In August 2023, the Indian parliament accepted a invoice authorising the institution of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation and the act got here into power on February 5, 2024. As a funding company for scientific analysis, the Anusandhan National Research Foundation is charged with elevating and disbursing round $6 billion to universities and analysis laboratories over 5 years.
Of the proposed goal, the Anusandhan National Research Foundation is predicted to invert present funding ratios by elevating no less than 70% from non-governmental sources, together with trade and philanthropy. Industry contribution to analysis in the present day stands at 36% total. State funding for science is in the present day at 64% and when seen as Gross Expenditure on Research and Development, in share of GDP, has been 0.66% (2018-’20) and 0.64% (2020-’24). For comparability, the equal determine for the US stood at 3.59% in 2023 and China was at roughly 2.5% in 2023-’24.
This is just not the primary time that India has thought-about an unbiased funding physique for science analysis at an arms-length from the federal government. The concept was already proposed in 1944 by the biologist Archibald Vivian Hill in his report back to the British Government of India concerning the post-war reconstruction of India. Hill envisioned a “Central Organisation for Scientific Research” whereas Indian scientists with the National Institute of Sciences on the time proposed a “National Research Council.” Since independence, the federal government or administration of science for improvement in India has been essential to these in India and attention-grabbing to observers exterior.
Two many years after Hill, the American educationist and activist Ward Morehouse (1929-2012) comprehensively surveyed the organisation of science in India but once more and wrote a 500-page manuscript, Sarkar and Vigyan (“Government and Science,” Hindi) in 1967 and a revised model in 1970. These drafts that surveyed the primary 20 years after independence have remained unpublished thus far. Historian David Arnold, in his paper on “Nehruvian Science”, famous that in 1961, India had 400,000 science and expertise diploma holders and 70,000 full time researchers. Between 1948-1960, state expenditure on scientific analysis grew from Rs 10.8 million to Rs 133.7 million. We can perceive the considering behind and the implications of these numbers in Morehouse’s work. No different book-length vital account of science under Nehru’s management has been written to date.
This ebook is a witness of its time. Morehouse explores the Indian state as administrator and chief patron of scientific analysis. In his phrases, that is an account of “public patronage of scientific work in India – about three-quarters of the total in the mid 1960s: industrial research, atomic energy, and agricultural research.”
Morehouse makes three most important claims: first, concerning the bureaucratisation of science in India, evident within the ebook’s title. He then speaks concerning the difficulties of constructing enduring establishments for science, in distinction to the extra widespread leader-dependent organisations, and at last, he speaks to the considerations associated to the social buildings inside which science and scientific establishments in India perform. Morehouse’s arguments and observations stay astonishingly related in the present day.
In preparation, Morehouse interviewed over 100 key figures in Indian science and science coverage, organised a convention with them in New York, and had entry to strong documentation from the Research, Survey, and Planning Organization Unit of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. Today’s commentators on science in India could effectively envy the robustness of the information to which he had entry.
I stumbled upon the manuscript a number of years in the past and have now ready it to be printed. Drawing on my introduction to the quickly to be posthumously printed Sarkar and Vigyan: Government and Science in Nehru’s India, I make a case for what we’d acquire from studying Morehouse in the present day.
Contemporary Debates
Sarkar and Vigyan is critical studying in the present day not solely as a major supply, for historic causes, or for the attention-grabbing mental journey of its writer, but additionally as a result of of its relevance to modern debates on science, expertise, and improvement in India. This ebook is a reminder of some of the questions already posed, debated, discredited, ignored, or deserted prior to now.
Morehouse’s strategy to public coverage and science in India was to centre the objective of lowering inequality on the trail to social justice. There are two moments when he may nonetheless have printed this ebook within the 14-year interval between 1970 – when Morehouse revised the manuscript – and 1984 when, following the fuel leak on the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, we noticed an entire shift in Morehouse’s considering on science for improvement.
The first is the lengthy seven years between 1971, when he printed Science in India and 1978, when he signed the assertion on “The Perversion of Science and Technology: An Indictment.” Signed on the 14th assembly of the “World Order Models Project” (Poona, July 1978) by Rajni Kothari, Shiv Visvanathan, and Giri Deshingkar, amongst others, this assertion referred to as for a rejection of the modern strategy to science and improvement. In calling for a reorientation of science, the assertion nonetheless carried the idea {that a} totally different variety of science may – and may – form improvement.
The different second when Morehouse may have printed the ebook was between 1978-’84. During this time, he was nonetheless serious about India and printed a report on the state of coverage and analysis and improvement for electronics in India (1983) however his religion in science and expertise as drivers of improvement was shattered by the “world’s worst industrial disaster”, a fuel leak on the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal. Bringing justice to the victims and survivors of the tragedy utterly swallowed his consideration till he died in 2012.
Even then, years after he first wrote it, Sarkar and Vigyan would nonetheless have been related as a critique of the obstacles to a social transformation formed by science. Perhaps the tutorial critique of his manuscript was far too robust, maybe he discovered it troublesome to get a writer of his alternative or, maybe his curiosity in revising a protracted manuscript merely waned with time.
