INDIA’S TRYST WITH TECHNOLOGY
Anewspaper report in early 1952, we learn from Midnight’s Machines, described Jawaharlal Nehru’s dinner: vegetables, steamed in a solar cooker. The cooker, made by the National Physical Laboratory, was, for a while, a sensation, a sign of independent India’s scientists coming forward to meet the country’s needs. But it soon became clear that the cooker was impractical for any real use and the project lost steam. Early embarrassments such as this led scientists to avoid mass-use products and, author Arun Mohan Sukumar writes, ‘The distance between citizen and technology grew.’
The relationship of citizen to technology in independent India has been almost entirely through the state, and Midnight’s Machines presents an account of that mediation. For the book’s purposes, the state is largely personified by prime ministers, who, until fairly recently, have tended to hold the portfolio of science and technology. And by energetic and influential technocrats, three of whom from different generations are briefly profiled near the end of the book—M. Visvesvaraya, Vikram Sarabhai and, ‘the technocrat who came in from the cold’—NandanNilekani.
Nehru’s embrace of technology is seen by Sukumar as cautious, trying to reconcile the necessary development required by a newly independent India but with a Gandhian wariness. With his definition of technology as the ‘latest technique applied to the conditions that prevail in a certain country’, Nehru was in no rush, even asking for limited machinery to be used for a dam project so that unskilled workers could have jobs. Shastri’s short time in office is marked by the Green Revolution, which Sukumar says might have been ‘the first instance of new technologies interacting with Indian masses in a direct and consequential manner’. Indira Gandhi, we are told, repeated Nehru’s mistakes, resorting to the narrative of low-cost ‘appropriate technologies’ for far longer than required to cover up for an economic inability to industrialise more intensively. And this while supporting relatively large space, nuclear and defence programmes and, in the early 1980s, laying the foundations for international collaborations that were consolidated by the technocraticallyminded Rajiv Gandhi. The contributions of later prime ministers are dealt with more cursorily, ending by linking Narendra Modi with Madan Mohan Malaviya: ‘...it is from the blueprint that Malaviya drew for India’s modernisation that the essence of Make in India can be distilled.’
This larger narrative has, on occasion, intriguing assertions that aren’t always substantiated: after the Bofors scandal, technology became ‘the Great Corruptor’ and ‘a decade’s struggle to bring machines closer to the citizen had been undone’. Or, Indira Gandhi’s championing of ‘appropriate technologies’ led ‘an entire generation of researchers and businesses to believe that small was, indeed, beautiful’.
Major sectors, such as power, biotech and telecom, are only touched upon briefly. And while decisions are often critiqued with the benefit of hindsight, an alternative is not always evident. It would be good to know what other countries in similar situations ended up doing, and how it worked out for them.
Midnight’s Machines is particularly absorbing and insightful when it deals with certain episodes in detail: the Colombo Plan of the 1950s; India’s refusal to participate in the Human Genome Project; the software services industry emerging from the Y2K problem; technocrats like Sanjoy Dasgupta or N. Seshagiri pioneering the use of technology for better governance and for development projects.
Sukumar is very good with explaining the complex manoeuvring around trade treaties, geopolitical dynamics, and local political considerations that shape the trajectories along which science and technology evolve. If the Indian embrace of technology was tentative in the years after independence, now it feels anything but. While not a comprehensive history, Midnight’s Machines offers an enjoyable and opinionated account of this particular tryst with destiny. ■
Srinath Perur is the author of If It’s Monday It Must Be Madurai and translator of Ghachar Ghochar