Myth and Reality - CiteSeerX

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With political independence four decades ago, India embarked on a determined quest todevelop modern science and technology as tools of social and economic progress andnational power. The result has been prodigious growth of scientific and technicalpersonnel and the institutional infrastructure for science and technology, with widespreadimpact on agriculture, health, industry, communications, and national defense. But theIndian experience also makes clear that deep-rooted social problems such as poverty andexploitation cannot be solved through technical fixes. The rich and varied nature of thatexperience suggests five myths about science in the Third World: (1) Science is a Westernmonopoly; (2) science is autonomous; (3) advanced technology is derived from science;(4) science and technology are the Third World’s social salvation; (5) science is universal.

Myth and RealityAnimadversions on Science, Technology,

and Society in India

WARD MOREHOUSECouncil on International

and Public Affairs, New York

One of the myths about the scientific age in which we live is that it isdevoid of myth. Myths are considered to be departures from rationalperception of reality and are typically associated with bygone eraswhen the level of ignorance is presumed to have been substantiallyhigher than it is today, or with remote and unfamiliar cultures wherethe same condition is presumed to apply.

This excursion into the complex web of interrelationships of

science, technology, and society in India suggests a contrary picture.

Author’s Note: This article is based upon a presentation to the Comparatme Study ofSocietal Knowledge Systems Workshop at the University of Pittsburgh in April 1983. Iam grateful to participants in that workshop for critical reactions. Passages have beenadapted from my The Endless Quest: Science and Technology for Human Betterment In

Knowledge: CreatIOn, Diffusion, UtilizatIOn. Vol 6 No. 4, June 1985406-436c 1985 Sage Publications, Inc

at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on March 4, 2016scx.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://scx.sagepub.com/

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Myth-making is still very much with us and may well reach a height-ened stage of egregiousness when Western approaches to the socialscience of science, with their presumptively &dquo;rational&dquo; modes of

understanding, are applied to this intricate and everchanging web ofrelationships.

The excursion that follows is neither systematic nor complete. Torealize these characteristics would be the task of more than one paperor book and is probably beyond the capacity of any one individual.Rather this exploration seeks to identify critical factors in the evolvingrelationship of science, technology, and society in India, particularlysince independence almost four decades ago. It concludes with an ex-amination of five &dquo;myths&dquo; about science and technology in the ThirdWorld, which, as befits the modest nature of this inquiry, should beregarded as tentative hypotheses rather than validated propositions.

Lessons from the Indian Past

When we return to the more circumscribed field of history ofscience, the prevailing Western view is that Indian scientific progressstopped any further advance some 500 years ago. Not so, arguesClaude Alvares, an Indian philosopher-cum-historian of science andtechnology. In a sometimes angry and always challenging book,Homo Faber: Technology and Culture in India, China and the West,1500 to the Present Day (1979), Alvares asserts forcefully that

Western historians of science and technology have systematical-ly-with a few exceptions-underestimated Indian and Chinese

achievements in science and technology, particularly the substantiallymore advanced levels of technology in many realms of productive ac-tivity in these two countries at the time of their first contact withEuropeans.

This perceptual problem, in Alvares’s view, is compounded by theEuropean colonial presence in Asia, especially in the nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries, in which systematic efforts were made by thecolonial powers to &dquo;deindustrialize&dquo; Asian societies and rob them of

India (Lund, Sweden: Research Policy Programme, University of Lund, DiscussionPaper No. 106, December 1976) and much more briefly, Ward Morehouse and RaviChopra, Chicken and Egg: Electronics and Social Change in India (Lund, Sweden:Research Policy Institute, University of Lund, 1983).



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their technological achievements. By imposing European colonialvalues and educational systems, furthermore, these colonial masterseffectively stultified further indigenous development until political in-dependence was achieved after World War II (de facto in the Chinesecase since it was more or less independent de jure prior to that time).

Alvares’s line of argumentation is complex and not easily sum-marized. Even more difficult to encapsulate is the wealth of evidencethat he adduces to support his thesis. On the face of it, he certainlymakes a persuasive case for examining conventional wisdom about thedistribution of scientific creativity among major world civilizations.And he makes the additional and telling point that much of European&dquo;progress&dquo; in science was not only based upon, but Alvares would in-sist, extracted from Asian civilizations during the half a millennium ofan essentially exploitative European connection with the Third World.

Some would argue that in the Indian case the British colonial con-

nection was not all bad as far as science was concerned. British-styleuniversity education was introduced and the rudiments of science-based public services created-e.g., in geology, meterology, andsimilar fields. Others argue that these and similar developments, par-ticularly the insistence on university-level education in English, haveonly alienated the doing of science and scientists themselves from themainstream of Indian society (Rahman, 1968).

But Alvares (1979: 173) poses a prior question about the very ap-proach taken by many historians of science and technology, Indian aswell as Western:

I hold it to be a major historical blunder to ask why a particular societydid not produce any great desire for economic growth, just as I hold it

misleading and wrong to inquire into why a society did not make thetransition from traditional to modern science. This historical fallacy iscommitted when the historian or theoretician subsumes the experienceof alien cultures under a theory that he has constructed out of the ex-perience of his own society while it was responding to new problems.

Even if one does not subscribe entirely to the Alvares thesis, hemakes some telling points-and those too by citing for the most partother European sources than the mainstream of Western scholarshipon the history of science and technology. Indeed, he has been taken totask by Indian critics for neglecting to use more extensively the richbody of historical evidence on the state of medieval science and



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technology in India during the Mughal period just prior to and forsome decades after the first coming of the Europeans (see Rahman,1982). Certainly the work of Alvares and other Indian scholars on thehistory of science and technology in their own civilization suggeststhat conventional perceptions of the emergence of &dquo;modern&dquo; scienceand the level of technological achievement in so-called non-Westernsocieties at a minimum need to be reexamined.

Big SciencelLittle Sciencein Independent India

When Derek J. de Solla Price wrote Little Science, Big Science inthe early 1960s, his observations were based mainly on the exponentialgrowth of scientific activity in Western societies as a consequence ofthe discovery of science and what were perceived to be science-basedtechnologies as a major source of national power by political leadersin those societies. But Price might as well have been writing about In-dia, for it was with the advent of political independence that Indiabegan to build its scientific and technological capabilities in earnest.In an oblique way, this surge of effort in national capacity building inscience and science-based technology provides affirmation of theAlvares thesis. Certainly the British colonial masters had little seriousinterest in seeing India build that capacity beyond the minimal leveluseful in operating the Empire.To understand the frankly instrumental character of the govern-

ment-science relationship in India since independence, it is necessaryto examine the perceptions of science and science-based technology asforces in the contemporary world held by India’s political leaders. Nosingle leader is more important in this regard than the person whoplayed a major role in India’s freedom struggle and was the dominantforce in shaping the Indian polity for the first decade and a half of itsindependence, Jawaharlal Nehru (Morehouse, 1969; Nayar, 1983).

