Panel Discussion
Chaired by Shiv Viswanathan

I think we should try to open up the discussion because I think it is getting segmentalized and a bit restrained. If we open it up to some kind of  slightly wider conversation where we connect certain things and people get a chance to make full statements. Let’s take this opportunity. Otherwise what is happening is a lot of things are said but a lot more is left unsaid and that lack of connection is barring this seminar. I think that is my personal thing. Since you made me chair you will have to suffer it.

I want to request Dr. Balaji who is has been suffering from restraint for the last decade.  Dr Balaji happens to be heir of the Alternative Science Tradition of C.V Sheshadri. He also won the World Innovator of the Year Award. He worked both with C.V. Sheshadri and M.S. Swaminathan and I think that gave him a world view into different kinds of perspectives about Indian Science and Technology. He also happens to be one of the original members of one of the most interestingly creative groups on Science with one of the most horrible names “The Patriotic and People oriented Science and Technology Group the PPST”.

Balaji: Thank you, Shiv. Listening to what went on I think I should take a few cues starting with Esha Shah’s presentation.  I am currently based in an Agricultural Research Institute. I am not an Agriculture Scientist. I have never been trained to become one but I have been working with a number of Agriculture Scientists for the last almost two decades now. So I am going to base some of my comments on that as well as on my own observations which is based partly on what Shiv referred to as the Epistemology issue.

One, I want to go back to a very different person, a person who normally would not be referred to in a crowd like this - Peter Drucker. In one of his articles when he analyzed the founding of MIT and many of the so called A&M institutes in USA (Agricultural and Mechanical Institutes) of which MIT was one, he said that they were all founded on “acts of faith” not so much on Act of Parliament, state or equivalent but on act of faith. No one knew no one had evidence; no one had a kind of structured analysis to prove that investment in university education of that type (A&M type) would lead to national or state level prosperity.

But yet they went ahead and did that and I mean he says that this was one of the very insightful investments that they ever did and it gave rise to very significant  level of prosperity. At least many policy makers later said that  this was one of the very viable investments. Now the act of faith, I keep going back to this phrase because  in the context that we are in, in  India, today, the act of faith is very much there. Faith runs very deep especially among the so called passive recipients, passive exploiters or passive recipients of knowledge both farmers and political class. In Sanskrit we often use this phrase “Artha vakyam” meaning you trust certain people and you count that as evidence and as a fact itself just as Jung talked of “dreams as facts” there are people who accept certain type of statements as facts.

To reach that level of course you need to go through several births as they say in Hindu Mythology but it is a culturally accepted fact in large part of South Asia. The reason why I am saying this is that a large amount of (in my view) major technology spread, major decisions related to technology, can still be traced to actions based on some of this kind of attitude if you want to call them as attitudes.
 
I hopefully will publish a study subject to people giving me the permission… I was just relating that to Shiv that two major Acts of India in the recent times the Bio diversity Conservation Act and the Plant Variety Protection Act, both were inspired primarily by the civil society and by the scientific community. They were not done at the initiative of either the political class or by the civil servants. But the charge of drafting it, converting it into legislation making it into a framework for a lot of action fell into the hands of  these two classes of people and I worked with a man who was charged with drafting both these Acts during the period 1996-1999 and I observed very closely how many of these interrelationships in a complex situation  in India where there is a federal setup and then there are what are called state subjects – subjects that are allocated exclusively to the sphere of State legislation .  Bio- diversity by and large is in that area.

I observed in close quarters a lot of this and one day I was telling this to Shiv that subject to some of them dying I may publish some of the discussions which went on. My impression was that a lot of what Mr. Nehru brought to India, once again from Shiv’s book which was based on his appreciation of a man called  P.M.S. Blackett, who was the President of Royal Society and of course a very well known physicist.

And the way they believed what I would call an informal Leninist Model kind of structuring scientific research, structuring higher education etc. that  model seems to have failed here altogether because I could see the way both civil servants and politicians were in a highly reactive mode and yet were  keen to settle the matter.

Only one point I would make here from that set of observations is that contrary to my own expectations I found that scientific class was talking primarily to the political class not to the civil servants. Civil servants were by and large seen by the scientific community as experts in blockading tactics, they were raising every possible blockades and making the scientists run. But it was the politicians who probably the key figure at that time were concerned probably had not passed beyond… he claimed he was a lawyer but I thought it was a fake degree. But this gentleman had enormous intelligence in this matter because he believed that the scientific community and the civil society, that the scientific community tended to represent at that point in time, were speaking the truth and they meant the well being of the nation at large. Whereas the bureaucrats saw a lot of opportunities for future patronage and therefore thought of reserving lot of rights for themselves. So this whole phenomenon or process I watched and felt that a lot of our debate should need to consider issues such as this and we need to involve with some of the personalities such as this because in a country like India and I have worked with many African countries too, (I am sure this is the case in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa too) a lot of science related decision making does depend on the respect that an individual scientist or a body of scientists has in the eyes of the political or the class that really wields the power and  that’s number one.

