Discussion on whose innovation counts
Led by Andy Hall

We really heard three stories about what happens when the innovation is played out within the dominant paradigm.

Brian's story was of course the case of gene-based technologies in Europe. Esha's paper was about Bio-technology in India. Shambu’s had a wider canvas - about how science & technology policy planning is taking place within this dominant paradigm --about the losses and potential gains if you actually start to engage in what he calls ‘alternative readings of Indian science’.

Very interesting presentations, but let’s just go back to the theme of this session, which was "whose innovation counts?". There is a kind of long history of this question – often counched in entirely different terms like that the Institute of Development Studies has been asking for a long time and that’s about whose knowledge counts. It’s really this issue of what are the power relations around different types of knowledge. 

This morning we heard some very interesting talks about I think the knowledge crisis and similar sorts of things, where people are starting to recognize that existing mechanisms for producing and using knowledge productively are starting to breakdown.  We are seeing it certainly in the agricultural research community, where I come from, where the international agricultural research scientists are really struggling to regain their relevance. We are also seeing it,I think, in European universities and Educational institute. I am increasingly having to examine PhDs in topics labout science  and technology policy where I see no policy content whatsoever but increasing amounts of theorizing. Then I get told often I try to fail these things, because I don’t see what their the relevance is and I don’t see how the candidates are being trained for the future. 

So we have this crisis  and this is the really why we are starting to  ask these questions   about whose knowledge  counts.  I think  there is  now   abundant   information that tells  us that there are different sorts of knowledges out there that are very useful. Shambu and I did a bit of work trying to document some  of  what we call the ‘innovations in civil society’, where particularly some of Shambu's historical writing was showing that there is a strong tradition of doing things differently in different contexts with different institutional settings which are producing innovations of  social relevance. I think everybody sort of fairly is clear about that.I think what is possibly gone wrong over recent years, is that many of these debates have got highly polarized and I have certainly in the past been guilty of engaging in the debates about the primacy of farmer's knowledge over scientific knowledge. Of course what happens with these sorts of debates is that everybody retreats back to their kind of barricades and throws stones at the other parties.  Now I raise that question because I worry that we are going down the same route here today. 

I feel very comfortable with the debate in this room -- we are talking about sociology issues around knowledge and power. But really we are all on the same side of table. We are all asking: Why isn't the existing paradigm being changed? Why aren’t people making use of these alternative sources of knowledge? Why aren't Shambu's alternative readings  of Indian Science being brought in to the policy debate.  I think the question  really is not “whose innovation counts”.  I think the question really is ‘whose debate about innovation counts’. I have been on the receiving end of trying to persuade those in the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research that they might need to rethink their paradigm a little bit.  When I go to their meetings they greet me warmly, listen to what I say and recently I have noticed that they delete my name from the conference proceedings.  We have a very-very strong ‘political animal’ which is the gate keeper of these paradigms.

Now the reason that I raise that is that I feel that in a sense charity needs to begin at home for a group like this. We are all very comfortable with this sort of discussion, but I think we need to come out from behind our barricades. We need to start and engage more directly in ‘the gatekeepers or holders of that paradigm’. We need to be talking with scientists. We need to be talking with policy makers. We need to be talking to other parts of civil society that perhaps don’t have the same view as those held around the table.  I think until we start to get into a more active engagement with these sorts of questions, we are going to continue to have very nice meetings but we are not going move the agenda forward. So as I said,  This is  a very challenging issue of how we challenge, how we expand the existing paradigm, how do we get it to evolve to bring in these other perspectives,  these other ‘readings in science’.  How do we get these incorporated into the dominant narrative of the existing paradigm? That’s really the challenge and we need to step up to demand it, address it. Thank you very much.

Sheila: I am interested in your diagnosis as to  why the paradigm doesn’t change. In a way you are, to my mind, re-inscribing a theory-practice mindset which I for one have found much more useful to question and rewrite in a sense.  I am not too much sure that there is a single comfortable intellectual discourse even around this table and I do think that there is blockages to global south account making it into high places in so called global north. I dont thing the bloackage only between policy makers and critics.  I think critics in north countries are not always attuned to what the corresponding vocabularies or epistemologies in the southern context are, either. 

This is the question when you engage with scientists and policy makers, as many of us around this table do run into on a fairly routine basis,  what exactly are you going to speak to them in. Once you daily confront that problem you find that constraints are actually much-much more rigid than one might assume at the start.  To give a very immediate, very recent example; one of my colleagues from Kennedy school has been appointed the new Science Advisor to President Obama . So of course I have been questioned by the newspapers from the region from Harvard to the Boston Globe  about my opinion on the subject. Well, I can’t give my opinion on the subject, if I did then my critical project would be in greater danger of marginalization within my academic institution than it already is. So in a sense I have to find the sanitized discourse that is not going to challenge the fundamental presumption of the Obama administration that the way to undo the Bush administration is once again to let science "speak truth to power". I mean their implicit diagnosis of what has gone wrong in the past few years  is that power has been allowed to override truth, so just switch the dial back and let "truth speak to power", unmediated again, and then we will be all walking free.