While Nehru saw science as an important force for change in socialattitudes, values, and outlook through the widespread disseminationand inculcation of what he called the &dquo;scientific temper,&dquo; he primarilysaw the application of modern scientific knowledge throughtechnology as a critical means of achieving rapid material progress in apoor society and as a source of national power for a newly indepen-



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dent country. &dquo;It is science alone that can solve the problem of hungerand poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and ofdeadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste,of a rich country inhabited by starving people,&dquo; Nehur once observed.&dquo;Who indeed can afford to ignore science today? ... The future

belongs to science and to those who make friends with science.&dquo;

(Nehru, 1964: i)Turning more directly to technology, Nehru insisted that &dquo;it is

technology which has made other countries wealthy and prosperous,and it is only through the growth of technology that we shall become awealthy and prosperous nation.&dquo; (Nehru, 1964: 26) Whether he wasaware of the complexities of the process of linking scientific researchthrough technology to the productive sectors of society is less clear.Final assessment of Nehru’s role in developing India’s scientific

capabilities is still premature, but what evidence we have suggests thathe assumed cultivation of India’s scientific capabilities as a sufficientpublic policy goal in and of itself. He believed that once these

capabilities were sufficiently strong, the critical linking process

through science-based technology would occur on a broad scale,bringing about the transformation of Indian society alongeconomically and socially humane lines and achieving the economicand political power essential to a modern nation state, which werefundamental to his vision of independent India (Morehouse, 1969).

The point in dwelling on Nehru’s views about the role of modernscience and science-based technology in India’s development as an in-dependent nation is that, because of the central place which he oc-cupied in the first decade and a half of Indian independence, his ideasand views tended to dominate public policy for science and technologyin India in the 1950s and 1960s. The public policies were expressed in avariety of ways throughout this period but perhaps their most explicitand comprehensive expression is found in the Scientific Policy Resolu-tion of 1958, which was proposed by Nehru and adopted by the IndianParliament. This resolution, which is less a statement of policy than ofbroad policy objectives, asserted the following:

The Government of India have accordingly decided that the aims oftheir scientific policy will be:

I to foster, promote, and sustain by all appropriate means, the cultiva-tion of science, and scientific research in all its aspects-pure, appliedand educational;



411

II to ensure an adequate supply within the country of research scientistsof the higher quality, and to recognize their work as an important com-ponent of the strength of the nation;

III to encourage, and initiate, will all possible speed, programmes for thetraining of scientific and technical personnel, on a scale adequate tofulfill the country’s needs in science and education, agriculture and in-dustry, and defense;

IV to ensure that the creative talent of men and women is encouraged andfinds full scope in scientific activity;

V to encourage individual initiative for the acquisition and disseminationof knowledge, and for the discovery of knowledge, in an atmosphere ofacademic freedom;

VI and, in general, to secure for the people of the country all the benefitsthat can accrue from the acquisition and application of scientificknowledge. [The text is given in Rahman et al., 1973.]

This perception of the instrumental role of science and science-based technology in building national power and tackling pervasivesocial and economic problems has continued to be the dominantthrust of government policy toward science and technology in the twodecades since Nehru’s death. His daughter who was also primeminister, perhaps reflecting her father’s influence, maintained con-tinuity in the essential thrust of his efforts to build India’s capacity inscience and technology as a major source of national political powerand as a means of trying to meet widespread economic and socialneeds. Baldev Raj Nayar (1983: I, 411) sums up the character of hertenure over cultivation of the science and technology system by thepolitical system with these three major accomplishments:

(1) the expansion and deepening of the science and technology base;(2) the rationalization of the science and technology system and according

a more prominent role to scientists and technologists in decision-

making ;(3) the significant endeavor to advance research and development outside

the government where it was almost exclusively concentrated earlier.

It is beyond the scope of this essay to examine in detail the morespecific contours of evolving government towards science and tech-nology over almost half a century. Nayar devotes one volume of over500 pages to this task-and a second one of corresponding dimensionsto the results of these policies-and does a commendable job. What is



412

central to the thrust of my discussion of the relationship of science andtechnology to society in postindependence India is its explicitly in-strumental character. Perhaps this is inevitable in a poor society whereresources are very limited and difficult choices must be made. But inanother sense, the instrumental character of this relationship makesIndia strikingly like other major scientifically and technologicallymore advanced countries in the modern world. For as Derek Price so

conclusively demonstrates, the era of big science arrived on the worldscene when political leaders discovered that the cultivation of science,and the application of advances in scientific knowledge throughtechnology were major sources for the enhancement of national

political and economic power.

Postindependence Capacity-Buildingin Science and Technology

Science may be patronized as high culture, and in fact it was in

pre-independence India as in European societies in the nineteenth andearly decades of the twentieth century. But the magnitude of suchpatronage is roughly proportional to what such societies are preparedto invest in other forms of high culture such as literature and the arts.The really big money comes with the embrace of science and

technology by political leadership, a consideration no less true of In-dia than it is of the Soviet Union, France, or the United States (Gilpin,1968).

With the achievement of political independence almost fourdecades ago, India embarked upon a determined quest to developmodern science and science-based technology as tools of social andeconomic progress and national power. But India has long been, as wehave noted, a center of scientific activity, and it would be quitemisleading to suggest that all such activity began on that eventful dayin August 1947, when Nehru announced that India had at long lastreached its &dquo;tryst with destiny.&dquo;

Quite apart from the complex question of the relationship of scien-tific thought in classical Indian civilization to modern scientific ac-tivity in contemporary Indian society, which we have already discuss-ed, there is substantial evidence of diffusion throughout the countryof modern science and science-based technology during the eigh-



413

teenth, nineteenth, and earlier decades of the twentieth centuries,partly as a consequence of fulfillment of British economic and

political objectives in India and partly through the establishment of auniversity system based on the British academic tradition (Bernstein,1960; Rahman et al., 1973). Even more important than this diffusionin setting the pre-independence context for the post-independenceemergence of science and science-based technology, Alvares (1979)would argue, were the latent wellsprings of indigenous experience andcreativity suppressed during the long twilight of British imperial rulein India.