Number two, in a country like India there is a well established set-up led by DAE (Department of Atomic Energy), Department of Space, DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organization), and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and so on. They control a reasonable amount of budget not very big by any standards it is not very big budget for the size of the country that India is, and you will also find that a lot of very important major technology diffusion in India has occurred in spite of them; or probably in a way because they were not involved so it happened faster.

I will start from the last and go a little backward in history. Cell phones, There is Professor Ashok Jhunjunwala at IIT Chennai and I have been talking to him and I have been once again an observer and talking to many of his colleagues who were involved in the development of a particular kind of Wireless in the Local Loop Technology called WLL. They offered it as a solution, it was indigenously developed in hardware terms excellent it could do video conferencing at the time in 1999 when it was considered to be an exotic thing but they were able to do that.

Ashok was positioning that as a major-major solution for India’s Tele density increase – a very big challenge which they thought that China was doing much better and so they offered this as a solution. But in 2005 this technology update had stopped because no one anticipated including the group led by Professor Jhunjunwala that cell phone mobile telephone technology would spread as fast as it did. It is a global phenomenon and it has affected even deep Sub Saharan African countries. But the fact is at that point in time many wireless communication technology experts did not anticipate that it would spread as fast as that or its cost would fall as fast as that.

Now I am still wondering where we missed it all. Is it… Are the commercial interest driving it or the political interest driving it? India is on the verge of breakout of a major scandal in this area but leaving that aside there are all kinds of interests going into that but we seemed to have missed it.

A little earlier is the cable TV revolution particularly started in the peninsular part of India. When I did a survey in 1997 I found that there was exactly one telephone for a population of 1000 people in remote parts of southern India. One public telephone…there were a number of private phones but I found that there were 30 times as many cable connected television sets. Cable television technology came much later into India and there were all kinds of legal hurdles and India was still not allowing up-linking of satellite programs from the soil of India. You had to go to Philippines to do that and they were enterprising enough to do that and some one was financing it, someone was setting it up and someone could repair it. These are all I am talking about remote places where getting a man to repair a bicycle was not easy but they were erecting three meter diameter satellite dishes - heavy ones. How could they do that, how were they maintaining it again became a mystery, I could go on.

The spread of bottle gas in India is unprecedented in the developing world. So is the case with the spread of stainless steel. All these technologies are known, but somehow a lot of adaptation has gone on, a conversation has gone on, it has moved in, it has escaped a lot of regulations. To this day, cable TV regulations are very few.  Therefore I don’t know whether its market which did that . I really don’t know. So I would like to know more of some of  that.

I am coming to my last point now that leads me to a different issue altogether. In the morning Esha Shah’s paper and Revathy’s paper touched very closely on agriculture related issues. One of the points , we know that in International Agricultural Research a sense of crisis has built up and that is because International Agricultural Research believes in producing only knowledge and generating knowledge in ways that are accepted in the university system especially in the Land Grant College system of US. It primarily comes from there. It is anchored in Redding, it is anchored in Hohenheim. It is anchored in Wageningen and the French SERat system. These are real prime movers and shakers of the system with Australia, Japan playing a relatively peripheral role. That is until about some three years back.

Now the situation suddenly seems to be changing because you find that agriculture as a knowledge producer is not reflected as much in the modern the world of Web 2.0 or the equivalent as much as it should. Because simple fact Wikipedia has at this point in time over two million articles and my students counted less than 3000 in Agriculture. The Boeing company aircraft has more articles and Ilyusin which is a much unknown aircraft company in Russia has a large number of articles. But a plant like rice a topic such as rice which affects hundreds of millions of people, has one article.

Peanut or groundnut which affects many countries has one article. Chickpea has a very short article. Chana (Gram) dal (pulse) very important to India has one. So neither Indians nor others are contributing to that. I checked with my friends in Michigan State, Florida, major Land Grant colleges. They said Wikipedia…well..Wikipedia didn’t occur to them as anything worthwhile. The academic crowds never considered that as worthwhile whereas people in climate research do accept that the articles related to climate change in Wikipedia are among the finest accessible to the public better than the stuff that occurs in the EB (Encyclopedia Britannica) but agriculture isn’t there.