So I think the question is what critical vocabularies and registers and strategies we find and how we can actually make things circulate in different ways is not a question of people. I am actually beyond the self-flagulation  mode. think all of us sitting around this table are doing very-very well at trying to cross  all kinds of divisions with those  among ourselves around this table, which is not negligible but with also people from very different walks of life.  I would just question whether we know what to say when we get there and how to move around ,whether pooling knowledge of expertise in those places might not work as well . I think that what persuades an Indian Prime Minister is not the same thing as what persuades the American President and may be those are the kind of places where we should begin.

 

Prof. Haribabu: A clarification.  Esha said that in 2007 the BT-cotton fields were infested with Bollworm. What the farmers did was that they left out nature in the scheme of faith. I think the Bollworms developed resistance against toxins that is put in to the Bt cotton crop. Once they develop resistance, these toxins does not work on them. It is the same as mosquitoes developing resistance against DDT. That is why companies which are selling BT cotton seed are in a great hurry to sell their technology, because they know that after sometime this toxin will not work against the pests.

 
Shiv  Esha, some rank complaints - you tell me whether you are speaking in English or in Gujarati? I’ll tell you why I am say this - actually the farmers were talking about potency not immortality. Second the metaphor they used is very different. Those seeds, let me quote your own data. They said the best of the seeds is like an 'Amitabh Bachchan'. They are immune and potent. Why I am saying ithis is we are using words literally’ here and it is becoming very dangerous.  We are doing science policy iconically like science policy is supposed to be done -- as a grammar of good behavior. I think the language becomes the first thing here.  I will give you an example: the only real idea of epistemology we have produced is bollywood and have you seen that scene in Sholay where Dharmendra threatens to commit suicide and then the old man asks 'suicide kya hota hai' (what is suicide)… He says that 'jab angrez log apne ko marte hai usko suicide bolte hai’ (when Englishmen kill themselves it is called suicide).

 I think that is the important thing. Wwe are using the same English words to talk a different language. We have got to do it with gossip and rumor . Otherwise the language we are using here challenge-innovation chain! My God, India has suffered from transfer of technology for 40 years and between UNDP and DFID they have killed our story; because they killed our story they killed the imagination that went behind the story. So let’s stop talking crap.

I think we have to put the narrative in a different way, and I think why is that in Science a name like M.S.Swaminathan or C.N.R Rao is self explanatory? They have their own epistemology C.N.R Rao is worth what 100 billion? It is self-explanatory, what is it that makes C.N.R Rao self explanatory is the question we have to ask.  We cant do it in the language of the  Science Policy that we are talking about.

America is metaphor and I realize how much of a metaphor America is…have you ever been to Delhi Airport? All the Sardars (male followers of Sikh faith) who come there, they go to a second hand shop just a bit beyond the airport and pick up all the American goods before they go to Chandigarh… But it makes a point. It makes a point about the potency of the word America. It makes a point about how American is maintained as a life style.. as a way of life. It is not just power and politics. Unless we go to that, it is pointless.

I think the narratives we are producing here are too well-behaved. Let’s just ask one simple question that why is it all the great dissenting scientists in India had different life styles -P.C. Ray-he dressed in a certain way. J.C. Bose behaved in a certain way. Why was lifestyle and method connected in their narratives?

But there is no attempt to do that here. Epistemology also means a way of life; it means a life style; it means a kind of power; it means a certain notion of gossip; a certain idea of rumor.  Now you talk about innovation chains. innovation chains except outside this room don’t have gossip and rumor; don’t have epistemologies in the real sense. You know when a man like Dharampal (Gandhian thinker and philosopher from India) said the British destroyed the epistemology of Agriculture, he was saying something more than just the tax systems, colonialism, power.

I want to use my illiteracy and absence during the morning session,  to say why are we talking in the way we are talking . Because then the narratives of the green revolution, the narratives of globalization are all going to sound the same.  We are challenging something in a language which is unchallenging.

 I think that is what Sheila is trying to say in a different way, may be more potently (Sheila:  like Amitabh Bachchan), (Shiv: yes  all the Amitabh  Bachchans)…I think it is time we start…see the country has suffered from the transfer of technology for 40 years! How long are we going to use that stupid discourse in this country? because World Bank uses it, DFID uses it or some of our crap foundation or philantrophic agency uses it? Break it. And there were people here who broke it. C.V. Seshadri broke it. Dharampal broke it. Use these names. Learn what they said. Why are you burrying these names and citing C.N.R Rao and Kalaam--one of the most illiterate books written in the history of science and technology who thinks national integration is based on project management! Any of you have read the book closely? You are saluting him as if he is the national anthem or the national flag.  He gives you the most aborted theory of culture.( Chair: we didnt do that in the morning. Shiv: No, Kalaam was used. Let's stop saluting these people for the wrong reasons by quoting them etc. Nehru also the same thing. )


Shastri: In a way this is a very good point. We are having a nice meeting and we should go beyond that.  I think it took a while for people like us (Indian participants) to know that there are so many of us existed. And step two: it took a while further for us to come together on an occasion to talk together. Second important step was taken. So probably we will continued to talk nicely to each other for a little more time before we adopt Shiv’s way of looking at the whole thing  namely going beyond step two.