But whatever occurred before 1947 pales to the point of in-

significance when compared with independent India’s efforts to

develop its capabilities in modern science and science-based

technology since then. During the first approximately four decades ofindependence, India enlarged some 40 times the government expen-diture on research and development. In the decades of the 1960s and1970s, the &dquo;research ratio&dquo; (percentage of gross national productspent on research and development) has almost tripled so that it is nowin the neighborhood of 0.6% (still well below the leading scientificnations of the world with research ratios of over 1070 of GNP but asubstantial advance over the meager levels of 0.15% and 0.2% ofearlier years).

In terms of human resources, the record is, if anything, even moreimpressive. R & D personnel have increased manyfold during thisperiod. The total stock of scientific and technical personnel has grownwell over 10 times since 1950 and by 1980 numbered well over twomillion. The out-turn of scientific and technical personnel from theuniversities has likewise grown dramatically (Morehouse, 1971;Nayar, 1983).

Nayar (1983: I, 537-538) sketches in the following &dquo;broad profile&dquo;of the science and technology systems that had emerged by 1980 fromthe various government policies and political actions pursued since in-dependence and mentioned above: 119 universities, affiliating about1,650 colleges; 5 institutes of technology; 150 engineering colleges; 100medical colleges; 350 polytechnics; 150,000 annual addition to thetotal stock of qualified scientific and technical personnel; 2.5 millionas total stock of qualified scientific and technical personnel, the thirdlargest in the world; 130 specialized research laboratories and insti-tutes under the auspices of the Indian Council of Agricultural



414

Research, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Indian Coun-cil of Medical Research, Department of Atomic Energy, Departmentof Science and Technology, Department of Space, and Defense,Research and Development Organization; 600 in-house R & D labora-tories in the public sector and private sector enterprises; 150 engineer-ing consultancy organizations of varying sizes, employing 20,000technologists; 0.6% as share of total expenditure on science andtechnology in GNP.

Consequences for Indian Society

The difficulties of trying to construct a &dquo;balance sheet&dquo; of the im-pact of modern science and scientific technology on Third Worldsocieties like India during the twentieth century are immense. An im-portant dimension of these difficulties is the virtual impossibility ofsorting out indigenous efforts from those derived directly or indirectlyfrom the work of scientists and technologists elsewhere in the worldeither now or in times past. While Thomas Kuhn agrues in The Struc-ture of Scientific Revolutions (1962) that major advances in scientificknowledge do not reveal a straight path of linear accumulation, suchaccumulation appears in general to be characteristic of advances intechnological knowledge based on modern science, and hence the dif-ficulty of determining just what kind of return to Indian society therehas been from its own investment in developing a national capabilityin modern science and science-based technology. Beyond that is the

even larger question of the relationship of knowledge to other inputsinto the process of economic, social, and political change such ashuman and material resources.

I am prepared to argue, on the basis of what evidence we do have,that the economic, social, and political returns from the policies whichproduced the very rapid growth in scientific and technological per-sonnel and institutions described above have not been insignificant,particularly given the short period of time involved. There is evidencein such diverse fields as nuclear generation of electric power, elec-tronics, fertilizer production, public health in varied ways (but almostentirely in reduction of deaths, not births) and, of course, agriculturaltechnology that science-based technology, with important Indian con-tributions made possible by the existence of an extensive organiza-



415

tional system for science and technology, has produced significant&dquo;payoffs.&dquo; Whether these returns have ameliorated or exacerbatedsocial and economic problems within Indian society is yet another

question, but it seems abundantly clear that these inputs have con-tributed to the enhancement of the national power of India as an in-

dependent nation-state and have enlarged options for political leader-ship. Let us consider the area of public health, which deals with themost primordial aspects of human existence, including survival itself.In doing so, we need to remind ourselves that there is no valid way ofisolating quantitatively the specific Indian input in R & D activity inthese areas when calculating returns to Indian society. Nor indeed isthere any valid way of isolating research and development from othervariables that have contributed to the consequences describedbelow.

To the degree that research has been a significant factor (in contrastto other variables such as the availability of medical and public healthservices), medicine and public health provide a dramatic example ofthe payoff to society from modern science and technology in India.According to the Government of India sources, in the years 1941-1950life expectency at birth for males was 32.5 years and for females, 31.7years. In 1976-1981, it increased to 51.6 for both male and female

(Government of India, 1982).Whether this widespread application of modern science and

technology is the field of medicine and public health represents a netgain to Indian society as a whole, is, of course, a moot point, althoughobviously individual suffering has been reduced. For what happenedin India is that one variable in the equation for determining popula-tion levels has been changed but not the other. India’s populationproblem is not due to a soaring birth rate (in fact this rate has comedown slightly since independence) but rather to a rapidly decreasingdeath rate which in turn has escalated the rate of population growth.

Medicine and public health deal with one side of the equation whichdetermines man’s relationship with his natural environment. Applica-tion of the results of research to the production of food is directedtoward the other side of the equation. Here also is incontrovertibleevidence of widespread payoff to Indian society from the applicationof modern technology based on scientific research. Extra returnsestimated to be attributable to the introduction of high yieldingvarieties of cereals have been calculated by the Indian AgriculturalResearch Institute for the 1968 agricultural year alone at Rs. 760



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crores or approximately $1 billion at then prevailing rates of exchange(IARI, 1970).

With the advent of the Green Revolution, production of food hasincreased substantially over the past decade and a half, notwithstand-ing the ups and downs of India’s monsoon climate and the impact ofthe rapid increase in oil prices in the early and late 1970s, which has in-evitably raised questions about the wisdom of pursuing an energy andchemical intensive agricultural technology strategy. In 1950-1951, thetotal production of cereals in India was 48,814 tons and food grainswas 55,011 tons. In 1979-1980, it increased to 100,480 tons for cerealsand 108,850 tons for food grains (Government of India, 1981).

Is the bottle of life’s satisfactions half full or half empty for the In-dian people as a result of these changes? One measure is the PhysicalQuality of Life Index developed by Morris (1979) and based oncriteria of infant mortality, longevity, and literacy. Here India with aPQLI of 43 occupies a mixed position-higher than some countrieswith substantially greater per capita GNP (e.g., Nigeria with a PQLIof 25) but substantially lower than many others, including the in-dustrially more advanced countries (e.g., Sri Lanka at 82 or theUnited States at 94). These calculations, however, do not revealchange over time, which is critical in understanding the Indiansituation.A more melancholy picture emerges from a careful study of

changes in the rural society in one of the leading states, Tamil Nadu,over a 25-year period from 1950 to 1975. In this study, the Madras-based economist, C.T. Kurien (1981), documents carefully the

widespread changes that have occurred in the agricultural sector withthe introduction of new technology and the infrastructure embeddedin it such as irrigation. There is little doubt that the rural Tamil Nadueconomy has been transformed during the quarter-century covered byhis study, with significant increases in production of a variety of foodcrops and other agricultural products. But his conclusions are muchless happy when it comes to an examination of the distributionalcharacter of these changes and their impact on social equity (Kurien,1981: 145-146):

The totality of changes that we have observed have been brought aboutessentially through a transformation into modernity of traditional

agriculture via technological innovation. But technology has had dif-ferential impact on different sections in rural society.... In this sense



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technology has what may be called a &dquo;refraction effect&dquo; which is deter-mined by the productive system into which it comes ... Apparently, notonly physical technology, but even social technology-the marketforces, for instance-was in favour of the rich and against the poor. Anera of rising prices led to the growing accumulation of assets by a fewand the deterioration of the real wages of the many.