You go to You Tube …again major phenomena and look for agriculture you get some home garden stuff. Nothing worthwhile about anything to do with agriculture. So it’s not just India that is missing out. It's  everyone who is missing out in this area so I often ask why?

My understanding is that the way knowledge generation was  structured in the Land Grant system especially for the developing countries, something in my view has gone wrong and we are only talking about farmers as recipients but the fact here is that even at the level of  generation it looks like we need to understand quite a bit. In fact I remember  Andy Hall was involved in a project on knowledge sharing and we found that the response from the international agriculture research centers was cold. Am I right? (To Andy)…They didn’t respond positively at all in spite of a lot of innovative ideas. I tended to think that this is much more a systemic issue than the issue of a few people.  There is something going different, if not wrong. There is a different field for knowledge related things, knowledge creation and sharing it with people and other sources in agriculture.
I will take up more about this when we get time tomorrow but I wanted to flag this issue. It is very important for two reasons one is food production is a touch and go. In a country like India 2007 was a crisis year, 2008 was also a crisis year according to the Federal Secretary of Agriculture. He said we just survived by chance, we didn’t really do anything. He thought we were on the verge of a major shortfall. And secondly climate change onset is very clear and countries in Sub Saharan Africa and South Asia are going to be very badly affected and what we find is that in the major IPCC Report there is very little on agriculture to reflect on.

So as a community agriculture researchers are not finding their voice, I don’t know why. Is it because they are cut out from the main stream decision makers or they are not reflecting farmers’ aspirations fully, nor are farmers represented. So there is a gap that I see here which I believe needs to be addressed very-very quickly. Maybe some of the studies and discussion should show some path way towards any action. Thank you.

Shiv: We can have one or two quick questions which are specific to Balaji’s presentation.

Sheila: Because there is a radically alternative reading of your agriculture story it is that it is not talked about because it is so taken for granted, so ubiquitous. So I would just like to put that on the table. Telling the A&M or the Land Grant college story one of the different narratives is that it was successful not because of university based knowledge generation but because of the extension system which was a transmission belt created in a more efficacious way than in other areas of university sponsored attempts to do technology policy, so that would square with my reading of you know possibly this is so engrained, so entrenched and so on.

In the American context the agricultural policy is one of the least contentious in that the Republicans and Democrats  have tended to agree. For instance on GM  agriculture there has been a monolithical agreement between the parties and Obama’s nominee to be the Secretary of Agriculture comes from a highly pro GM State, so that nomination again is sort of a centrist nomination that skirts any hand of right left disputes. So you know I would just like to put that as an alternative reading that people are not talking about agriculture because there is too much acceptance of a dominant hegemonic model not that people think it is irrelevant not worth talking about.

Shiv: Flagged.

Prof.Paki Reddy: Well I would like to offer some observations on innovations. And the observations I make come from my field experience unlike the specialists here who are talking on innovations, knowledge society, expertise, etc. I bring here my field experience with a live program on the ground for the last 15 years. This is on Agriculture bio-technology for dry land agriculture, as I said in the morning, supported by the Dutch government. It is only support in financial terms but otherwise it is a local program it is called AP Biotech Program.

I choose to talk about innovation primarily because as madam just now mentioned agriculture is ubiquitous, it is everybody’s subject and it is also easy to talk on this subject because very few of us practice it. But it is nonetheless very critical for our survival much more so in the Indian context.

Since morning there have been a lot of references to who creates innovations, who creates this knowledge and how is it created in a manner that it is emerging. Also lots of suggestions were made  that there should be an alternative but very little reference to what kind of alternative should it be. And I would like to offer on the basis of our own experience what is the alternative that we tried.

In the discussion on agricultural biotechnology as we know the focus is on supply driven technology and I presume that the lot of controversy is  not because the technology per se is contestable but perhaps because of the very ownership of technology. In Indian context also elsewhere this technology , as the terminology has been used, is dominated by a few companies and therefore it gets into the centre of the controversy.

While this is the case with agriculture biotechnology what has been missed out at least in Indian context during the process of this emergence of the new technology that the public sector completely neglected the potential of these promising technologies.  As a result there was very little option for the farmers in India to buy the technology that was available from the private sector and thereby you know the controversy that we are faced with. But we in the program thought that there could be an alternative way.

The alternative way is a true public-private partnership and in this model what we tried was to keep the end user in the center of the place and articulate their demands in such a way that the scientific community would design research projects in such a manner that their immediate needs are met. As you know bio-technology is a very long drawn process and it's even more complicated in respect of Genetically Modified projects. It is therefore very difficult to keep these two groups engaged all the time while the technology is being developed. But we invented a number of instruments through which these two groups of people were kept in a dialogue mode all the way from the conceptualization stage to the technology delivery.

