Near Hyderabad itself  you have Deccan Development Society where they have done a lot of work. They have kept different varieties of seed of each crop, maintained this pool. In Kerala in many cases, and in some cases where the local tribal communities have benefited, they have been given a fund for their local knowledge. There are a lot of  problems with that like - how to spend that money? who will control it?  So there have been problems but there have been some developments on that front . You can see that these have been with the local community through  NGOs right down to Department of Science and Technology which  has a separate section on IPR  related things. We also have an organization called gene campaign which has been fighting court cases at the international level. So there are attempts of this kind.

Sastri: The bio-diversity registers on which DDS has invested considerable time, have remained as bio-diversity registers.  They have not been taken note of even while enacting the Bio-diversity Act. There could be some good stories here. They are just  anecdotal and nothing more than that.  The government is too busy doing something else.

Haribabu: I just want to draw the attention, to the National Bio-diversity Act which is supposed to incorporate the provisions of the conventional biological diversity especially clause 8J which refers to the traditional knowledge and how this knowledge should be used what kind of benefits should be given to the communities. Our National Bio-diversity Act to some extent incorporates some of these things. Of course  several communities, several non-profit organizations have been trying to build up a database on various species and various innovations and so on across the country. One such  organization which has been involved in this work is National Innovation Foundation based in Ahmedabad  (Honeybee). Tthey are trying to develop these registers..

Sheila: I would like to really pick up the important point that Vinod made that we should be looking at the point of convergence in these accounts and not point of divergence only, because I don’t think we are going to make progress in developing any kind of social analysis that matters if we don’t try to probe more authentically and deeply why the stories coming out of Indian social science on power- knowledge don’t sound the same as the stories coming out of America.

I think that if one looks harder --what critics in the west, of western systems of power- knowledge, are saying have to made in some way to link up with what critics of the global south are saying on the same sorts of questions.  If we they don’t found a common language there, I think we are genuinely up the creek in some sense. So to me the Dr Ramachandraiah’s account of the geography of Hyderabad and the movement of the dalits was an extra ordinary affirmation of the same kind of point that I was trying to make in my more abstract rendition or description of the erasures that visions of progress have to make.  What you were illustrating is that the materiality of that erasure. But when you give an example like ISB needing the same level of water consumption and you Vinod in your commentary say that growth models are totally linked up with democracy  --a point with which I fundamentally agree with enormously --, the intellectual question becomes what are the erasures being performed when these things are allowed to happen. So whose imagination is it that says that ISB must be made a kind of seed bearing pod of the American vision of the rightness,  that sees it as a logical end point of appropriate growth that has to be embedded in Indian soil and watered so that it flowers. Along with this is the notion that  the other seeds like what’s represented in the dalit colony, has to be put in barren lands so that it doesn’t flower and that doesn’t grow. What we are seeing there is the importation I mean -  Forget the inclusion-exclusion. We understand that point which has made over and over again and again descriptively, cogently, eloquently and it should be made. But that doesn’t solve the questions of policy. It doesn’t solve questions like who gets to be Obama’s Science Advisor and with what model of progress for the global world now etc. It just doesn’t get to begin to get up those kinds of questions.

So it is important I think for all of us including our Indian colleagues not just to be using the language of inclusion - exclusion but in addition to be using other languages that we, sitting in our domains in the seats of power, are very weakly trying to use to get our imaginaries cracked open.

I mean what we are trying to do is achieve a reflexivity in our own analytical domains which is incredibly difficult to achieve. And I am afraid that as things stand now, (and let me be passionate about it) no story that has couched only in inclusion and exclusion terms is going to succeed in cracking open the imaginaries of the West. Because, you know, the responses are all too clear :  trickle down economics --  Infosys will eventually generate the jobs for the dalits.  If they only manage to get themselves together and get the education, they will be able to come back and occupy that land in the end. So that is one kind of response.

Another kind of response is that it is too bad that the Indian government, by the admission of Indian social scientists themselves, is an anti-democratic force and if only you would democratize the Indian government more, like we have in America, then you will be home free because the dalits will get proper representation like we have.

