Suman K Sharma
When I was a school boy, one of the joys I looked forward to was the arrival of my sister and brother-in-law from Mumbai (we in Jammu called it ‘Bum-bai’ back then). An officer with Indian Navy, my brother-in-law always brought home goodies from abroad: a shiny Big Ben table-clock which rang alarm bell as many as six times after half-a-minute interval each, compelling you to leave the bed if only to quieten the jarring noise; a kerosene stove with a huge glass bottle to hold the fuel and painted burners on either side to vie with the drab earthen chulha we had in our kitchen; and even a toy boy that peed on pressing a small rubber bladder. The fun lay not only in the novelty of the new-fangled articles but also in the pride that we had goods at our disposal branded ‘Made in England’, ‘Made in USA’, and ‘Made in Japan’.
That was the time we Indians looked up to others to fulfil our needs big and small. If hungry and under-nourished, we went to America to dole out to us food grains and powdered milk. If war broke out with our neighbours, we sought help from the cold war rivals Soviet Russia and USA for arms and ammunition. The well-heeled amongst us went abroad and bagged all the baubles so they could flaunt them before the envious eyes back home. Fifty-five years on, I look around and find that a lot remains unchanged. The one difference is that globalisation has done away with the need of someone actually going to foreign shores to buy such stuff.
PM’s call for ‘Make in India’ therefore seems timely. But in a country like ours where it takes no time to downgrade even the best-intentioned motto to an empty slogan, the catchy phrase leaves much to interpretation. Does the first part of the injunction ‘make’ imply that we should ‘form, prepare and produce…’ (Oxford Dict.) aircraft to zip-fasteners in our country or is it that our youth, adept at handling precision tools, spanners, hammers, riveters, welding machines and the lot should be prepared merely to assemble cars and calculators, mobile phones and machine guns from the kits despatched by foreign manufacturers? Nobel Laureate (Physics) David J. Gross, Chairman of International Advisory Committee of the Tata’s International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), in a recent article (Indian Express: January 15, 2016) throws us a stiffer – and more precise – challenge: ‘Discover, Invent in India’.
While recounting the advantages that India enjoys in having a vast pool of talented youth and the overseas community which maintains strong ties with the motherland, the learned professor has identified the factors that keep us from vying with, let us say, China. The first is the lackadaisical approach towards basic sciences. ‘India has three national academies of science,’ he points out, ‘but they play little role in either advising the government or representing the scientific community.’ Second is the paucity of funds for research and development. Compared to China and US, the countries that spend 2.1 and 2.7 per cent of their GDP on scientific research, India’s expenditure on this account, according to Prof Gross, has remained at a measly 0.9 per cent for the last 15 years. Two more factors that he blames for our retarded growth in the fields of science and technology are a hide-bound bureaucracy (which is notorious for ‘applying the same rules to the post office and scientific research centres’) and a ‘highly politicised system’.
Make in India’ would remain a day dream unless our scientists industrialists, bureaucrats, politicians and teachers work in synergy to make it a reality.
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