Using this methodology we set up about 75 research projects that deal with both abiotic and biotic stresses. Initially focus was more on the immediate deliverable technologies that would catch the attention and imagination of the people and that would solve the immediate problems of the people like bio fertilizers, bio pesticides, tissue culture, animal vaccines, animal feed and so on and so forth and gradually engage on the higher end of bio-technologies i.e. genetically modified crops. In contrast to the methodology or the approach followed by the typical multinational  companies whose interests are, high value added products like BT cotton, our focus was more on the locally relevant immediate requirements of people.

For instance Castor is a poor man’s crop in a place called Mahabubnagar in Andhra Pradesh. Pest is a major problem Semilopa which devastates the crop up to 80%. Sorgham a food crop, a cereal crop, shoot fly, grain mold these are the very important issues. Pigeon pea, Red Gram (the dal) that is again a locally important crop. Likewise a number of crops which are of local relevance became the priority and technologies were designed in collaboration with the local scientist and the research was locally engaged or locally done by the scientist located in a number of public institutions like the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, the Agriculture University, the Traditional Universities and so on. Using this methodology we have been able to produce successfully at least 25 technologies which have already been made available to the farming community and the higher end of biotechnologies are at different stages and because of the law of the country they are going through a very slow pace of going through the regulatory system. What it means from this description is that it is still possible to have a paradigm shift in the thinking of scientists in the very same public institutions to make them commit to the issues of local relevance and importance yet sensitize them about the importance of dealing with the end user in the tailoring of these technologies.

In our view we think that this is a good alternative to the typical private sector supply driven, profit oriented technologies and then ensure that the interests of the people are better served through this mechanism. This apart I would also like to make a couple of points on the agenda setting of research. There was a mention about the scientific elite dominating in the agenda setting. I think this has been true right from our independence may be even before and I see no change what so ever even after 60+ years of independence. It is the same group of people, the same group of elite scientists who dominated in the early 50s that continues to hold the same kind of influence.

Although civil society has been making big noise I think in terms of the tangible amount of output that has come from this activism has been very-very limited in my view. Second I think even the civil society its perception about the demands of the people, the perception of the farming community have not been very well captured.

I think our imagination of farmer is still the same old imagination as in the 50s, like a farmer going with a bullock cart, a farmer with the soiled dress, soiled hands and so on. But today I think the third generation of people (farmer) that we see, the young farmer would like to be seen as a professional, like any other person he would also like to buy a Maruti car, he would also like to send his children to an engineering college, he would also like to have all comforts that you people or we have. But unfortunately our innovation I think is centering on the requirements of the farmers of the 50s that we have imagined.

There was some discussion, as to how do we regain the lost space.  I think the best way of gaining not only the lost space but also gaining additional space is to engage in a useful dialogue with those who dominate.  I think you cannot (let’s say) push them aside and then have your own agenda through. It has to be through a dialogue process and that dialogue process has to be with those who are dominating and only then perhaps you have (I think) something to gain out of this negotiation.  For that you would be successful only when, obviously the other section is weaker and you will be successful only when the weaker section is empowered. I think the way you empower is some of these initiatives that I have mentioned I think we need to have not one Netherlands Biotech Program but several other programs. Thank you.

Shiv: Starkly different narrative…any quick responses?...

Prof. Rao: I want to get a clarification. You said the dialogue process between the scientists who are made sensitive through this intermediary mechanism and the demands of the people who want those products at the end of the technology delivery, recipients so to speak, now I thought that the process obviously depends on the kind of knowledge domain that you are speaking about right?

There could be some domains of knowledge, for example we have considered thing like automobile. Here is an instance where I don’t have to know statistical thermodynamics to be able to drive a car, so the gap between the user and the knowledge producer (technology deliverer) is vast in one case and that is where the so called distance between expert and the layman so to speak is very large there.  In some cases  where this domain, this distance is small, it is possible to be more effective and indeed you have through the intermediate agency made it possible, the enabling process has been effected. What we need is really the mechanisms of the development of those kinds of languages in which this process of dissemination of knowledge where the distance between the expert and the layman is very large.  How do you bridge those gaps?  That I thought is the relevant issue.

Shiv: We will flag it.

Brian: If I understood you correctly you were saying that the basis for opposition to GMO’s in Europe was an opposition based upon the private ownership and promotion of the technology.  I would want to, if not challenge that, then at least qualify very heavily indeed which might well constitute a challenge to it, certainly the private ownership of GMO, in fact the particular  promotion was a part of the critique, a significant part of it, but so also was the fact that governments who seemed to be in the pockets of those private corporations and there was also a lot of opposition to the pace at which the technology  was developed because of that particular reality of its promotion and that was also of course, part of a critique of the substantive nature of the technology in that condition of ignorance about what the technology even was, let alone what its environmental and  health consequences might be.  So there was a whole constellation of components to that critique, part of which you were quite right the whole issue of ownership.

