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SCIENCE Voices In The Wind The bullock cart hasn't changed in 50 years while we dream of ICBMs. Skewed priorities won't change, and Indian scientists won't get it right unless they learn to listen to their forgotten users. By Samar Halarnkar A wise man should utilise even a child's utterance. India searches still for its wise men. Yes, we send satellites soaring to their homes in the blackness of space and make them seem stationary 36,000 km above our heads, bouncing our phone calls off them. Yes, we build telescopes that see galaxies 1,600 million light years away -- if you think that's beyond your imagination, it is -- and create radio photos of them.
Yes, we know how to split the uranium atom and build weapons that can reduce our enemies to atoms. We have all these and more to be proud of in the 50 years of the republic. And then we have our history. We gave the world the zero, we knew of infinity when western man was no more than a fur-clad, rodent-eating cave dweller. But these are old stories. Our landmark scientific and technological achievements are considerable. Unfortunately, our science has thus far been unable to lead an ancient civilisation and an ambitious young republic into the new age; it has shown an inability to change India's life measureably.
For all the state-of-the-art satellites, giant radio-telescopes and atomic weapons we cannot provide a citizen a phone when he wants one, a road free from potholes, a pipe that does not leak. Instead we have escalators that swallow children. Science is more than showcase achievements. In December the Indian Science Congress 2000, an annual scientific stock taking, for the first time had a section called "Ingenious Innovations": a pesticide sprayer mounted on a motorcycle; a cheap runabout; a lever that stops a bucket in a well from falling back while it is winched. You may scoff. But these innovations were born of the desperation of 400 million, or more, Indians who live outside the pale of the modern world. There is something fundamentally wrong with our science if village women had to wait since the days of the zero for one innovator to give them a lever that stops a bucket of water from falling back into a well. At the same meeting, a man with the looks of an ageing flower child declared that India could now build an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). We can now reach Irian Jaya and beyond, not just Islamabad. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the father of India's missiles, offered other thrilling visions: anti-ballistic missiles, lunar flights, space tourism. It is good to dream, to offer a vision. An ICBM could be as necessary as a bullet, but the point is we fail to make the bullets. We fail miserably in making a fighter plane of our own, instead flying antique Russian tinpots called MiGs that routinely kill young pilots (80 have died since 1991 in about 185 crashes). We make the Agni but fail to make simple night-vision goggles for soldiers who die in the dark. We make the H-bomb, but nuclear energy sadly fails to light up our homes. In 1984 the super-secretive Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) promised 10,000 MW of nuclear power by 2000. Today the capacity of our plants is a dismal 2,060 MW. Defence and nuclear research is a classic example of triumphalism: our scientists are guided by their own vision, not by the voices of the people they serve. Everywhere, we paint the larger picture without filling in the details. So we put the world's third-largest pool of scientific manpower -- as we are routinely told -- on distinctly unvisionary work. Run through this list of the Government's fish, yes, fish- research infrastructure: we have a Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute; a Central Institute of Fisheries Technology; a Central Institute of Brackish Water Aquaculture; a Central Institute of Freshwater Aquaculture; a Central Inland Capture Fisheries Research Institute, a Central Institute of Fisheries Education, and finally (whew!) a National Bureau of Fish Genetic Resources. Sure, we need fish research, but isn't there something wrong here? It is not too late, it never is in timeless India. There are those among the establishment who have begun to listen. Within this decade we've seen a flowering of scientific talent and jobs outside the government sectors. The difference between the new and the old is a motivator: a person who's very demanding, often unreasonable, sometimes churlish -- and always, always right. They call this being the consumer. Consumers are both buyers and users, from the farmer to the soldier. The temples of modern India were planned by a government that always decided what was good for the people. Today, as the state's hold diminishes, the scientist must listen to the user and the consumer, not sermonise from the mount. Consider that laughing stock of old, the Indian automobile. What couldn't be achieved in 50 years was achieved in five when the engineers were forced to give people what they wanted. User-driven change is everywhere: televisions with Hindi menus, cellular phones that relay agricultural prices, microwaves that cook aloo palak. In the new millennium, the new sci-tech market will spur the biggest breakthroughs in science: computers, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals. A new report predicts that software, the leader of these sunrise industries, could do business worth Rs 35,000 crore by 2008. That could take care of India's present-day defence needs -- three times over. The excitement is all pervasive. Scientists strike out on their own, even as India's vast network of cash-starved government labs urges its scientists to make research useful. That can happen only one way: if they begin to listen to the voices. |
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