The counter narratives are built into the narratives themselves as long as you stay on the plane of inclusion-exclusion. I think the reason that you have to get down to the epistemological domain and ask what makes these imaginaries of progress so resistant to critique -- that is a different kind of question, that is a different order of question. And that I think is the place where we have to bring  our collective intelligence to bear in some sense.  I have lived for more than 30 years as a scholar, for more than 50 years as an inhabitor of multiple social and intellectual worlds.  I move among them fairly easily, I know what stories to expect in each. But the place where my intellectual puzzles are largely today--  is defined along the axis of deafness. I mean what is it that makes story telling in one domain impervious to story-telling in another domain.  I am absolutely convinced that we each sitting in the places where we are sitting have to produce different discourses; Because  as long as we sit and say -  well, the problem from the Indian side looks like exclusion, the problem from the American side looks like –well, maybe imperfect democratization, that is not getting at the heart of it. Somehow we have to get to the epistemology of power and  epistemology of powerlessness to the institutional substrates that makes certain stories last and others not. That’s where I think the discussion ought to be being pushed.

Brian: If I could just illustrate one example of  where Sheila’s point hits in very concrete terms the references made in response to Maria’s question about the database on indigenous knowledges, to the Convention on Biodiversity, and in the convention the arrangements for access and  benefits sharing with respect to indigenous knowledges. Many of you may know, that this  is actually under negotiation under the CBD as we speak.  A colleague of mine Paul Oldham at the Lancaster University has been involved with indigenous peoples’ networks in those negotiations. One of the things we realized, in the discussion at Lancaster, was that the access and benefit sharing issue was all being defined about access in exchange for shares --in other words sharing in the benefits. The question of what benefit, defined by whom, in which terms was completely neglected within the negotiating process. 

Paul has managed, from his own role, to insert into those discussions the point that actually the benefits were being presumed to be western, rich market benefits like  block buster pharmaceuticals  for profits for big western corporations. That was the only benefit on the table within the imaginary that was being imposed on those negotiations. Can one introduces the idea there might be different kinds of benefits which might be about allowing local meanings,  autonomy and sovereignty over the definition of what counts as a benefit from knowledge? Such question are precisely the terrain that Sheila is talking about when she spoke about escaping from inclusion, exclusion and shares – namely some kind of monolithically imposed imaginary of what might count as a benefit.

Thank you.

John:  And where this ethic lies is similar to the kind of crisis that we are having at the international/global level, where you will find after this crisis a new regime of probably like of how you have your Brussels, may be some other place Washington or some other place deciding, how then we will move from/to a market and then probably to a political union and there when the crisis of ethics will come in, because the kind of responses that we have, when we talk of bio-registers, is the same as what the predominant paradigm is  and if there is got to be an another alternative, it it’s got to be another location even the discourse has to have a totally different base.

And here I would like to say that even the discourse among the intellectual, or the knowledge producers in society, seems to be such that is extracting rent from whatever it produces on the table. Because you have this, then somebody else produces and then I will get royalties on my book over this much time and things like that and it’s similar to the kind of situation that you are finding that the patent itself extracts rent. And as long as we are in that paradigm the due discourse that you are looking for cannot come from this same body of people who seem to be living on this same logic.

The new…the way of understanding this would be to see which are those autonomous societies or which are those smaller efforts which are working at that knowledge and where is that knowledge being discoursed. And like the anthropologist probably, going back to a certain type of understanding and relating some of that experience. So I do find little… it’s important that this session was on technocracy versus democracy and you are going to have the same dilemma that you find in the eve to day, discussing knowledge society you are going to have at the global level, and all our debates about bio-diversity registers will all be subsumed within this whole big debate of ethics. At that level at least in you, you have some amount of tradition of discourse, at the international level we know the skew is much-much wider.

M.V.Sastri: Vinod, you were referring obliquely to the Gandhi, you didn’t mention Hind Swaraj, and I think Hind Swaraj has lots of hidden and not so hidden answers to the various questions to which you have come up.  And you will be pleased to know that among other things the KICS is doing is going back to Hind Swaraj and reinventing as it were “Gandhi and Hind Swaraj” to answer some of the questions which, be-dwell the Indian society and the Global Society actually. 

In every conclusion I would like say that Dr.Rao has some beautiful statements here, on the subjects which have come up, direct or indirectly. “If unceasing transgressions are valorized as modernity, resistances to such transgressions are upheld as tradition”. Human history is thus the dialectic between transgressions and resistance” as if that sums up all that has been said in a very fitting way. Thank you ladies and gentlemen for that excellent session, except that we have used more time than we had.