Shiv: Let’s flag it, let people chew on it for a while.

Prof. Haribabu: Thank you, Prof.Shiv. What I would like to mention in the few minutes I have at my disposal is, see, worldwide with an increase in knowledge production, with increase in the amount of knowledge, we also have several problems like insecurity, risk and perception of threat. So I think this is part of the process of  addition to the knowledge base that we have been having, and as Balaji rightly pointed out a critique of science and technology should also be mounted at the level of generation of knowledge, not just at the level of impacts or effects of  science and technology and society. 

Now I’m going to make few observations in context of agriculture and bio-technology and the way the kind of research that has been going on in the country - India and abroad.  There are three models in the world. One is the American model where the genetic engineering of crops have been approved and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is the one which is mandated to oversee the regulation and USDA is also mandated to promote the bio-tech industry. 

I think this is what the situation is in the US where according to the USDA people ask what about the safety issues? What about the regulatory issues? Their argument is if the product is not acceptable to the people, then the product will disappear from the market.  The Americans also reacted to this labeling process that Europeans have adopted.  There was a Committee of USDA “American Agriculture in the 21st Century”.  There were industry representatives, foreigners, legislators and they did take into account the labeling process in Europe. One of them said “if you label the products you are telling the consumers that it is somehow not safe to consume”.  They said, “the US Department of Agriculture does not make a distinction between the genetically modified food and food produced by other methods”.  They say it is “substantially equivalent”. So this committee said if you label a product, it might give a signal to the consumers, that somehow this product is not really safe.  Now in US most of the genetically modified food crops, food products are integrated in to the agricultural market whereas in Europe we have seen the kind of debate that went on for a long time, even now people insist on the labeling process and the industry itself lost interest in Europe to introduce the GM products, because there is so much pressure from the civil society organizations protests and so on.  That is one model.

The other model in Indian context is that, we have from ‘60s onwards the Green Revolution did produce some increases in the food production and it also created, led to several unintended consequences like the pesticide residues in the crops and salination in the soil and the other environmental related issues and the people showed that bio-technology or at least some sections of argued that bio-technologies would solve all the problems of hunger. That is a point which was the basis for the introduction of the bio-technology techniques.

As  these decisions were taken, we also see a trend where the research process went out of public sector institutions. Research process increasingly got privatized. Obviously, the privatized research process would be driven by motives of profit, motives of market, conquering markets and so on.  This is where the genetically modified seed was introduced, privately produced, it is protected by patent and only Monsanto Company which introduced the BT cotton seed was asked to give compulsory licenses to others to put this BT gene into various local backgrounds and it generated several controversies. People found that yield was not uniform in different states.  Some people said   that it has an environmental impact because in India farming is an integrated farming where the farmers take the cattle to the farm on a everyday basis. People found that what if the cattle consumes the BT cotton plant residues? What happens to the animals, will they develop some health problems, and will they develop some diseases? 

Now this is an important issue, which has to be addressed because the testing of the GM crops on the environment and cattle was left to the industry.  Industry said we fed these residues to cattle, goats and sheep nothing happened to them so they are safe.  I think that is an important issue that has to be addressed;

The second thing that I would like to mention is of course the transfer of genes from one organism to another organism across the Taxa created several controversies and we have an opening for innovation process in the genomics based knowledge and that is what we call Marker Assisted Selection.  We can also transfer genes from within species from one variety of rice to another variety and if the rice genomic database is in public domain you can use the database to retrieve some genes and also develop Markers out of these database and use them in selection process by accessing the desirable genes from  the crop-gene pool of rice. 

I think India has the largest number of rice varieties.  I think the recent count was about 28000 varieties of rice. Germ plasm has been collected in India and stored that has enormous variability and this variability has to be accessed before we move on to a genetically engineered rice crop. 

Recently the government allowed the BT-brinjal trials. BT gene was introduced in the Brinjal crop. Brinjal is an egg plant, which is used as a vegetable and in India we have a variety of brinjals.  We have black ones, white ones, green ones, round ones, long ones but I don’t know who said that brinjal is in short supply. I think what’s happening is the Company is trying to push this product, to push this technology put into various different types of crops because the Company realizes that the gene as a part of the process of evolution, the host and pest develop a certain kind of interaction after sometime the toxin that is produced by the BT gene will not be effective because the pests will develop resistance against this kind of toxin. 

