The poverty of innovation

One of the ironic things about the new year is that we actually think it is new. We expect new thoughts, new models and new rituals and all we get is the re-treading of old ideas. Last few days saw the celebration of a whole series of events around innovation. There was the venerable Indian Science Congress celebrating its 99th session. I want to look at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s speech as a part of the landscape of current thought.

Our leaders keep talking about innovation. The sadness is that they locate science and scientific innovation within a politics of competition and anxiety. Our politicians seem to be locked into the Sputnik complex. US scientists and politicians invented the bogey of the Sputnik complex to frighten Congress, to release grants, citing the Cold War fear that America might fall behind Soviet Russia. It was a bogey that worked allowing American scientists a cornucopia of unaccountable grants.
India has its own version of the Sputnik complex. Dr Singh himself raised it by saying China has gone ahead of us in the science race. Dr Singh ended with the predictable appeal that the current investment of 0.9 per cent of the
GDP must reach a level of at least two per cent by the end of the Plan period.
For all his scholarship and achievements, Dr Singh is a conventional economist who thinks investment in science is directly linked to the nature of economic progress. It is a kind of claim that is a part of the clichés of science. One is yet to prove convincingly that investment in science adds to the GDP.
There are two stereotypes we need to challenge. One is the fear of China fuelled both by our defence hawks and our scientists. The future is constructed as a perpetual race between the two nation states creating a paranoid idea of innovation and politics. The script unfolds with China as the juggernaut and India as the dinosaur. China seems to be outwitting us despite our comparative advantage in English and democracy. China, in fact, has replaced Japan as the marketing phenomenon, and Chinese investments in biotechnology, armaments are cited as illustrations of their will to science.
There is a double sense of inferiority here. There is a fear of China and there is growing doubt the slowness of democracy. There is a double about illiteracy here, about China and about fear as a form of illiteracy. We need to outthink both China and the West but fear and anxiety are poor starting points for it. Our democracy gets more stereotypic and our ideas of innovation, archaic.
One misses the celebration of science today. Science acquired its creativity through play and it is the playfulness of science that created a Jagadish Chandra Bose, a Raman, a Ramanujan or Chandrasekhar. Science as playfulness has to come back as cultural form to childhood and the universities. Science has to be enjoyable.
In fact, one must make a plea for temporary irrelevance. One recognises the fact that science is the determining force of the knowledge economy. Such an administered science becomes a dismal science and an empty one, as our scientists make promises that they don’t understand and cannot fulfil.
Try an experiment. Make a list of our top scientists and read their speeches. Pick the best and you will see that our scientists have little understanding of the nature of science. Just try it with a sample of speeches from the Indian Science Congress. The illiteracy of our scientists and our politicians about science seems to be
co-produced.
There is a second danger. Of late, we have realised that our people are great innovators, that subsistence and survival inspire their own style of innovation. We call it jugaad, the culture’s ability to innovate in a system of constraints or crisis. Jugaad is now enthusiastically read as India’s contribution to innovation and management experts treat it as almost patentable. Yet not all of them put together can create a heuristics of jugaad or show the price and agony of it.
This enthusiasm is part of the new orientalism, where our managerial and technocratic elite treat our own society as a distant exotic phenomenon. Our peasants and the workers in the slum become exotic creatures generating fortunes at the bottom of the pyramid. What are everyday tactics in a culture of poverty and scarcity become collector’s items to be presented in conferences abroad. We assemble go-downs of such innovation creating a combination of mundi and a museum distorting the very basis of these cultures.
There is a third fear. Our Planning Commission, which defined poverty as an index rather than a lived world, looks askance at the new wave of social innovations and protests asking for institutional innovation. Demands like the protests for the Right to Information, the Lokpal Bill have complex
histories.
Legislative innovation is a complex process and whether it is information, corruption, food security or employment, the government has to take the innovations of civil society seriously. The government must have a white paper on civic epistemologies. One has to grasp how the movements in biotechnology, the debates on mining, the controversies over disaster management, the battle over urban systems, the anxiety over nuclear energy demand new forms of transparency, accountability, audit and innovation which is currently beyond the governmental imagination. Civil society is combining knowledge and democracy in new ways. A knowledge economy like ours has to understand the new knowledge society that civil society is seeking to create.
Our illiteracy about innovation is life threatening. As a democracy, we desperately need to understand that technological innovation in laboratories cannot homogenise the idea of innovation. Diversity is the core competence of democracy and governance. This much, our governing elite needs to understand.

The writer is a social science nomad