Moderator: Prof P Venkataramaiah
 
Moderator's opening remarks
 
Making Science and Technology policy people friendly is the topic of the panel discussion. We have five speakers for this session – Dr. N. K. Sanghi,  M.V Sastri,  Prof.  Prajit Basu, Prof.  Shiv Visvanathan,  Walter Mendoza. 
 
I want to make a few observations: The topic is making science and technology policy people friendly. Any policy that is made is it not supposed to be people friendly? The fact that a group like this wants to have a panel discussion on this, means that the policies that are made are not always people friendly. There is a sort of feeling that what the government is doing is catering to the needs of the particular interests and not the people at large. When you talk about technology for progress there should be a technological change to enhance productivity. Technological progress is always linked with intensification of capital. Productivity comes out of more capital. When the society is accumulating more and more capital for technological gains, liability gets affected, affected by the share going down and more importantly by unemployment. This causes concern.
 
There are probably four paradigms in this development process.

1. Technological progress is necessary for productivity and the growth of the economy and when the capital increases, the productivity increases. So the productivity output reaches the national output and that can promote employment.

This is what we call the market paradigm or the neo-classical paradigm. What we call the World Bank view.  So we leave it to the market and open up trade and technological progress. When this takes place, productivity increases and there is growth. But it is also realised that there may be market failures and that could pose some problems, which may have to be tackled. But for that you must have safety net .

2.The second solution for this problem is redistribution of labour and capital. Abolish the two categories and make them one. Let the workers own the capital, dictatorship of the proletariat or whatever. So one way to solve this problem is to divide this national cake into labour and capital. Don’t make them into two categories, make them one. That is one type of solution.

3. The third type of paradigm is that you have no unemployment. Use technology that does not displace people. Call it appropriate technology or call it the Gandhian way of doing it with low mechanisation. So have equipment and technology in such a way that you do not  create problems. Any technology you use should not result in unemployment or environmental degradation, which means people, must have control over the resources. The problem with this development is that it is seen as anti-development, anti-growth. Okay you are protecting livelihoods, but where is the progress? What is growth and welfare? Is this growth? If it is done at the cost of somebody, is it really done for the welfare of the people? These are the types of questions that come to mind.

4. The fourth type of paradigm that usually people offer is: Get technology and compensate the affected people adequately so that you have  growth and as well as non displacement.  Social democrats will offer this type of technology. But in this type of compensation, one problem is how do you really compensate? What is the mechanism? Does the compensation really reach the people? How do we place a value and we all know that in majority of cases, the compensation never really reaches the people it is meant for. Also you never really compensate people for their livelihood. In fact the hard core market economics says that the welfare situation is such that any compensation is never enough. 

So these are the four paradigms. Growth versus equity is a debate that economists have raised time and again. Everybody says there can be no growth without equity or equity without growth. In the short run there is a trade off between equity and growth.   And you cannot neglect either equity or growth.  This is the sort of dilemma that social scientists or policy makers also face. You cannot have growth without equity and vice versa. So how do you balance? This is the real problem. And maybe a politician is much more aware of this, to my mind; much more than an academician, because a politician has to face the people at least once in five years. An academician once s/he is secure, s/he is secure. In the first couple of years after election the politician concentrates on growth and then in the next two years s/he speaks about “inclusive growth”. It is not that the government or policy makers are new to this or anti-people. But the problem is how to balance equity with growth.

So this is a genuine problem and we should not think that the governments are insensitive about this. But there is a need for organisations to intervene and find out which classes are being affected when a policy is being made. They should think about the type of safety nets required for the affected group. These are the matters I think we should discuss.

Apart from this if we really want the policies to be people friendly whether it is science policy or any policy one major requirement is language. If you do not do your administration, teaching, legislation or higher education in your mother tongue, there is no way in which the policy maker can understand the people at large and the people understand or influence policy.

I don’t know of any country in the world that can progress without conducting its affairs in its mother tongue; whether it is the European countries, even small countries like Denmark, Holland, Sweden, Norway or the newly emerging countries like South Korea, Malaysia. They conduct their affairs in their  language. Somehow the general perception is that all the knowledge can be gained only in English. Our productivity comes down by one fourth when we conduct our affairs in a foreign language.  If you want any policy to be effective and people friendly, it should be made in the mother tongue. The Acts, Policy papers, everything is in English. How can the common man understand all this?

One last thing I want to say is that  the State should act more like a trustee rather than a sovereign.