That is why the Company is in a great rush to sell this BT technology to as many farmers as possible and as many countries as possible.  Now I would like to draw your attention to the Marker Assisted Selection which is in an innovation process, which is an open source innovation.  There is a great deal of attention being   paid to the open source innovation biology.  One of the innovations is the Marker Assisted Selection in which we move genes from one variety to another variety within a species by using markers.

I think there are a couple of case studies in our country where this was successfully tested and the product is in field trials I think in certain crops, rain fed crops like millets, their traits can be improved by using Marker Assisted Selection.

One of the important gaps in policy making in India is, policies are not based on evidence, policies are based on political expediency, that expediency is influenced by several factors.  I think there is a great need to look at the rain fed crops specially millet crops which are supposed to be (which are called the orphan crops) which no company is interested in doing anything.  Only the public sector institution must take up this research on these crops, to improve productivity, resistance against drought, salinity, etc. There is also, like Dr Paki Reddy  pointed out -  the involvement of farmers in the whole innovation process.  Now there is a suggestion to involve the farmers right from the beginning of the design of projects what we call the “participatory breeding practices”.

Now I think there is a great need for the scientists to talk to farmers to see, to find out for which traits they want new technological solutions, for improvement of  what kind of traits  they  want new technological solutions, and what kind of technologies are appropriate in a given context.  . Thank you.

Shiv: Any quick responses ?
Andy: It’s a technical question,  I find it fascinating in what you said, is there any technical reason why Marker Assisted Reading is best conducted with what I understand Syngeneics, (genetic transfers within species).  I wasn’t aware of there being a necessity of those two things coming together in the way you said. 

Haribabu: Normally each crop has a diversity I think within each crop there is…for example a wild variety of rice, wild variety of wheat. What we are trying to say is atleast what we should tell the scientific community or researchers is, first we exploit the gene pool of the crop, look for variability.  Some variety may be drought resistance but may be high yielding. Some maybe susceptible to drought but also high yielding. We should look at various combinations. We should pick up the varieties the genes which are drought tolerant but at the same time high yielding, which are tolerant to salinity but high yielding but this choices have to be made cautiously keeping in view the different agro-ecological zones, different regions.

Sunil:  I was just struck by the fact that all the three of these talks were about agriculture and even in agriculture only about agriculture technologies.  I think we have been taken not by these people by some invisible hand we have been taken for a ride.

Knowledge Society debates for one in my opinion today, must primarily address the question of knowledge management.  Even if we talk about knowledge production more than knowledge management, we could be talking about various different things.

We could be talking about agriculture about market and economics. There is variety of things.  How does it happen, in the name of bio-technology, I wonder whether the speakers were interested in talking about agriculture or whether the day comes through the bio-technology debates?  I don’t think, I don’t firmly think that bio-technology debates are central to knowledge society debates.  Bio-technology debates are very different kind of debates.  The way the idea of knowledge is transforming, what is making knowledge society terminology popular, what is making knowledge society debates interesting, and what is making knowledge society debates necessary, is not the developments in bio-technology.  We are not talking about new technologies. We are talking about the knowledge society debates.  And there it hinges more on the new science of information and the new science of knowledge management which is growing, which is forcing us to discuss all these issues and if we get interested  for whatever reasons, because of ethical questions involved, because of the immediacy in terms of since it is related with food production and so on with bio technology questions, then I personally think that we would have been taken for a ride. 

Shiv: Any responses to that?

Balaji: I didn’t focus on bio-tech.  It is not trying to sound apologetic it is just that knowledge management, knowledge sharing and agriculture has a lot to do with extension.  We didn’t reach there because in fact Sheila made a statement, the accepted notion that extension success is so pervasively successful that you don’t even speak about it anymore.  But now, I believe a time has come to question that because the Land Grant College model and when it was transferred to the South Asian experience, to South East Asian experience worked for a while and that gave rise to particular forms of information management.  I think those days are over now.  India has 78000 people in the so called centres of extension of which half are in office jobs.  That leaves 39000 workers support in theory, a population as big as 20 crores and the fact that there are lot of farmers actively producing knowledge and actively disseminating  knowledge is not captured in that system.  This is the part I thought I would take up tomorrow.


Haribabu: See, my brief presentation on bio-technology is not to say that there are larger issues connected with knowledge economy, knowledge society.  I think what is at stake is knowledge is essential for all productive sectors, including agriculture. 

Now the way we talk of knowledge society, knowledge economy today is that the knowledge has become a commodity.  That is why it is termed as knowledge economy, so if knowledge becomes a commodity, how do we talk of access to knowledge, how do we say who should produce knowledge.  What regulatory mechanisms are required to produce and apply this kind of knowledge?  These are important questions.  In that context, I just talked about bio-technology.  I also know that people are saying that bio-technology may not be the panacea for Indian agricultural problems.

