An analysis of science under Nehru has lessons for today’s India

In August 2023, the Indian parliament approved a bill authorising the establishment of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation and the act came into force on February 5, 2024. As a funding agency for scientific research, the Anusandhan National Research Foundation is charged with raising and disbursing around $6 billion to universities and research laboratories over five years.

Of the proposed target, the Anusandhan National Research Foundation is expected to invert current funding ratios by raising at least 70% from non-governmental sources, including industry and philanthropy. Industry contribution to research today stands at 36% overall. State funding for science is today at 64% and when seen as Gross Expenditure on Research and Development, in percentage of GDP, has been 0.66% (2018-'20) and 0.64% (2020-'24). For comparison, the equivalent figure for the US stood at 3.59% in 2023 and China was at approximately 2.5% in 2023-'24.

This is not the first time that India has considered an independent funding body for science research at an arms-length from the government. The idea was already proposed in 1944 by the biologist Archibald Vivian Hill in his report to the British Government of India about the post-war reconstruction of India. Hill envisioned a “Central Organisation for Scientific Research” while Indian scientists with the National Institute of Sciences at the time proposed a “National Research Council.” Since independence, the government or administration of science for development in India has been important to those in India and interesting to observers outside.

Two decades after Hill, the American educationist and activist Ward Morehouse (1929-2012) comprehensively surveyed the organisation of science in India yet again and wrote a 500-page manuscript, Sarkar and Vigyan (“Government and Science,” Hindi) in 1967 and a revised version in 1970. These drafts that surveyed the first 20 years after independence have remained unpublished to date. Historian David Arnold, in his paper on “Nehruvian Science”, noted that in 1961, India had 400,000 science and technology degree holders and 70,000 full time researchers. Between 1948-1960, state expenditure on scientific research grew from Rs 10.8 million to Rs 133.7 million. We can understand the thinking behind and the implications of these numbers in Morehouse's work. No other book-length critical account of science under Nehru's leadership has been written thus far.

This book is a witness of its time. Morehouse explores the Indian state as administrator and chief patron of scientific research. In his words, this is an account of “public patronage of scientific work in India – about three-quarters of the total in the mid 1960s: industrial research, atomic energy, and agricultural research.”

Morehouse makes three main claims: first, about the bureaucratisation of science in India, evident in the book's title. He then speaks about the difficulties of building enduring institutions for science, in contrast to the more common leader-dependent organisations, and finally, he speaks to the concerns related to the social structures within which science and scientific institutions in India function. Morehouse's arguments and observations remain astonishingly relevant today.

In preparation, Morehouse interviewed over a hundred key figures in Indian science and science policy, organised a conference with them in New York, and had access to robust documentation from the Research, Survey, and Planning Organization Unit of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. Today's commentators on science in India may well envy the robustness of the data to which he had access.

I stumbled upon the manuscript a few years ago and have now prepared it to be published. Drawing on my introduction to the soon to be posthumously published Sarkar and Vigyan: Government and Science in Nehru's India, I make a case for what we might gain from reading Morehouse today.

Sarkar and Vigyan is necessary reading today not only as a primary source, for historical reasons, or for the interesting intellectual journey of its author, but also because of its relevance to contemporary debates on science, technology, and development in India. This book is a reminder of some of the questions already posed, debated, discredited, ignored, or abandoned in the past.

Morehouse's approach to public policy and science in India was to centre the goal of reducing inequality on the path to social justice. There are two moments when he could still have published this book in the 14-year period between 1970 – when Morehouse revised the manuscript – and 1984 when, following the gas leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, we saw a complete shift in Morehouse's thinking on science for development.

The first is the long seven years between 1971, when he published Science in India and 1978, when he signed the statement on “The Perversion of Science and Technology: An Indictment.” Signed at the 14th meeting of the “World Order Models Project” (Poona, July 1978) by Rajni Kothari, Shiv Visvanathan, and Giri Deshingkar, among others, this statement called for a rejection of the contemporary approach to science and development. In calling for a reorientation of science, the statement still carried the belief that a different kind of science could – and should – shape development.

The other moment when Morehouse could have published the book was between 1978-'84. During this time, he was still interested in India and published a report on the state of policy and research and development for electronics in India (1983) but his faith in science and technology as drivers of development was shattered by the “world's worst industrial disaster”, a gas leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal. Bringing justice to the victims and survivors of the tragedy completely swallowed his attention until he died in 2012.

Even then, years after he first wrote it, Sarkar and Vigyan would still have been relevant as a critique of the obstacles to a social transformation shaped by science. Perhaps the academic critique of his manuscript was far too strong, perhaps he found it difficult to get a publisher of his choice or, perhaps his interest in revising a long manuscript simply waned with time.

