s on the
role of science and technology in India. Much of these discussions seem to
surround around the decision by India and Indira Gandhi in the early seventies
on India's nuclear bomb. Given the current stage of the Indo US nuclear deal
this is to be expected. However a more important thread on the relation of
science policy administrators with the people of India continues to escape
attention. This paper seeks to take further a lesser known decision of Indian
science administrators - the setting up of the National Council of Science and
Technology (NCST) that later engaged in the largest ever democratic exercise in
India wherein over 2000 scientists were involved in preparing an approach paper
that was to finally feed into India's Five Year Plans. Parthasarathy was part of this plan as much as the decision to have a bomb. Even though NCST did not have representation from outside the scientific establishment the process of having wide ranging consultations and discussions among scientists was unprecedented and threw up several ideas where scientists did explore the relation of science and society.
The paper seeks to explore this connection between science and democracy by looking at some of the tensions between the scientists involved in the NCST plan and the planners, a tension that perhaps revealed structural difficulties in the conception of science and democracy. The failure of the NCST plan seemed to reflect a thinking that is prevalent in Indian policy making - 'Can science and technology ever be democratically planned?' We seek to empirically explore this relation of science and democracy through an analysis of the structure of the 11th Five Year Plan and hope to throw light on the following concerns. Even as civil society has had reasonable success in certain sectors of policy making vis-a-vis representation (howsoever token) in committees, is it that the process of policy making in S&T is very different from other sectors or human activity? We hope to look and compare the steering committee compositions of the various sectors of the ongoing 11th Plan and analyse the role of civil society in each of these sectors. In doing so we hope to make some connections on science and democracy and explore if indeed there is an unwritten code in policy making circles that allows for civil society in certain spheres while excluding them completely from other spheres. Can democracy ever be at the core of science policy making in India?
Science and Technology Policy 2003: http://dst.gov.in/stsysindia/stp2003.htm
Technology Policy Statement, 1983: http://dst.gov.in/stsysindia/sps1983.htm
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