One can think of bio control agents, Natural Pest Management, NPM is big program.  We can also think of various alternatives of, you know, growing rice, SRI is an example; several varieties of solutions are being discussed or being talked about.  And I’m not trying to say that Biotechnology is the only solution.  Given this kind of a technology that is being sort of promoted, what are the issues?  That’s the kind of question that I was trying to address.

Shiv: A quick response…

Paki REddy: I think maybe this question should be posted to the organizers why they have chosen only the people in Biotechnology.  But I personally don’t see any hidden agenda in this.  I think it is just a coincidence and also since morning, we have talked about several other topics, you know Geography, we talked about Agriculture crisis etc. Several other issues were being talked about.  Having said it, I think it is also important to talk about Bio-technology, because it is very hardly hitting the agricultural sector today.  And if you look at the knowledge creation in agriculture as a whole,  I think the dominant players who had the center place during the Green Revolution period still continue to have a hold in the policy prescription in agriculture which is I think very-very important to discuss. 

Some names were picked up in the morning.  I think Shiv has mentioned this.  See, these are the real forces that have been driving the policy prescription in this country.  And how are we getting engaged with them.  I think this has not been talked about.  And to what extent we have been successful in negotiating with them?  Unless we answer these questions, I think the agriculture science will remain where it is now. 

Prof.Ramachandriah:  Instead of calling knowledge society debate, will it not be more appropriate to call it Information Society debate.  I feel, because the moment we say knowledge society debate now, it looks as if there was no knowledge before or the knowledge has suddenly come to the fore now.  Instead of that, I will be more comfortable in saying Information Society debate.  It’s not that there was no information before, but various kinds of information from the same set of knowledge gets generated and information gets used to influence policies, rightly or wrongly.  Even wrong information or misinformation or disinformation also can be used to influence public opinion, to influence policy making through the various kinds of media that we have, a television, a cell phone, a rumor, a SMS (short message service) rumor kind of thing and because knowledge society as such may not fit well to a highly unequal society, where we still have 50% of the people without literacy.  Like in the morning, I said millions of children not going to school, so “information” may be more appealing than “knowledge” as a framework for debate.  Its just one of my ideas.   

Esha Shah: I just feel obliged to say this, in fact just to respond in one sentence to Sunil.  Before you said that even I was also very surprised that all the speakers are asked to speak in the concluding  panel chose to speak about the ideas through the example of Biotechnology.  I think it was some kind of invisible hand indeed, the way the program developed and the way it found its own ecology. It wasn’t by design.

Sunil Sahasrabudhey: I didn’t suspect that at all that it was by design. It’s just that when you are compelled to discuss issues of medical science, you end up discussing only cancer and when you end up discussing only cancer, you are taken for a ride. If you end up discussing only cancer, in place of discussions which broadly affect the mankind, the discussions related to health issues, you end up discussing only cancer. You don’t really discuss the issue at all then.  It’s that kind of thing. 

John D’Souza: Maybe I will go down the ride because the ride actually says that this is a knowledge society when actually it is just sheer collection-of-data -society.  If somebody is working in a BPO and responding to questions and don’t even know what the company’s policies on that particular thing they just know what the answer is, they are known as “knowledge workers” and this is part of the design of this thing of capitalizing, and like I said in the morning and extracting rent from this new technology which you have to call it as knowledge, because you are trying to take out value from something you know which you have to make money quickly and get off.

The GM crop, all these guys have to extract money from the same thing and try to perpetuate till the next production that they have to make.  And for me this doesn’t make a difference whether it is a private sector, ICRISAT or the Government of India. I don’t see the difference.  If you subscribe to the same thing of extracting and capitalizing, and drawing rent from something which actually supposed to be more intrinsically linked with the product, then it a kind of a dichotomous situation that you will find   yourself in and it’s true: Agriculture happens to be one of those topics where some of that linkages can be seen quite substantially because we know that topic a little bit, like somebody says none of us do agriculture but we seem to be knowing about it.  But all of us do agriculture in some form or the other because we have our home plants.  We spend a large amount of water, fresh water transported into maintaining our lawns. We know how to do it, we have our potted plants, we choose plants which will take more water, which will show that see even in this kind of climate, I will have this plant because I will water it extra, and put that much more fertilizer, that much more chemical on it. So it is after all the politics behind it and the word that has been runaway from throughout this thing is the “economics” behind the whole issue.  Since morning we have just shied away from saying that --it’s the money man!

