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to repeal the Indian Independence Act of 1947? Fortunately, there could be a better solution based on the trinity of technol-ogy, management and systems.

The people are the problem

Expecting government officials to shun corruption or the electorate to vote ra-tionally is like expecting Kolkata to have a weather like Darjeeling. There may be a few exceptions here and there but by and large, very very unlikely.

We need to work with these two assumptions. Bending, breaking and abusing the system is a leitmotif of India. Individual Indians may be sane and rational, but en masse and as a collective, they will never be. This is the founda-tional principle on which the governance of India needs to be based.

Since people are at the heart of the problem, we need to minimize their role in discretionary decisions and, to the ex-tent possible, from the delivery process. Cellphones succeeded where land phones failed because they did not need an army of corrupt, anarchic people to maintain the thousands of lines running across the country. The towers are unmanned and the central switches need a few compe-tent people.

This is a perfect example of a technol-ogy trumping the accumulated hubris of centuries and is the model that we must try to emulate in other areas as well.

This though, is easier said than done!

The technology is never the issue but to implement it against the wishes of people, who see this as an infringement

of their fundamental right to be corrupt or anarchic, is the real challenge. This is where smart management techniques can come in very handy. The key is to use the carrot and the stick to cajole, convince, convert, confuse or coerce everyone, so that they have no option but to be yoked to structured technology-enabled systems.

Individual brilliance and creativity is great, and diversity is something wonder-ful to celebrate. However, if cars do not stop at traffic lights but only when people block the road, then society collapses into the kind of anarchy that India is familiar with. Net-net, we need to design systems that will bring technology and manage-ment techniques into the governance pro-cess in a manner that minimizes the need for people in the governance process.

Is this possible at all? To a large

extent, yes

Since data should be the basis of any ra-tional decision, our systems must collect data and place it in the public domain. Next, a clear set of algorithms, or rules, must be put in place so that the data itself drives decisions—say, approvals for or limits on expenditure, the quantum of taxes due—in a way where humans have only a supervisory role.

Finally the data, the process of ar-riving at a decision and the decision itself must be automatically visible to the public. This is a generic template for transparent governance.

A simple example would be a Wikimapia-style map showing physical locations of NREGA projects along with

time-stamped, GPS-encoded pictures shot before and after the project is executed—without which no further funds will be released to the panchayat in question. Three previous articles in these columns have shown how similar systems can in-deed be designed to help expedite justice in courts, facilitate elections and track corruption at the operational level.

The design and implementation of such systems would of course eliminate a lot of redundant but hugely lucrative positions in the administration and so would be stoutly resisted by an army of the most corrupt. This can be overcome only if the elected leadership has the political will and the administrative wherewithal to place a few honest and technophile administrators at key deci-sion making posts in government. This is the only, and minimal, ask if we want to see technology-enabled rationality in the governance of this country.

The tyranny of a Singapore-style benevolent dictatorship may pose too big a risk for a big, multicultural country like India, but the tyranny of systems developed and deployed by a few smart and well-meaning people employed by an elected government is the answer to India’s perennial problems.

The author is an engineer by education, a pro-grammer by passion, a teacher by profession, an imagineer by intention. He teaches at Praxis Business School, Kolkata, and has authored The Road to pSingularity which explores the intersection of computer science, genetics and Advaita Vedanta. Follow @prithwis on Twitter

Individual brilliance and creativity is great, and diversity is something to celebrate. However, if cars don’t stop at traffic lights but only when people block the roads, then society collapses into the kind of anarchy India is familiar with

Their modus operandi is simple—confuse the public, increase anxiety, and politicize the issue; if nothing works, file a PIL.

F OR THE BETTER part of the 20th century, so called “liber-als” on both the left and the right have been waging a war on climate change, the theory of

evolution, vaccination, nuclear energy, and genetically modified (GM) food, and have polarized the world. The big ques-tion is why so many reasonable people disbelieve science in spite of enjoying the fruits of modern science and technology in their daily lives.

For those who have tracked the global movement against nuclear energy or GM foods or vaccinations, a pattern seems to emerge that cuts across all such social movements.

The worldviews of those supporting and those opposing these technolo-gies are vastly different. Any dialogue between the two is really a challenging task. Positions have become so hardened that it is affecting development of na-tions. Some governments have become tired of engaging with “civil society”, and have initiated serious actions against groups that are impeding development in the name of assessing the safety of the technologies and their risks to the environment. India has banned interna-tional NGO Greenpeace from receiving any foreign funding. This action is sure to send a strong message to other NGOs who carry on unreasonable agitations to stall or deny development projects.

Professor Marcel Kunz, writing in the prestigious EMBO Journal, describes the anti-science movement as the post-mod-ernist assault on science. He argues that the rational scientific view of the world has been painstakingly constructed over millennia to guarantee that research can be subjected to the most rigorous objec-

tivity tests, and verify universal truths through experimentation. Scientific au-thorities are challenged not only for their honesty and professional integrity, but also the methods they use in the process of scientific inquiry. The ironic situation with liberals bashing science is that all of them believe in the science of climate change and accept it and even fight for it, whereas they simply dismiss the science of GM food and accuse all GM scientists of being corrupt and dishonest.

