Apply modern technology to agriculture
NEW DELHI, August 9. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi said today that science and technology were means to higher production, to self-reliance, as well as to reduction of disparities within society.
Inaugurating a multi-nation conference on the application of Science and Technology in Asia, Mrs. Gandhi said that it was obvious that there could be no economic development without technological change.
“My father’s life-work was to free India from all the shackles which prevented her full flowering — whether they were political, economic or the dead weight of outmoded thought, she said.
In her view, India could not break out of backwardness only by establishing basic and consumer industries. It should apply modern technology to agriculture.
While Asia, she reminded the delegates, had regained her freedom, the gap in technology remained. In some ways, the extraordinary proliferation in new technology had even widened it. This was one of the “sharpest causes of tension in the world, causing situations which are explosive and exploitable.”
Asia, she said in a reflective strain, had today come to mean disinherited millions, whether they lived in the desert, the jungle, or the crowded deltas. But Asia, Mrs. Gandhi asserted did not always suggest want and penury. It was the home of many civilizations and all the great religions. Could these civilizations have grown, it they had not been held together by adequate technological mastery?
Castasia, the Prime Minister opened, was an important conference aimed at the removal of poverty and to enable Asians to lead the kind of life which was today regarded as “man’s basic right.” It should, therefore, “illuminate new areas of endeavour and of co-operation and help the nations of Asia at individually and collectively.”
INAUGURATING A conference on the application of Science and Technology in Asia, Mrs. Gandhi said that it was obvious that there could be no economic development without technological change.