Science and Technology Is the Panacea for the Growth and Security of the Nation

On 27 March 2014 the World Health Organization certified India, together with other countries of South East Asia, as free of polio. Only three years earlier India had been reckoned the hardest country in the world in which to eradicate the disease, with its dense population, poor sanitation and warm climate. The achievement came from a vaccine, a mass campaign, and a surveillance system that traced every case. Science and technology can do this much. The topic goes further, and calls them a panacea, a cure for all ills, for the growth and security of the nation. The claim deserves to be tested.

The achievements of science and technology in India are visible in nearly every field. The Green Revolution of the 1960s, built on high yielding varieties of wheat and rice developed by scientists including M. S. Swaminathan and Norman Borlaug, ended the dependence on food aid. The White Revolution created by cooperative dairying, with the buffalo milk processing technology of Amul, made India the largest milk producer in the world. Mobile telephony reached hundreds of millions of people within a decade. Space technology gives weather forecasts that save lives, as when a cyclone in Odisha in October 2013 killed few because of accurate warnings and evacuations, in contrast to the super cyclone of 1999. Missile and nuclear capability, demonstrated at Pokhran in 1974 and 1998, form the basis of national defence. In November 2013 India launched its Mars Orbiter Mission, which entered the orbit of the planet in September 2014.

The link to growth is established by economic history. Robert Solow showed in 1957 that most of the increase in productivity in the United States came from technological change, and later work confirms the pattern. Nations that grew rich, from Britain in the eighteenth century to Japan in the nineteenth and Korea in the twentieth, did so by mastering the technology of their times. India's information technology industry, built on a pool of engineers, earned tens of billions of dollars a year in exports and helped to put the country on the global map. Jawaharlal Nehru, who called the dams, steel plants and laboratories of the new India its temples, and who promoted a scientific temper, understood that economic independence rested on science.

Security too depends on science. Modern warfare is a contest of technology, from radar and aircraft to satellites and cyber capabilities. A state without its own scientific base depends on others for its defence and is vulnerable to pressure. The Indian Space Research Organisation and the Defence Research and Development Organisation, despite their delays, have given the country strategic independence in some domains. Security extends beyond the military. Food security depends on agricultural science, health security on medicine, energy security on technology for oil, solar and nuclear power, and cyber security on skills in computing.

A state without its own scientific base depends on others for its defence and is vulnerable to pressure.

Yet a panacea it is not. First, science is a tool and does not choose its own purposes. The same physics that gives nuclear power gave the bomb. The chemistry that gave fertiliser gave chemical weapons. Technology used to track criminals can be used to monitor dissidents. Thus the benefits depend on the aims of those who use science, which are shaped by politics and ethics, and not by science.

Second, science has not solved the problems that arise from human choices. India grows enough food to feed its people, yet nearly four in ten of its children are stunted, a problem of distribution, poverty and sanitation. Technology has not removed corruption or caste discrimination. Medical advances reach those who can pay. A technological fix applied without regard to social conditions often fails, as the story of numerous rural projects whose equipment stood unused shows.

Third, the application of science brings new risks. Pesticides and chemical fertilisers have contaminated soil and water in the fields of Punjab. The Bhopal gas disaster of 1984 followed the introduction of a hazardous process into a crowded city with weak safety. Industrial growth has made Indian cities among the most polluted. The burning of fossil fuels, a product of technological civilisation, is warming the climate. Nuclear power raises questions on safety and waste, as the agitation at Kudankulam in 2011 and 2012 showed. Each solution has created a problem for which another solution is sought.

Fourth, science depends on conditions that are not scientific. It flourishes where there is freedom of inquiry, open debate and funding, and it fails where dogma or politics intervene. In the Soviet Union, the agronomist Trofim Lysenko, with the backing of Stalin, suppressed genetics in favour of false theories in the 1930s and 1940s, and Soviet agriculture suffered. In India, spending on research and development is under one per cent of national income, university research is weak, and many talented scientists work abroad. Superstition and pseudo science persist, in opposition to Article 51A of the Constitution, which calls on citizens to develop the scientific temper. The murder of the rationalist Narendra Dabholkar in Pune in August 2013 showed how dangerous it can be to speak up for it.

Education is the base on which everything else rests. Laboratories without good schools and universities have no one to staff them, and a child who never learns to question will not become a scientist. Investment in science therefore has to begin in the primary classroom.

The sensible conclusion is that science and technology are necessary conditions for growth and security but not sufficient ones. They must be paired with good institutions, inclusive policies and ethical limits. A country needs scientists, and also teachers, judges, farmers and citizens who use science wisely. The aim is a scientific outlook in society, in which decisions rest on evidence and a willingness to correct mistakes.

A panacea is a remedy that the sick person need not understand. Science asks the opposite, that the remedy be understood, tested and open to being wrong. A country that treated science as a cure to be purchased, and not as a habit of mind to be acquired, would own the instruments and miss the point. Which of the two India is building depends on what it teaches children to do when they do not know the answer, and that lesson is not in any laboratory.