Six years before Morehouse's first draft, the British bureaucrat and scientist Charles Percy Snow published Science and Government (1961), which likely informed Morehouse's choice of title. Snow was important for Morehouse's thinking on the purpose of science and engineering in developing societies. It is, however, interesting that he flipped the order – government came before science.

At the risk of reading too much into what may have been a stylistic choice, in putting government before science in India, Morehouse may well be suggesting the primacy of bureaucracy in the organisation of science in India, an argument he makes strongly in this book.

In his use of Hindi, we may read that this level of bureaucratisation was likely specific to India, or at least true of India in particular ways. Finally, and this too is drawn from his use of Hindi, Morehouse seemed to indicate that the strong arm of administration was located in Delhi – the capital – rather than other parts of the country where Hindi was not a working language. Bureaucratisation was a concern then and remains one today in the debates on science in India today.

Technology, even more than science, is now seen as the panacea for all problems – and this book offers one genealogy for why that came to be the case.

The late 1960s were a moment of transition. Morehouse captures these final years of an era when the first generation of independent India's leadership was giving way to the next: the physicist Meghnad Saha passed away in 1956, prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1964, Homi Bhabha (of the nuclear program) in 1966, Vikram Sarabhai (of the space programme) in 1971, and the statistician Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis in 1972. Each of them believed in the power of science for development and global relevance.

Internationally, after the student protests of 1968, critiques of science and engineering as being overwhelmingly beholden to the state went briefly mainstream. Morehouse was writing at the threshold of this transition, and the book is marked faintly by the tensions of thinking about social justice in the shadow of statism and big science and technology.

Along the way, Morehouse became associated with Ernst Friedrich Schumacher's Intermediate Technology Development Group (United Kingdom, 1965), focusing, among other things, on a Gandhian approach to technology and economics. Schumacher, the German-born British statistician and economist, published Small is Beautiful (1973), a book that sought to recenter people and integrate the environment into government policies.

Given this association, it is curious that Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi does not figure meaningfully in the book. Missing also is a reference to the work of the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (est. 1962) and more generally, the people's science movement in India, as well as a direct engagement with the debate on appropriate technology led by, among others, chemist Amulya Reddy at the Applied Science and Technology for Rural Areas, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

In effect, disagreements on how to develop science and utilise technology to alleviate poverty are missing from the book. Was there a Delhi Consensus, and was it so strong that Morehouse had to wait for a disaster before any critique of the Nehruvian project captivated his imagination?

When Morehouse started writing, Walt Whitman Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960) was well absorbed by American bureaucracy of the Cold War. Rostow begins, “With the phrase ‘traditional society' we are grouping the whole pre-Newtonian world…the dynasties in China; the civilisation of the Middle East and the Mediterranean; the world of medieval Europe.” The US, argued Rostow, had the responsibility to lead the newly independent nations through the stages of industrial development toward democracy and prosperity. Under the Lyndon Johnson presidency, Rostow would go on to advocate Operation Rolling Thunder for the carpet bombing of North Vietnam. In the year that Morehouse was writing the first draft of this book, George Basalla published The Spread of Western Science: A Three-Stage Model (1967) about the introduction of what appears to be an almost alien modern science into any non-European nation.

Both Rostow and later Basalla are broadly covering the same terrain as Morehouse. It is interesting, then, that Morehouse's approach is at a distance from both Rostow and Basalla even as he held on to his faith in a “scientific revolution for the third world.” Morehouse was acutely aware of his position as an American in India. He knew that his claims about what mattered to Indian leadership and to Indian scientists was written through foreign eyes. In the spirit of Graham Greene's The Quiet American (1955) and Eugene Burdick and William Lederer's The Ugly American (1958), Morehouse wrote The White Brahmin – a critique of American presence and behaviour in India and in the world during the Cold War (Illustrated Weekly of India, 1970).

A lot has changed since Morehouse wrote the book. Aspiration to global power and the specter of a rising China has tenuously taken over earlier goals of modernisation in India. Today, Indian science and politics are taking stock of capabilities in science and engineering, and not surprisingly, also of the Nehru era. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation is tasked with delivering internationally competitive research. How that unfolds – and if it can do so while addressing the major concerns around how science is organised in India, including those that Morehouse posed decades ago – remains to be seen. If we want to trace genealogies of the socio-technical imaginaries of our time and re-evaluate problems with the organisation of science and engineering in India, then this is a book worth reading.

Jahnavi Phalkey (CASI Spring 2025 Visiting Scholar) is a historian of science, filmmaker, and the Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru. She was awarded the Infosys Prize in Humanities (2023).

The article was first published in India in Transition, a publication of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.

Source: Scroll
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