What are the social and economic forces that enable the few who are

rich to benefit from all the measures undertaken for the improvement of&dquo;society as a whole&dquo; and what are the socio-economic forces that pre-vent the many who are poor from taking advantage of even measuresspecifically designed for them? This is the clue to the understanding ofrural transformation.

While as the Indian experience makes abundantly clear, deep-rooted social problems such as poverty and exploitation cannot besolved through technical fixes, technological capacity (and to the ex-tent it is essential to maintaining and developing that capacity, arelated science base) are important factors in the realization of

national economic and political goals in the contemporary world.There is no very satisfactory way of measuring the phenomenon of na-tional power, which is also, of course, a function of size. But thereseems to me to be little doubt that independent India’s determined ef-fort to strengthen its scientific and technological capabilities has beenan important dimension to the enhancement of its national power inthe last half century.We again run into formidable difficulties in sorting out just what

element is indigenous and what is external, but it is clear that India hasbuilt up a substantial base (at least in absolute terms of a world scale ifnot on a per capita basis) in most major sectors of heavy industry andhas become one of the important capital goods producers in theworld. It now manages much of its defense production and is widelyregarded, even though its national political leadership stoutly deniesit, to have nuclear military capability as a consequence of the

&dquo;peaceful explosion&dquo; of a nuclear device in May 1974. And it has in-itiated, within the last couple of decades, reasonably determined ef-forts to strengthen its capabilities in areas of advanced or frontiertechnologies such as electronics and biotechnology-although theseefforts have not been without difficulties (Chopra and Morehouse,1981; Morehouse and Chopra, 1983).

There is another dimension to the examination of the consequencesof science and science-based technology for Indian society. This



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dimension is at the heart of an ongoing debate in India among criticsand proponents of the &dquo;scientific temper&dquo; and the role of &dquo;scientific&dquo;values of &dquo;objectivity&dquo; and &dquo;rationality.&dquo; Two of its principal adver-saries are P.M. Bhargava (1983), Director of the Centre for Cellularand Molecular Biology and one of India’s leading scientists with asubstantial international reputation, and Ashis Nandy (1979), a socialpsychologist and Research Fellow at the Center for the Study ofDeveloping Societies in Delhi. I have explored elsewhere the nature ofthis debate (Morehouse, 1985) and so will not discuss it in detail here.

Since the case of &dquo;scientific rationality&dquo; has been widely argued inthe literature on science, technology, and society, I will confine myselfto a brief quotation from one of those who challenges these assump-tions and who argues instead that in the very nature of modern scienceitself there is a violence derived from the determination of science to

manipulate the natural world:

The dichotomy between the text and the context of science has forced usto protect the internal grammar of science and grant autonomy which in

reality it does not enjoy in the world of everyday politics. Values andgoals which are no longer acceptable in the context of science survive inthe text of science as its implicit, exploitative and antihumanist codes.

For instance, George Debereux shows how the theme of violence canenter the very core of science as a part of the &dquo;pure&dquo; structure of science(as for example among the vivisectionists in biology).... Not merelythis. Many elements of the social relationship of science have been in-corporated into the text of science and declared out of bounds for thenon-scientist [Nandy, 1979: 7].

Whether this &dquo;violence&dquo; in science is casually liked to the&dquo;violence&dquo; in the Indian social order-as manifested in widespreadpoverty and exploitation enveloping some 40070 of the popula-tion-can never be established with any analytical validity. But muchof the &dquo;violence&dquo; in the social order existed at the time of in-

dependence, and if it has increased since then, it is at least in part a

consequence of the considerable growth in the country’s population.And there is countervailing evidence cited above in changes in life ex-pectancy and infant mortality that suggests that in some significantrespects for a sizeable number of Indian people, some of the worstaspects of this kind of &dquo;violence&dquo; have been mitigated. That said,however, it is depressingly clear that all of the exertion by independent



419

India to build up its capacity in modern science and science-basedtechnology has not yet enabled it to come to grips with the awesomeproblems of poverty and exploitation that prevade the Indian socialorder.

Political Independence andthe Stages of Scientific Growth

The three-stage model of scientific progress set forth by Basalla inScience (1967) provides a conventional framework for viewing theprocess of development of modern science in the Third World as oneof diffusion of science originally from Western Europe (and morerecently from North America, the Soviet Union, and Japan as well),leading to &dquo;self-generating&dquo; growth. In Basalla’s framework, the firststage is the &dquo;non-scientific&dquo; or &dquo;pre-scientific&dquo; society, followed by aperiod of &dquo;colonial&dquo; (not necessarily in a political sense, although nocolonial territory has ever gone beyond this stage) or &dquo;dependent&dquo;science. To achieve the third and final stage of scientific growth,namely, &dquo;independent&dquo; science, many tasks must be accomplished.Basalla lists seven among these, all of which, in varying degrees, con-stituted, in this conventional approach, tasks still before science inIndia on the eve of independence:

(1) Resistance to science on the basis of philosophical and religious beliefsmust be overcome and replaced by positive encouragement of scientificresearch.

(2) The social role and place of the scientist needs to be determined inorder to insure society’s approval of his labors.

(3) The relationship between science and government should be clarified sothat, at most, science receives state financial aid and encouragementand, at least, government maintains a neutral position in scientific mat-ters.

(4) The teaching of science should be introduced into all levels of the

educational system.(5) Indigenous scientific organizations should be founded which are

specifically dedicated to the promotion of science.(6) Channels must be opened to facilitate formal national and international

scientific communication.

(7) A proper technological base should be made available for the growth ofscience.



420

At most, viewed from this perspective, India stood at the stage of&dquo;colonial&dquo; and &dquo;dependent&dquo; science on the eve of independence. Tobe sure, some elements of political leadership in the freedom struggle,notably Jawaharlal Nehru, were conscious of the potential of scienceand science-based technology as sources of national power and socio-economic change in the second half of the twentieth century, plans forscientific development were being laid, and the broad lines of a na-tional system for science and technology were emerging prior to in-dependence. But it was not until the achievement of independence in1947 that the real thrust began in earnest. In short, political in-

dependence appears to be one of the essential preconditions for therapid development of a national capacity in science and science-basedtechnology and for the achievement of Basalla’s third and final stageof an &dquo;independent&dquo; or self-generating scientific endeavor in theThird World.

