The S&T Policy was drafted in 2003. Policy statements of the country cannot be changed on and off. There must be certain continuity and sustainability. Science and technology at the moment is in a state of rapid change. Therefore, if you have drafted a policy many years ago, that might not have taken into account the rapidity with which changes are taking place in the global science and technology regime. And that is the present position today. Within the broad framework of S&T policy, directional alignments are necessary. That’s what the Department of Science & Technology is currently engaged with. When there is a state of rapid change, it is not an ideal time to develop a new policy. We need to wait for certain growth to happen. Then develop the policy. Therefore we are not looking at revising the policy but designing it right.

The most serious challenge today in S&T stream world over is the attraction of talent to study and make a career with science. Many people are attracted to sectors, which provide them quick returns, settling in life much earlier and larger physical income and parameters, which are strongly coupled to a highly developing economy and better economic well-being. Science and technology, unfortunately, doesn’t provide anywhere in the world that extra financial remuneration. It throws out challenges; it provides a delight—all intangible. So, attracting talent to science and technology itself is an aspect of concern for everybody. We are monitoring a programme called INSPIRE, Innovation for Science Pursuit. It is not just awareness for the sake of science but bringing young people into studying science and taking it up as a career. This is a major programme. We have initiated an activity where the research in universities gets rejuvenated. At one point of time, 50% of the research output used to come from universities and the other 50% from national laboratories. Now it is just 15% from the universities and 85% from the labs. It is good for the national labs, but the spring of research is universities. So, for the rejuvenation of university research, for taking research back to the universities, we have some concrete arrangements in mind. These are more programmes than a policy direction.

I have a slightly different view of this word ‘bureaucracy’. In any government system, you have lot of linear processes. A decision given to person A ten years ago and extended to person B under similar circumstances, everything else remains the same. You cannot distinguish person A from B and provide discretionary powers. And that’s what I call a linear process. On any legal governance, democracy requires jurisprudence. The decision is driven by a set path, set guidelines and set rules. The decision logic is people neutral. Who takes a decision? To whom the decision is delivered? The other word for that is bureaucracy. For a civilised society, for a country, it is required. Now, the size of this linear system will depend on the size of the population and the largeness of the country. India, the largest democracy in the world with multiple divisions of ethnicity, linguistics, cultural differences, to a large extent is stabilised by this governing system. Science, as a discipline, is related to growth. It is supposed to be nonlinear. While bureaucracy concentrates on stability, science and other related processes focus on growth. So stability and growth in a social system are philosophically opposite. The more stable you are, the less you grow. The higher the growth rate, the less stable you are.

No country can fare well in every technology field. Knowledge wise you may be superior. But when knowledge is converted into competitiveness, it leads to many spin-offs. For any knowledge-centered activity to be successful as an economic endeavour is related to the level of participation from the private sector in converting knowledge into wealth and distributing it in the system. As regard to knowledge selling programmes – be it IT, telecom or pharma, we are slightly better in relating to the global environment. So in those sectors, India’s growth is reasonably rapid. When you talk about growth-centric technologies of the country, where the technology denial is very important, whether it is space or atomic energy, we’ve done very well. But there are certain growth-centric technologies related to domestic need, for example, manufacturing system for domestic production, which are rooted in the culture of the country. For example, textiles. So what we’ve done is achieving self-reliance. Textile was a tool for getting independence. Khadi is a statement. So once you look at those products, our culture is to stay out of the global environment. With regard to technology, India lives with dualism. And this dualism is probably advantageous for India. We have one set of technologies for common man of the country that costs much lower than it does anywhere in the world, which is based on economy and scope of small and medium enterprises, creation of large employment, which is more important than the quantum of production in those sectors. Sectors like IT, biotechnology and telecom, that have high expertise costs, cater to different markets and come with different purchase price envelope. So it is not feasible to compare textiles with these sectors. In a country like India, it takes at least 15-20 years to bring even growth in all the sectors.