Balasubramanian: About this question of opposition to bio-technology in India, I think you said that partly this is true.  But in Europe the context is different.  My feeling is that in India the market system in agriculture, atleast the input supply at least to the extent that seed is supplied, we follow an entirely different mechanism.  It’s basically a public research, public good that is made available to the farming community.  All our revolution during our Green Revolution period is on account of the efforts made by the public system, whereas in Europe the model is very-very different.  Therefore, in India when we suddenly see the genetically modified crop (GMC), there is some alert as to what is going to happen to our native seed industry.  In India mostly the seed moves from farmer to farmer.  And suddenly we are exposed to a situation where we need to eternally depend on companies.  So these are the issues why the farming community in general was opposing to let’s say the Genetically Modified Crops.

I think again the reason atleast my information from a number of   scientists in Wageningen, Netherlands is that there is a political reason why they oppose GM crops particularly coming from the US and maybe that is the reason why  they don’t welcome the GM crop in Europe.  In comparison with Europe our context is very different.  Our farmers do need some innovations in this technology. 

Brian:  As far as I am concerned the issue is not about pro or anti GM, but they are about the processes lying behind. I think the reasons why the invisible hand is so appropriately called it moved us towards agricultural bio-technologies, because of the processes that are in operation in that field which are of much more general relevance in a whole variety of other fields. It would be quite  interesting if we had more time, as I am looking at the clock now, if we would have had the chance to actually look at those other domains, where similar processes for example concentration, generation of scarcity, for example scarcity of knowledge ability which has actually been part of the knowledge economy processes that we are looking at.  But of course, we are not only looking at them, you know we are only confronting them in the field of agriculture biotechnology.  We are not even only confronting them in the field of bio-sciences including pharmaceuticals etc., We are confronting them right across the whole reach but I think probably one of the reasons for me why we probably independently come to focus, maybe too much, I don’t know on agricultural bio-technology, because those are more general issues, are more sharply evident in that domain than they are in some other domain, but they are still there in other domains.  

Shiv: Actually what I found very interesting is that the way the seminar was constructed.  I mean ok, I came in late, but I think sometimes being late and being illiterate are two great advantages for science policy.  Let’s take the way the stories are constructed.  I think the way we construct our stories differently might lie the fate of two different kinds of democracies. You take Andy, Brian, Sheila, I think there is some emphasis on concepts. 

If you take the other kinds of stories they were political stories.  And the political stories constructed in a kind of an uncritical way because these are political stories without an epistemology.  They talked about politics as politicking but there was no understanding about how the epistemologies of power also construct politics.  It was present tacitly in certain things but there is a difference between a critical way of constructing science and an “as is” way of constructing science, with the hope of an alternative space.  And I think to me really what is interesting is--, just take a simple thing, a lot of your issues about risk, were very normative.  But I think as Shambu pointed out, risk hardly enters our imagination and is not even seen normatively and worse not even seen as being necessary for a normative understanding of democracy. 

I think between the ‘as is where is’ which creates its own understanding of power and some idea of a democracy which looks critically at rationality in democracy.  I think the differences are stunning. and I think what would be interesting is if we highlight these confusions.  I think this can make these discussions productive.  I mean it is very interesting, even the word American is used here and you don’t know whether it is an emotion,  a passion, a concept, an economy, a source of power.  And it seems to be there in all the kinds of discussion.  I don’t want to get into biotechnology, but I think the way people told stories around here, and the variety of concepts, stories, metaphors used to illustrate it, might be one way of reflecting before we begin tomorrow. So we don’t have more stories but we have some kind of reflectivity on the way the different groups are culturally and politically reconstructing these stories because otherwise we are just going to throw stories at each other and go back.

I think there is a bigger debate on here.  It is a bigger debate about how to look at democracy critically, how to look at science critically and how story-telling affects the politics of these things.  And that might be more interesting than or as interesting as issues about the technical issues of bio-technology. 

I think in the morning it was highlighted.  I can see it highlighted in some of the abstracts.  If we could connect sum of these two parts the experiment that Esha, Sheila and all have begun in some way,  can actually be much more fruitful.  I will emphasize more on the way the narratives were constructed, than the sheer facticity  of the narratives or the case studies. I think then it can be a part of a conversation between democracies and between different ways of constructing science and talking about it.  I think it will be very interesting if we were to take each narrative and analyze what you take for granted in constructing the politics of science and there are  different taken-for-grantedness in each of these assumptions.   But I think we threw stories at each other without reflecting what each of us took for granted culturally, politically, epistemologically in constructing these stories.  I think in the politics of story telling might lie the future of a different critical way of understanding democracy.  Let’s stop there. Thank you.