Of course, no vigorous national scientific effort today can beliterally &dquo;independent&dquo; of scientific work elsewhere. The pointBasalla seeks to make rather is that, in the final stage of growth, suchendeavor should no longer be largely dependent on scientific workdone elsewhere but should have self-generating qualities that enable itto contribute significantly to, as well as draw from, the continuing ad-vance in scientific knowledge on a worldwide basis.

After almost three decades, it seems to me a reasonable reading ofthe evidence to suggest that independent India has made progress withall seven of Basalla’s tasks, although I certainly do not argue that allof these tasks have been successfully &dquo;completed.&dquo; It is clear, further-more, that more progress has been made with some tasks than withothers. Thus, &dquo;indigenous scientific organizations&dquo; have been found-ed that &dquo;are specifically dedicated to the promotion of science.&dquo; In-deed, a quite complex organizational network has been created sinceindependence. &dquo;The teaching of science&dquo; has certainly been intro-duced &dquo;into all levels of the educational system,&dquo; although thatsystem is still not accessible to significant elements of the Indian socie-ty and the effectiveness of this teaching varies widely.

Science in independent India definitely &dquo;receives state financial

aid,&dquo; although I do not think government maintains &dquo;a neutral posi-tion in scientific matters.&dquo; This is in fact a questionable criterion for&dquo;independent science,&dquo; give the statist nature of the emergence of BigScience in most nation states in the last half-century, certainly thelarger as well as industrially more advanced. Channels have been



421

opened &dquo;to facilitate formal national and international scientific com-

munication,&dquo; and some important steps have been taken to provide&dquo;a proper technological base&dquo; for science, although considerablescientific equipment is also still imported.

&dquo;Resistance to science&dquo; in society as a whole has hardly been&dquo;overcome,&dquo; but there is at the same time &dquo;positive encouragementof scientific research.&dquo; The &dquo;social role&dquo; of the Indian scientist is a

complicated question about which we know all too little, but clearlysome segments of Indian society approve of his labors, even if we can-not yet say that there is &dquo;general&dquo; approval or even sometimes

widespread recognition of the social significance of those labors.Some would argue that the Basalla model is fundamentally flawed

in that it presumes modern science is a Western dispensation, whetherto be bestowed upon or grasped by Third World societies that havefailed to develop science on their own. Others, like Alvares (1979:173), would go still further and assert that it is a &dquo;historical fallacy ...to inquire into why a society did not make the transition from tradi-tional to modern science.&dquo;

But for purposes of examining critically the Basalla model, let usassume then that, three decades later, India has moved well alongthrough the stage of &dquo;colonial&dquo; or &dquo;dependent&dquo; science but is still, ina gross national sense, on the threshold of achieving the third andfinal stage of scientific growth, namely, &dquo;independent&dquo; science, eventhough that threshold may in fact have been and undoubtedly hasbeen crossed in some areas of scientific activity. It is then possible toadvance some propositions about India’s experience with the develop-ment of modern science and science-based technology that may besuggestive for other countries in the Third World.

One proposition is that, based on the Indian experience, the newlyindependent nation-state in the Third World has proved itself to be anecessary but thus far insufficient condition to the development of avigorous, self-sustaining national capability in modern science andscience-based technology, which has resulted in substantial and

widespread amelioration of material conditions of living in poorsocieties. The key qualification is in the dependent clause in the

preceding sentence since India has made considerably greater progressin the utilization of its greatly expanded capability in modern scienceand science-based technology as a means of enhancing its nationalpolitical power.



422

In India’s case at least, the period of time since the achievement ofpolitical independence may simply be too short for this goal to be ac-complished. A similar phenomenon occurred in the West at a differentpoint in human history and at an entirely different stage in levels ofknowledge and activity in all major fields of science and technologyover a much longer period of time. Twenty-five years is a mere frac-tion of the 200-300 years this historical process took in the West. Inthe second half of the twentieth century, furthermore, the notion of atruly &dquo;independent&dquo; science in any national sense may simply not berealistic, given the increasing interdependence of scientific work on aworld scale. To all of the forgoing needs to be added a part of theAlvares (1979) thesis set forth above, which argues that much of thecapacity for further advances in science, and especially application ofscientific knowledge through technology, was repressed in the ThirdWorld during the period of the European colonial presence.

Clearly also possibilities for explaining the lack of development of&dquo;self-sustaining&dquo; science and science-based technology in the ThirdWorld include external factors of a contemporary as well as historicalcharacter over which India and other Third World countries have little

or no influence. The attraction of intellectual talent to the majorworld centers of scientific work at the frontiers of knowledge, whichexist overwhelmingly in the industrially more advanced societies, is

one example. Others certainly include the influence on priorities andselection of topics for research in Third World societies by advances inscientific knowledge made in the more developed countries and thetypically unequal competition between imported science-based tech-nology, especially in industry where it has been highly refined throughextensive utilization abroad, and indigenous technology, which har-bors many uncertainties for the potential user because of limited ex-perience with its utilization.Human history tells us that crises that threaten societies, whether

internal or external, often result in spurts of progress in science andother fields of intellectual activity. While India’s birth as an indepen-dent nation had its traumatic qualities, the truly traumatic period forindependent India has been that since the early 1960s, when the coun-try was involved in three military encounters and three major and ex-tended periods of adverse weather conditions with nearly disastrousconsequences for the country’s food production, as well as an internalpolitical crisis (the so-called Emergency in the mid-1970s when the



423

government assumed sweeping powers allegedly to contain politicalchaos). That India did not appear to &dquo;turn the corner&dquo; scientificallyand technologically during this period may have been that these criseswere not long enough or severe enough, that there were other counter-vailing factors which inhibited this development, or that we are simplytoo close in time to see the foundations laid in the 1960s and 1970s formore rapid progress in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Technological Autonomy:The Ultimate Stage ofScientific and Technological Developmentin the Third World

The discussion thus far has rested on an implicit assumption thatthere is a direct and causal relationship between growth in a country’sscientific capabilities and the society’s capacity to use complex formsof technological knowledge based on modern science to meet criticaleconomic and social needs as well as to serve national political goals.If indeed this is the case, Basalla’s third and presumably final stage ofscientific development in the Third World represents a logical policygoal for political leadership in developing countries who patronizemodern science because they believe it will provide a means of meetingthese needs. But if this kind of reasonably direct causal relationshipdoes not exist, then &dquo;independent science&dquo; may be an irrelevant policygoal.

