Revisiting Science’s Social Contract
Making an impassioned plea for marrying innovative approaches in the field, including SRI, in crop cultivation with scientific research by academia, the article looks at the prevalent resistance of the latter to practices on the ground and hopes for more openness and collaboration between theory and experience, and a re-working of the social contract between science and society
Citizen’s Science
A dding innovation to India’s Science and Technology policy would ideally have been an opportunity to democratize knowledge and be more open to sources of innovation from the margins, often outside formal science. However, there is little that is innovative about India’s recent Science Technology and Innovation Policy (STIP 2013).
This article looks at an innovation in agriculture, System of Rice Intensification (SRI), which has spread rapidly among farmers in the last decade but has, so far, failed to evoke requisite interest from the agricultural establishment. SRI is an example of how the social contract between science and society is being re-worked and shaped for the people by several actors, in a manner that may be called ‘citizen science’, outside the state and the market. If Indian science is keen on ushering in a new paradigm, as STIP suggests, the establishment would do well to listen to and learn from such experiments.
The idea of a science with strong civil society origins finds increasing resonance in recent debates on science studies and innovation policy globally. India’s STIP though remains caught in a time warp, presenting old thinking on science and society, and a weak understanding of how innovation is shaped in contemporary India and the world. Specifically, I refer to recent manifestoes on Science and Technology that have articulated the need for science policies to be more responsive to innovation and the implications of sustainability ideas for scientific futures—an imperative of diversity and plurality. These manifestoes also talk of distribution of innovation and cognitive justice of expressing the right of different forms of knowledge to co-exist.