Prof.
Prasir Basu
Let me start with the slide
that Sagar has shown - that is the party is over. If you look at the changes
that globalisation has brought about there is a certain group of people out
there for whom the party just has begun. And this has been the reflection of not
only the economic regime that is in place, but also certain kinds of science and
technology that is in place.
Sagar also mentioned about
energy haves and have nots. What I will be taking with me is not so much the
question of energy haves and have not, in a sense that the energy haves have
indented the energy intensive materials and mechanisms. But I would like to
think in terms of entropy rather than someone holding on to energy. The rate of
creation of entropy could be better indicator rather than haves and have nots.
Then switching gears as it
were, let me sort of think aloud, and ask what exactly is meant by this present
S & T policy. If I think that policy has a normative content, which means that
the policy tells us in some ways what to use and what not to use, what we need
to work out and what we ought to do, then different kinds of questions come up
in terms of what we wish to do with the topic before this panel as well as
something that we have talked about yesterday concerning science and technology
policy, and the question of science and democracy.
Keeping in mind that the
policy has a normative content, one needs to ask some very fundamental questions
and I am quite sure that all of us do ask and that is - what constitutes the
“good life”. How does government see or analyse the notion of good life? If we
take science and technology, the part of good life is the attainment of a
certain kind of knowledge. Knowledge is sometimes taken as a value. But what I
have heard here is, and what confirms my worries, is also the concept that
knowledge is power, and knowledge leads to control, then where does science and
technology, people friendly science and technology, or say science and democracy
come in?
One way to visualise is
that the democratic process is successful provided the participants are
knowledgeable, and that is why we are talking about people friendly - in the
sense that people have the basic knowledge for it to be friendly to them. This
does not seem to be a problem. That is how it ought to be that participants are
equally knowledgeable on working out what constitutes good life and then finding
what ought to be done. The problem that we are
confronted with is what kind of knowledge? Who produces that knowledge, how do
we use that knowledge. But more importantly how we impart knowledge? Knowledge
is never questioned. It is something that is passed on. So constantly there is
this reconfiguration of knowledge. So the question therefore
is what kind of scientific knowledge is reproduced, and how is this related to
democracy. This has been answered predominantly by science and technology policy
and scientific community and needless to say that this model of knowledge has
been called Western knowledge. But there is an interesting
attempt to break the dominance of the science and technology community and its
configuration of what knowledge is. In some ways I find this goes back to 1958,
unwittingly making a point about science and technology and the positive element
of knowledge followed by the recognition that the dissemination of scientific
knowledge, and the inculcation of scientific temper will lead to democratisation.
I think Nehruvian policy,
at least had an attempt in paper to bring in the people at large into the ambit
of what may be called peoples’ scientific thinking. Howsoever flawed it is, this
is what I find missing from the second S & T policy and regulation. What has
happened to the 1958 policy statement and how has it changed to become the
recent policy statement?
The recent S&T policy
assumes that the western scientific knowledge is what the Indian people what to
know and that there cannot be any kind of debate on this. In fact what kind of
scientific knowledge is not the question that needs to be asked and as a matter
of fact, therefore the issue of scientific temper is not questioned.
One question I ask myself
is, has the nature of scientific temper changed so drastically that we do not
have the categories philosophically to demarcate science and technology anymore?
My contention at this point is that I need to look at the beginning of the
amalgamation of science and technology. This goes back to 1945, to the making
of the atom bomb - which is not the confluence of science and technology, not a
discipline but a kind of reward. Since then what constituted objects of science
and what constitutes objects of technology have meshed together so well that we
do have something like techno-science. And therefore the question
for me is not whether we can have science and technology policy, not whether we
should have scientific temper, (instrumental rationality etc.), but a) to
understand the character and b) how does it modify the concept of democracy.
Because we just say that
this is the science, we will disseminate scientific temper, scientific
knowledge, they will be good citizens, and they will participate in the
democratic process, but that is completely within the framework of science which
is Western.
Coming back to what Sagar
Dhara said - the party is over, we have proven that the party has just begun.