Despite the eloquent arguments of Haskins (1963), Piel (1964),Nehru (1964), and many others, no one really knows enough about thecausal links between science and technology to be able to say for cer-tain. De Solla Price (1965) argues that the reverse is true historically inWestern Europe and that artisan-based technology appears to havestimulated scientific activity by way of scientific instruments and theirmakers, but he is less convinced of the proposition when it it turnedaround the other way and applied to the modern world. The questionis obviously of concern to all societies in the contemporary world, butgiven their more limited resources and therefore the more decisivecharacter of policy choices in developing countries, it is critical forsuch countries.



424

Piel (1964) is undoubtedly right when he observed after a visit toIndia some years ago that &dquo;science, in contrast to technology, cannotbe imported. &dquo; But the real question is whether by developing its scien-tific work, a country is assured of greater success in using new formsof technology based on recent advances in scientific knowledge, for itis here that the pay-off in meeting critical economic and social needsoccurs. About all we can say is that historically the two phenomenaseem never to have been separated in time and place. The issue thenbecomes the classic chicken-and-egg problem: Which comes first?And that is what no one really yet knows, at least in sufficientlyrigorous and reliable manner to offer meaningful guidance to politicalleaders in Third World countries like India who must make suchchoices.

Some take Nehru to task for assuming that he knew the answer tothis question and that the answer which he used to shape India’s ef-forts for the first 17 years of its independence was wrong. In my view,not all the evidence is in, and it may yet turn out that Nehru was atleast partly on the right track. For the answer seems most likely to benot &dquo;either/or&dquo;-science first or technology first-but &dquo;and/too.&dquo; AThird World country needs to develop its scientific and its techno-

logical capabilities if it is to harness these forces as instruments ofnational power, let alone to find the &dquo;way out of the vicious circle ofpoverty.&dquo; What we can say is that Basalla’s three-stage model, whichis in any event flawed because of its implicit perception that science isa Western invention which can only be acquired elsewhere in the worldthrough lateral transfer, is incomplete. As a framework for analyzingpublic policies for science and technology in the Third World, anotherstage must be added. We do not yet know, however, whether the stageof &dquo;independent science&dquo; is an essential precursor to this additional

stage, should occur simultaneously with it, or should follow it.If we keep the parallelism with Basalla’s phraseology, this addi-

tional stage would be labelled &dquo;independent technology,&dquo; or to turnthe phrase around and make it a Ittle less awkward, &dquo;technological in-dependence.&dquo; No vigorous national scientific effort today can beliterally &dquo;independent&dquo; of scientific work elsewhere, and in this literalsense, Basalla’s third stage of &dquo;independent science&dquo; or &dquo;scientific in-dependence&dquo; is an anachronism. But if &dquo;scientific independence&dquo; is

anachronistic, &dquo;technological independence&dquo; is at least equally, andperhaps more so, within the context of the present discussion of ex-



425

ploiting science-based technologies to serve national economic andpolitical goals and meet urgent and widespread human needs in ThirdWorld societies.

One of the striking phenomena of the post-World War II era hasbeen the growth of transnational activities and relationships in manyfields of human endeavor. While this phenomenon has hardlyrendered the nation-state obsolete, the global environment withinwhich political, economic, and other activities of nation-states areconducted has changed markedly. Some argue that this has made thesovereignty of the nation-state less and less absolute and more andmore dependent on events, forces, and actors beyond its national

political boundaries (Keohane and Nye, 1972). So also is the

technology on which all nations depend becoming less and less self-contained and more and more &dquo;transnational&dquo; in the sources from

which it is drawn. This is perhaps particularly true of technology in-corporating relatively recent advances in scientific knowledge. It is

this kind of science-based technology in agriculture, public health, in-dustry, and other fields which has excited enthusiasts for the growthof modern science and science-based technology in the Third Worldbecause of the potential which it appears to offer in meeting urgenthuman needs in poor societies.

The available evidence suggests that as nations advance scientifi-

cally and technologically, they are drawn more and more into trans-national contacts and interactions with other scientifically and tech-nologically advanced countries. The postwar experience of countrieslike Japan and the Soviet Union, particularly recent and currentdevelopments in the 1970s and the 1980s, point in this direction (Long,1971). But if the more advanced countries are no longer &dquo;techno-

logically independent,&dquo; they appear to have a substantial measure of&dquo;technological autonomy&dquo;-that is, the capacity to use technologicalknowledge based on modern science for their own self-defined

economic, social, and political ends. This, then, is the ultimate stageof scientific and technological development of the Third World, oneof the critical missing elements in Basalla’s model.

But if it is the capacity to use technological knowledge which mat-ters, does it follow that the source of the knowledge does not matter?In individual instances, possibly not, although technology fromelsewhere, being &dquo;culture-specific,&dquo; must go through some kind ofadaptive process. But in an inclusive national sense, no major contem-porary nation has yet proved to be simultaneously &dquo;technologically



426

autonomous&dquo; and &dquo;technologically dependent&dquo; over a significanttime period. Even Japan, typically regarded as the classic borrower oftechnology, is now increasingly recognized as making its own distinc-tive contributions to the further development of technology that it ac-quires from other sources and adapts to its own purposes. The point isthat no &dquo;technologically autonomous&dquo; nation can be substantiallydependent on imported technology for extended periods of timewithout having &dquo;self-generating&dquo; qualities of innovation that enable itto contribute to, as well as to draw from, the continuing worldwideadvance in technological knowledge based on modern science.

As a policy goal for Third World countries like India, therefore, itis important not to confuse &dquo;technological autonomy&dquo; with

&dquo;technological autarky.&dquo; The critical difference is between

technological self-sufficiency, which is clearly unobtainable in thecontemporary world except at great economic, social, and politicalcost and technological self-reliance, which appears to be essential toharnessing modern scientific knowledge to meet critical economic,social, and political needs in these societies. Autonomy in this contextreflects not the general original meaning of the word but rather thenarrower sense of the term indicating a relationship within a largersystem of order as in the autonomous self-governing republics of theSoviet Union and comparable territories in other nations in Europeand elsewhere (Boehm, 1930). Achievement of technologicalautonomy implies that a country plays a significant interactive role ina worldwide network of activities which advance the application ofscientific knowledge through technology to meet economic, social,and political needs.

This in fact is where India’s continuing quest had led four decadesafter independence. The concept of &dquo;technological autonomy&dquo; is

analogous to that of an &dquo;autonomous economy&dquo; which some Indianeconomists have argued should be the goal of India’s economic plan-ning in the 1980s (Medhora, 1972). During that period, as we haveseen, an infrastructure for modern science and science-based

technology has been built up, with threshold conditions of viabilityand some significant payoffs having been already realized.