This is the problem. We had an occasion to talk about it,at the policy workshop at  Hyderabad University, hosted by Prof.Haribabu.  When we try to talk to the government; we try to talk to the science and technology people in the government, we didn’t probably in the 11th Plan; we were not invited. Yes, science and technology people come to forums on other occasions then we can talk to them.

 

The point is it is still a pro-forma encounter. It appears as if these people have something to say, so let’s call them and then having called them, either you don’t listen to them or even if you listen to them you forget what they have said. The point I am making is that for civil society, to make an impact,  needs much more effort, an enormous effort. For example you talked about the DDS effort regarding the bio diversity registers - that is step one. . Registers are there somewhere, but they are not taken note of . But because they were not noted by the government  or the powers that be, it would not be a point against DDS making a effort like that. As I said, it is like “Rome was not built in a day” kind of thing.

 Yes we were having a nice meeting but to follow this up with another nice meeting that would not be adequate. This nice meeting should be followed by something else. Let us take note of Shiv Viswanathan’s suggestions in that context.

 
Lady: I just have a short question to Shambu regarding the science spending for non-public science. For companies or other private organizations: is there any spending from the government?


Shambu: Very briefly I think one of the things we have looked at , is the budgets that come under the Department of Science and Technology under a scheme called “Science and Society”. I have always wondered if this is “Science and Society” then what the rest of the Science is for. Anyway the budget for that is 7 crores a year. And with great difficulty they felt very thrilled that they increased it to 12 crores a year. That in relation to the overall budget in science and technology work is extremely minuscule. The problem being – the ministry does not have a mechanism to disburse more money to civil society organizations to try and take up… It is more an administrative lacunae that is preventing larger spread. But the problems with the budget allocations are there they are spread in so many kinds of ways. And you know it is very difficult to say because the Department of the Space will also claim that they are doing rural development. So how do you try and make this sense of this situation is of course difficult.

Esha: I want to engage with what Andy said on the point about the process of dialogue. The issue of dialogue between different actors that should be the basis of the politics here and in other fora.I just wanted to share few experiences of my own contribution in similar dialogues. For instance, before the Biodiversity Convention was signed in the Parliament, there was a whole huge debate that happened in India. A number of us submitted our contributions and a roomful of material were generated. A similar thing happened in Watershed development. A number of us contributed in that debate also. And contrary to what the overwhelming majority of these contributions wanted in terms of the right kind of the politically correct Bio-diversity Convention and  also the Watershed development guidelines,  something absolutely contrary happened. So I wanted to bring these two examples in order also to put a question mark on the potency – using Shiv’s term  --of this whole dialogue process:  to what extent the so called idea or paradigm or dialogue is a driver for social change. I have a big question about that. I am very skeptical about it. That is also because the way the power relations are entrenched in our lives through - Sheila has raised this morning – imaginaries - through  certain kinds of discourses through a certain kind of lifestyle which are being justifiesd She recently raised that. And also through historically determined processes by which certain material access to resources have occurred and also legitimized. These things I am not sure whether can be addressed and changed only through dialogue. And that’s where probably we need to also re-think about what do we want to understand and where our politics lies.

Sunil:  About the debate around the table in this room , Shiv was was talking about isolation, about not being connected with the mainstream for various reasons – gate keeping by them or others. What Shiv was saying  in a more communicative wat, if I can make a a more sanitized statement of the same, I would ask: Are we more unto ourselves, not connecting there, engaged in an exercise of creating and creating an alternative public domain of belief, of understanding, of defining problems? Are we engaged in or do we have even at the back our minds some kind of goal of creating an alternative epistemology – an alternative way of talking about the same thing, analternative/other modes of understanding and doing -- coming to the centre and not just being 'included'.  What I said in the morning about the new opportunities, I focused on the new opportunities from the point of view of “lok vidya”,  the “people’s knowledge” but it could apply as well to us here debating these issues related to knowledge society.

Whether we see in the new phenomenon only new types of difficulties that are arising, new types of processes that have been unleashed or also an opportunity a new space, not just trying to recover some space that we had and are knowingly losing further and further on that space because of the new technology, because of the new politics, because of greater corporatization and so on. Not just reclaiming some such space that we might have had and may have lost in this process. But are we also focusing on some kind of space, which is ours which is different from that space, which has a different idiom, a different justification, a different epistemology, a different way or thinking and doing altogether.

Sastri: Time is a problem…Maybe the best thing is to close on this interrogative mode. It is a good question and you have posed it beautifically.