The Hindu Business Line : Question waiting for an answer

Just look around — at home or outside. Is there a single invention, scientific application or technological discovery — say, the electric bulb, motor car, micro-oven, polio vaccine, penicillin, jet engine, laws of thermodynamics, television, computer, whatever else one sets one’s eyes on — for which the developing countries can claim credit?

In the last 100 years or so, contributions of C.V. Raman, Hargovind Khurana, Abdus Salam and S. Chandrasekhar brought them the Nobel prize, but they were mostly in the domain of theories of no direct day-to-day application.

As in the case of every scientific and technological advance, all discoveries of new continents and all expeditions to new geographical landmarks such as the North and South Poles and Mount Everest are traceable to industrial, particularly Western, countries.

Dauntless pioneers of those countries, braving wind and weather, disease and death, opened up vast areas for colonisation, thrusting their value systems, cultural mores, languages and customs, down the throats of acquiescing natives, where they did not succeed in decimating them outright. And now, they are extending their sway over and beyond the solar system as well.

Dog with the bone

It is to the inquisitive scientists and technologists, the aggressive adventurers and explorers, of the Western countries that the world owes almost the entire corpus of achievements that have made life worth living.

Even today they dominate every field calling for ingenuity and inventiveness; they are the source of most new ideas and account for most scientific papers and patents.

The rest of the world has merely been adopting their inventions and techniques, without anything substantively original that can be exclusively attributed to them.

It cannot be that the brains, the power of observation and capacity for analysis of the people in developing countries are inferior to those in the developed world.

Still, they missed the significance of the rattling lid of the kettle with boiling water, whereas (as legend would have it) the same phenomenon set James Watt thinking and led him to develop the steam engine which became the driving force of the industrial revolution.

A number of scientists in many developing countries must have seen the mould that caught Alexander Fleming’s attention, but it was the latter that went on to give penicillin to the world revolutionising the treatment of diseases. Such examples abound in every sphere of science and technology.

As far as India is concerned, some argue that it never bothered about the here and now since all its intellectual prowess was devoted to spiritual quest and unravelling the mysteries of the hereafter; some others that the creativity of Indians was squelched by thousand years of foreign rule and the associated denudation of its human capital and deprivation of the chance to build on its undoubtedly glorious legacy; a third school of thought offers somewhat shamefacedly the view that the Indians lack the curiosity, tenacity and thoroughness (the dog-with-the-bone mindset!) of the industrial nations to go to the root of a problem; and a fourth holds, facetiously, I am sure, that Indians are canny enough to let others do the dirty work so that they can enjoy its fruits.

Mr Abdul Kalam, India’s former President, often points out how India is the only civilisation which did not seek to conquer other nations.

Alas, a little enterprise by the Indian versions of a Raleigh, Columbus, Cook or Cortes could have given India territories and resources sufficient to keep it in a state of prosperity for ever, besides getting lebensraum for its population!

Whatever it be, there it is — the pronounced contrast — for all the world to see. Will India surge ahead of the industrial nations in new inventions and discoveries in the present century at least?

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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