The new departures in public policies for science and technologyemerging in the 1980s are pointed toward the achievement of techno-logical autonomy. Whether India will achieve this critical but elusivenational goal, let alone with what economic, social, and political, con-sequences for the Indian people, is yet another question. For in the



427

past decade, the industrially advanced countries, and especially thetechnological &dquo;super states&dquo; (i.e., Japan and the United States), haveleapt ahead in frontier areas such as microelectronics and

biotechnology, which are fast emerging as new instruments of

manipulation and influence, if not control, in the global politicaleconomy, a theme which I have explored elsewhere (Morehouse,1979a, 1979b, 1980).

Technological Autonomy andSocial Equity in the 1980s

But technological autonomy for what ends? In the mid-1980s, priorquestions are being raised with increasing insistence about the socialequity implications of the scientific and technological choices made byIndia since independence. Has India opted for &dquo;bourgeoistechnology&dquo; which benefits primarily the already privileged sectors ofsociety? What has the R & D infrastructure created since indepen-dence done to meet the needs of the hundreds of millions of rural andurban poor? What is its capacity in the future for meeting their needs?Is the relationship between social equity and the country’s scientificand technological capabilities so incongruous that only a radical trans-formation of the institutional system for science and technology,perhaps even its dismantling, will make it relevant to India’s most

pressing social and economic needs?And well might such questions be raised, given the equity crisis con-

fronting India in the mid-1980s. The senior author of one of the basicstudies of income distribution in India concludes that the pictureoutlined on the basis of data from the early sixties had not improvedby the early 1970s. At that time, 38’Vo of the rural population had anannual per capita expenditure of Rs. 170 or less, which, at the officialexchange rates then prevailing, is about $36 a year (Dandekar andRath, 1971). Nationally aggregated per capita income figures concealas much as they reveal in a country like India, the more so if they arenot adjusted for inflation. Thus, while these figures may suggest amodest improvement for the country as a whole over the last two de-cades, the likelihood is that a substantial part of that improvement issimply inflation and most of it in any event has gone to the so-calledmiddle class. These in India, as another leading Indian economist has



428

observed, &dquo;belong in fact to the top 5 0l0 of the population, whetherranked in income or wealth&dquo; with the result that such increases in percapita GNP only exacerbate income inequality still further (Raj,1976).

Another measure of the equity crisis confronting India lies in therapidly growing unemployment problem. From 1961 to 1971, thenumber of landless and almost landless agricultural laborers, forwhom unemployment, underemployment and employment at verymarginal rates of productivity are most acute, increased 90%. But thisis a pale shadow of what has happened since. From 1974 to 1984, ac-cording to Raj’s estimates a decade earlier, the male labor force alonehas grown from 152 million to 196 million. The task of providing add-ed employment on this scale, in his words, &dquo;is such a gigantic one that... if not tackled in the manner needed, [it] could engulf the wholecountry in chaos within the next decade. The challenges it presents areindeed so formidable that nothing but a massive mobilization of effortcan make any significant impression on the problem&dquo; (Raj, 1976:

996-997).Grappling with such enormous problems which India is confront-

ing in employment and income distribution casts a long shadow overmuch of the effort thus far made to develop the capacity for

technological change as a lever for rapid economic growth. Studentsof the political economy of science and technology for developmenthave become increasingly aware, as the empirical evidence from theirstudies began to accumulate in the 1970s, that the naive optimism ofearlier decades was misplaced. A mood of profound skepticism hassurfaced about the wisdom of creating elaborate formal R & D

systems in Third World countries which appear to be in large measuresocially dysfunctional in meeting the most urgent economic and socialneeds of these countries, even though they serve, in greater or lessermeasure, important national political goals (e.g., Cooper, 1973).

At best, these systems have come to be seen as irrelevant to theneeds of the majority of the population of countries like India, and atworst, positively harmful because they divert resources and creativeenergies from more critical problems and help to facilitate a strategyof growth which aggravates rather than alleviates social and economicdisparities. The definition of research tasks for these systems appearslargely to have been derived from the research fashions and prioritiesof industrialized countries as filtered through the R & D system ofthose countries. One consequence is that R & D systems in Third



429

World countries have weak links even to the small modern sector and

almost no links to the traditional sector which contains 70% to 90%

of the population. Another consequence is that the &dquo;informal tech-

nology systems&dquo; which are more likely to generate forms of

technological change with greater relevance to the needs of most of thepopulation have been very little developed in most Third World coun-tries, including India.

The relationship of technological choice to employment and in-come distribution, furthermore, is an extremely complex questionabout which development economists, planners, engineers, politicalleaders, and others concerned with making such choices in developingcountries have different perspectives and little real understandingbased on rigorous analysis of empirical data over time (Pickett, 1975).It is by no means clear precisely what combination of technologieswould have worked better, let alone how they could best be developedand disseminated, even though we seem to be much more certain ofourselves in asserting the inappropriateness of technological choicesalready made. In any event, as we have already seen, technology is adependent variable in the process of economic and social change, andin the absence of fundamental shifts in the distribution of assets and

power within a given social community, deep-rooted economic andsocial problems are unlikely to be &dquo;solved&dquo;-and often not evenalleviated-no matter what kind of technological choice is made.

India, like China, to which it is often compared because of roughlycomparable size and level of development, has certainly scored somesuccesses in the technological development of its modern industrialsector and has enlarged options for political leadership in workingtoward national economic and political goals. The formal R & D

system in India, and even more broadly the science and technologysystem, have played an important role in these endeavors. It is perhapsto be expected that these systems would not have made much con-tribution to the crisis in social and economic equity now confrontingIndia since most of the thrust of their activities has thus far beendirected elsewhere.

By broad social function, India’s R & D expenditures have beenconcentrated far more heavily on national security and political goals(about one-third) and the needs of the modern industrial sector (aboutthe same) than on widespread social needs (the remaining one-third).In this, India’s performance is roughly comparable to that of China,and both are by international norms rather more &dquo;socially responsi-



430

ble&dquo; in the distribution of their R & D effort than, say, the UnitedStates, the Soviet Union, or the other industrialized countries, withmore than half of their R & D being devoted to national securitypurposes.