Government ‘before’ science
Six years earlier than Morehouse’s first draft, the British bureaucrat and scientist Charles Percy Snow printed Science and Government (1961), which doubtless knowledgeable Morehouse’s alternative of title. Snow was essential for Morehouse’s considering on the aim of science and engineering in creating societies. It is, nonetheless, attention-grabbing that he flipped the order – authorities got here earlier than science.
At the chance of studying an excessive amount of into what could have been a stylistic alternative, in placing authorities earlier than science in India, Morehouse might be suggesting the primacy of forms within the organisation of science in India, an argument he makes strongly on this ebook.
In his use of Hindi, we could learn that this stage of bureaucratisation was doubtless particular to India, or no less than true of India particularly methods. Finally, and this too is drawn from his use of Hindi, Morehouse appeared to point that the robust arm of administration was positioned in Delhi – the capital – reasonably than different elements of the nation the place Hindi was not a working language. Bureaucratisation was a priority then and stays one in the present day within the debates on science in India in the present day.
‘Appropriate Technology’
Technology, much more than science, is now seen because the panacea for all issues – and this ebook gives one family tree for why that got here to be the case.
The late Nineteen Sixties had been a second of transition. Morehouse captures these last years of an period when the primary technology of unbiased India’s management was giving technique to the subsequent: the physicist Meghnad Saha handed away in 1956, prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1964, Homi Bhabha (of the nuclear program) in 1966, Vikram Sarabhai (of the house programme) in 1971, and the statistician Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis in 1972. Each of them believed within the energy of science for improvement and world relevance.
Internationally, after the scholar protests of 1968, critiques of science and engineering as being overwhelmingly beholden to the state went briefly mainstream. Morehouse was writing on the threshold of this transition, and the ebook is marked faintly by the tensions of enthusiastic about social justice within the shadow of statism and massive science and expertise.
Along the way in which, Morehouse grew to become related to Ernst Friedrich Schumacher’s Intermediate Technology Development Group (United Kingdom, 1965), focusing, amongst different issues, on a Gandhian strategy to expertise and economics. Schumacher, the German-born British statistician and economist, printed Small is Beautiful (1973), a ebook that sought to recenter individuals and combine the setting into authorities insurance policies.
Given this affiliation, it’s curious that Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi doesn’t determine meaningfully within the ebook. Missing is also a reference to the work of the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (est. 1962) and extra usually, the individuals’s science motion in India, in addition to a direct engagement with the talk on applicable expertise led by, amongst others, chemist Amulya Reddy on the Applied Science and Technology for Rural Areas, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
In impact, disagreements on develop science and utilise expertise to alleviate poverty are lacking from the ebook. Was there a Delhi Consensus, and was it so robust that Morehouse needed to wait for a catastrophe earlier than any critique of the Nehruvian mission captivated his creativeness?
‘The White Brahmin’
When Morehouse began writing, Walt Whitman Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960) was effectively absorbed by American forms of the Cold War. Rostow begins, “With the phrase ‘traditional society’ we are grouping the whole pre-Newtonian world…the dynasties in China; the civilisation of the Middle East and the Mediterranean; the world of medieval Europe.” The US, argued Rostow, had the duty to guide the newly unbiased nations via the levels of industrial improvement towards democracy and prosperity. Under the Lyndon Johnson presidency, Rostow would go on to advocate Operation Rolling Thunder for the carpet bombing of North Vietnam. In the yr that Morehouse was writing the primary draft of this ebook, George Basalla printed The Spread of Western Science: A Three-Stage Model (1967) concerning the introduction of what seems to be an virtually alien trendy science into any non-European nation.
Both Rostow and later Basalla are broadly masking the identical terrain as Morehouse. It is attention-grabbing, then, that Morehouse’s strategy is at a distance from each Rostow and Basalla at the same time as he held on to his religion in a “scientific revolution for the third world.” Morehouse was acutely conscious of his place as an American in India. He knew that his claims about what mattered to Indian management and to Indian scientists was written via international eyes. In the spirit of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955) and Eugene Burdick and William Lederer’s The Ugly American (1958), Morehouse wrote The White Brahmin – a critique of American presence and behavior in India and on this planet in the course of the Cold War (Illustrated Weekly of India, 1970).
So much has modified since Morehouse wrote the ebook. Aspiration to world energy and the specter of a rising China has tenuously taken over earlier objectives of modernisation in India. Today, Indian science and politics are taking inventory of capabilities in science and engineering, and never surprisingly, additionally of the Nehru period. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation is tasked with delivering internationally aggressive analysis. How that unfolds – and if it may well accomplish that whereas addressing the foremost considerations round how science is organised in India, together with those who Morehouse posed many years in the past – stays to be seen. If we wish to hint genealogies of the socio-technical imaginaries of our time and re-evaluate issues with the organisation of science and engineering in India, then this can be a ebook price studying.
Jahnavi Phalkey (CASI Spring 2025 Visiting Scholar) is a historian of science, filmmaker, and the Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru. She was awarded the Infosys Prize in Humanities (2023).
The article was first printed in India in Transition, a publication of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.