Toa Republic of reason
India enters its 75th year of independence, id challenges that range from a pandemic ising school dropout rates, the climate is and an economy that has suffered body ws, there are answers, but they won’t be easy ones. May we return to first nciples, and m
As India celebrates its 75th Independence Day — that’s today; independent India will turn 75 years old next August 15 — it’s easy to focus on the negatives. It’s easy because, honestly, India, now a lower-middle-income country of 75, has a long way to go. For instance, there are still far too many poor people in the country; estimates of this number vary widely (and differ wildly) but given that one of the government’s most popular, and muchneeded, schemes during the pandemic — it has been extended till later this year — involves providing free grain to 800 million people, it is safe to say that there are hundreds of millions of poor in India, still. India’s 1.3 billion people, across 28 states and eight Union Territories, are not just separated by community, caste, class, and cash, it sometimes appears as if they are living in entirely different eras. Parts of the country are in the 21st century but there are others that are still in the 20th (and some corners still in the 19th, perhaps). And even as it lives in many centuries at once, the country faces firstgeneration, second-generation, and thirdgeneration challenges — again all at once.
This is a theme I have written on extensively, but at the risk of plagiarising myself, consider the challenges: sanitation, water supply, and health (first-generation issues that many now-developed countries solved at least a century ago); manufacturing (second-generation); and higher-order questions (such as dealing with the climate crisis, or how the 100-year life will affect countries) that perhaps require an entire ministry of the future.
These are complex issues that cannot be reduced to slogans or campaigns. The only thing required to solve them is scientific temper, or what Bertrand Russell so accurately described as “critical undogmatic receptiveness”.
Yet, recent years have seen a turn away from science and scientific temper, especially in matters concerning national pride (if only misplaced). L’affaire Covaxin, where the drugs regulator approved what would turn out to be an excellent locally
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1967 made vaccine purely on belief (Phase 3 data, even interim, was not available at the time) is a case in point.
For months after, seemingly rational and intelligent people continued to support this approval — again, purely on belief (not in the vaccine; in their case, this was that the government could do no wrong).
This tendency is also evident in the focus on managing data on dashboards instead of addressing the underlying problems. This sometimes throws up counterintuitive results (think state rankings) that might once have been difficult to justify. That’s no longer the case.
Recent years have also seen a turn towards extreme majoritarianism, a phenomenon that may have once been fringe but which is now definitely mainstream. This is a dangerous combination for here’s what it says — “I know I am right and I have the numbers behind me to prove it.” And adding to this already considerable force are filter bubbles (thank you, Eli Pariser) enabled by social-media platforms.
The most significant short-term chalhere’s
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must be egalitarian: Kovind
what even the intermediate s nario (not the worst-case one) presented that export could mean for India. One change in cropping patterns or what can grown where. Two, the need for m water for irrigation.
Three, more erratic monsoons and consequent problems caused by floodi Four, coastal cities having to deal with ing sea levels. Five, more intense cyclon There’s more, but I will stop.
But once again, science and the scient temper will provide the answers.
On India’s 75th Independence Day, al us should make three promises that w help us navigate the coming 25 years — respect science; to cultivate and adop scientific temper; and to address all pr lems (irrespective of their nature) by go back to first principles. And the first prin ples of some of today’s hot-button iss can be found in the Indian Constitution a document that has kept us going, agai all odds, for three quarters of a century
Happy Independence Day and may science be with us.