Against this backdrop of continued growth in the country’s scien-tific and technological capabilities and with some important nationaleconomic and political achievements, but with the deliverance of asubstantial proportion of the country’s population from the boundsof poverty as elusive a goal as ever, national political leadership joinedhands in 1983 with the leadership in the country’s science and

technology system in generating the technology policy statement.Designed to guide the country’s future efforts in applying science andtechnology to economic, social, and political needs of the country,this statement enshrines technology as a new kind of social alchemy.&dquo;Above all,&dquo; its closing words urge, &dquo;the entire population must beimbued with self-confidence and pride in national capacity. IndianScience and Technology must unlock the creative potential of our peo-ple and help in building the India of our dreams.&dquo;

It should be clear from this tour d’horizon of the emergence ofscience and technology in post independence India and its economic,social, and political consequences for Indian society that, notwith-standing such bold rhetoric, science and technology alone will not beable to build &dquo;the India of our dreams&dquo; although they certainly canplay and have already played, a helping role in realizing some aspectsof those dreams, notably in the realm of enhancement of nationaleconomic and political power. But at the same time, misunderstandingof their role helps to perpetuate some myths about science and

technology in Third World countries like India. Let us, in conclusion,examine some of these myths.

Five Myths about Sciencein the Third World

Those who harbor animadversions are said to have a carpingdisposition. To carp at the truisms of others is less arduous and

demanding than enunciating one’s own.The course I have chosen is decidedly the less arduous and demand-

ing one. The foregoing excursion into a vast realm of human ex-



431

perience in a complex social order does little more than carp at con-ventional wisdom, without seriously attempting to offer alternatives.The &dquo;myths&dquo; that follow are the most tentative formulations of somealternatives-far from being proven propositions but rather initialhypotheses reflecting my skeptical view of conventional wisdom.

1. Science Is a Western Monopoly

Usually this proposition is expressed historically, reflecting thedispersed character of scientific endeavor in the contemporary world.Even as a historical proposition, it deserves the kind of critical

scrutiny Alvares (1979) has started to give it.It is sometimes said that India needs its Needham-a scholar of

prodigious energy and commitment that will reexamine India’s scien-tific past much as Joseph Needham has done for China. Given thediversity, linguistic and otherwise, of India’s scientific traditions,probably several Needhams are required.

If there is sufficient evidence to warrant skepticism about the asser-tion that science in its &dquo;modern&dquo; garb is a Western creation, then con-structs such as Basalla’s three-stage model of the growth of science inthe Third World are fundamentally flawed, for they rest on the

assumption that science is an alien phenomenon to these societies thatmust be received from the West and internalized by the Third World.The apparent dominance by the West in scientific endeavor over thepast 500 years (itself subject to challenge, according to Alvares) maybe more a reflection of the global distribution of economic andpolitical power than of any unique creative spark in Western civiliza-tion. And in any event, dominance, while it is certainly oligopolistic, isnot a monopoly.

2. Science Is Autonomous

Big Science of the last half-century certainly is not. Science andscience-based technology are instrumentalities of the contemporarynation-state. This is certainly true in the Indian case, but that does notmake India-or any other Third World country-aberrational. On thecontrary, they are only conforming to the late twentieth century norm.

Scientists understandably harbor illusions that their intellectuallabors are in some sense protected from politicization. In the real



432 ,

world of social phenomena and processes, most things are relative,and it is no doubt the case that the doing of science is relatively moreshielded from political intervention in some social orders than others.But when push come to shove, there is no doubt who is calling theshots. Anyone who doubts this proposition should ponder the lessonsof Haber’s The Politics of the Scientfic Community (1969). In all ofhis cases, which are drawn only from Western societies, politics com-mands science.

3. Advanced Technology Is Derived from Science

Historically, we know from de Solla Price’s work (1965) that it wasthe other way around. The question is not whether they are related, asthey surely are, but whether advanced technology is causally linked toscience.

It does seem to be the case that the two have not been widelyseparated in time or space, particularly, if the issue at hand is innova-tion in advanced technology and not merely its possession.

The nature of their relationship is a vitally important policy ques-tion for Third World countries. My own guess is that strong science isneeded in areas closely related to a Third World country’s efforts tostrengthen its technological competence, but more for psychologicalthan instrumental reasons.

The ability to demonstrate the capacity for independent judgmentis vitally important, a proposition the Indian case seems to me to sup-port. Perhaps that is instrumental reason enough-that is, havingwithin one’s midst first-rate scientists who are highly literate about theleading edge of advanced technological change, and the doing of basicscience in the Third World then becomes the necessary price of sus-taining their presence. But from that it does not necessarily follow thatthe two are causally linked, at least in such a direct way that theachievement of &dquo;independent science&dquo; in Basalla’s phraseology is aprecursor to &dquo;technological autonomy.&dquo;

4. Science and Science-Based Technology Arethe Third World’s Social Salvation

Nothing could be further from the truth in the Indian case. Scienceand technology have been important tools for achieving major



433

national economic and political goals for independent India. But theyhave in no sense been the salvation of the Indian masses, especially thevery large number of poor people. Indeed there is evidence throughthe &dquo;Refraction Effect&dquo; phenomenon, that technological and in-frastructural interventions (the latter typically carrying with them newtechnological practices) have exacerbated the problems of the poor.

This proposition is hardly new. It was set forth more than 20 yearsago by an American scientific leader with a longstanding interest inthe Third World, Revelle (1967), when he sought to construct a broad-brush &dquo;balance sheet&dquo; of the impact of major advances in science andscience-based technology on the Third World and concluded that forhundreds of millions of people in the Third World, the costs mightwell outweigh the presumed benefits.

5. Science Is Universal

By that I mean that science is not culture-specific. Everyone knows,of course, that technology is. But science itself-the &dquo;text&dquo; of sciencein Nandy’s (1979) phrase-is supposed to be at least global, if notuniversal. There is not supposed to be any such things as Chinesephysics, Indian biology, or American chemistry.

It is more and more widely recognized that the doing ofscience-the &dquo;context&dquo; in Nandy’s terminology-is culture-specific.Indian social scientists such as Nandy have been important con-tributors, through their own studies of science in Indian society, tothis growing recognition. But there is a step beyond the culturalspecificity of the doing of science that is embedded in the recent workof some of these scholars, and it is a point well worth pondering. Isthere something in the text of science that is culturally determined andthat raises fundamental questions about the social consequences ofscientific endeavor in different cultural environments? Answers tosuch a question are far from settled, but my reading of the Indian casesuggests strongly to me that the question is worth asking.

The five &dquo;myths&dquo; about science and the Third World are derived invarying degrees from the Indian experience. They hardly exhaust therange of possibilities but represent rather a tentative first step in iden-tifying some of the key elements in the anatomy of the mythologywhich obscures our understanding of the role of science and

technology in the Third World.



434

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WARD MOREHOUSE IS President of the Council on InternatIOnal and PublicAffairs (New York) and Research Associate In the Southern Asia Instlfute,Columbia University (New York).



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