“Scientific curiosity and social insularity: Can (should) the chasm be bridged?”.
responsibility: Advancing scientific frontiers can indeed be accompanied by advances in our responsibility towards socially marginalised communities. If this is not happening enough in our society, then there may be a need to change the parameters of scientific discourse in the country.
accuracy/affordability trade-off: If every drug is screened at 1 or 5 per cent level of significance, it is obvious that many leads which might have worked at 10 or 20 per cent level of significance would be thrown out. If these rejected leads also were to provide solutions at lesser cost, then we have implicitly made a trade off between accuracy and affordability ( assuming that there are no life saving implications or no associated increase in side effects with reduction in accuracy). After all, people take much bigger risks in real life every day, they will/might any item prefer a drug which gives them 70 per cent chances of improvement at say 10 rupees per dose than 95 per cent chance at 1000 rupee per dose. Similar trade-offs have to be made in various disciplines. Many farmers develop herbal pesticides or bio-control strategies for pest control which may achieve 60-75 per cent effectiveness but at a very low or practically no cost and adverse side effect. But the traction for such innovations by farmers in institutional extension message sis negligible if not altogether absent.
Are poor rich in some resource? why do Honey Bee Network has contributed more than 90 per cent of the 140,000 ideas, innovations and traditional knowledge practices in the last two decades from over 550 districts. Twenty Five Shodh Yatras over last thirteen years ( lately in conflict probe regions like bastar, puruliya, koraput, champaran, arku valley, anant nag etc., ) have demonstrated extraordinary richness in local knowledge, institutions, culture and resources. But they also show extreme alienation of state, civil society, market and science and technology institutions. How else can one explain millions of people using technologies developed thousands of years ago, with high drudgery and low efficiency. Why are scientific peer groups not bothered by such inertia and insularity?
can linking tech youth with the problems and potential of informal sector provide a way ahead? is there really a trade off between good science and science for public good? Can www.techpedia.in developed by SRISTI hosting more than 100k engineering projects by 350k students from over 500 engg colleges provide a platform enabling youth to question institutionalised inertia, mediocrity and insularity?
Anil K Gupta