Anti-GM activists have gone so far as to even construct “parallel science” to challenge mainstream science. For exam-ple, the notorious Seralini experiments of feeding GM foods to rats that subsequent-ly developed horrible cancerous growths. The whole thing was proved to be a fraud, and the journal retracted the paper after a huge protest from the mainstream scientific establishment.

There are NGOs in India who keep alleging that GM crops have killed cows, buffaloes, sheep, and peacock, have caused skin irritation in cotton field workers, and led to early puberty in young female workers in the field. Anti-tech NGOs organized a group of 100 Ayurvedic physicians to write a letter to the Ministry of Environment to not allow Bt brinjal as it will affect their medicine system. When investigated, it turned out that most of these physicians knew next to nothing about Bt brinjal or its science. The same goes for a petition with 250 scientists as signatories. More than half of them were not even scientists, and other half had no knowledge or expertise in new biology.

The tactic here is simple—hoodwink the government by saying doctors and scientists are opposed to GM technology,

and therefore it must not be allowed. It is not very easy to counter bad

science all the time. It takes time and money, and how many can afford it? A group of civil society activists have started a $25-million 25-year GM food safety testing experiment in Russia. It is really hard for mainstream scientists to imagine how a controlled experiment can be conducted on humans for such a long period and obtain any meaningful data or information. But, then these activists are determined to prove that GM foods will be harmful to humans in the long run, and want all regulatory agencies around the world to stop giving authorizations until their experiment is over.

This is wholly unacceptable to modern science, but because these zealots have the capacity to create a ruckus, many na-tional and international organizations, to just buy peace, have acquiesced to their ludicrous demands. The net result is that science suffers and progress stalls. To ac-cept the demands of the post-modernists to treat all views as equally valid is to slow or shut down research. This Luddite mentality should not be allowed to have any say in decision making in science and technology.

Environmental activists love to part-ner with post-modernists or the so called “liberals”. It is amazing that these same liberals are also referred to as “progres-sives”, when in fact they demonstrate the worst regressive attitudes toward modern science and technology. But they are not willing to give up their mobile phones, cars, and computers.

Nuclear technology is opposed in India based on what happened at Fuku-shima in Japan, a one-in-a-million event of a tsunami. India has taken all steps to

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protect the Kudankulam nuclear project in case of such natural disasters. But that does not satisfy the liberals. The other important reason is that India signed a nuclear agreement with the US that has opened avenues for bringing energy to the masses through an industry that is considered to be one of the cleanest sources of energy. Surely, India must explore all other alternative forms of energy to suit local needs, but for indus-

try and farming, India needs a reliable source and that can only come from nuclear power.

The argument against modern tech-nologies is that they are unsafe, uncer-tain, and too risky. The activists would rather have alternative energies like solar energy and other renewable energy sources, and use agro-ecological methods to do agriculture. Their proposals for alternatives seem fine, until one starts

to think through the practical aspects of serving uninterrupted goods and services to the masses over a long term. They steadfastly refuse to include nuclear en-ergy in a mix of options that can be fitted to regional and local conditions.

Post-modernists have become scepti-cal about modern science and technol-ogy based on some well-known cases of scientific malpractice by the tobacco industry and a few pharma companies. But if one were to step back and take a broader view of how modern science and technology have improved the quality of life for millions, the effects of the misde-meanours are really tiny.

Even here, what is at work is the abil-ity of the scientific enterprise to correct

For industry and farming, India needs a reliable source of power. That can only come from nuclear power, also one of the cleanest sources of energy

itself through a peer review process. Granted that the peer review process

has not always ensured accuracy of scientific progress, but there is no real al-ternative to assure the quality of science. The process has a stellar track record. The irrefutable evidence is the quantum of scientific progress achieved since the 18th century.

Post-modernists want to redefine the way science needs to be done by infusing socio-political thought into the process of scientific query. But the goal of scientific enterprise is to establish inalienable and unvarnished truth through experimental verification. Religion, society and cul-tural factors are strictly off-limits, which the liberals do not agree with. They interpret science as a part of the societal construct of humans, and therefore, sci-ence necessarily impacts society and its components, which is why social factors need to be included in assessing the util-ity and suitability of modern science and technology.

It is not easy to quarrel with this line of thought, but empirical science cannot factor in social, political and cultural factors to obtain non-corrupt data to es-tablish the cause and effect relationship. The physical and biological nature of the universe does not operate on principles of sociology. It is perfectly legitimate for social thinkers to study the sociology and politics of scientific enterprise, but they cannot dictate the design of scientific experiments.

In India, both nuclear technology and GM foods technology have come under severe attack from left wing liberals, and now from the right wing of the Sangh Parivar. Several leading nuclear experts attested to the safety of the Kudankulam nuclear energy plant, but the activ-ists would have none of it. The UPA II government had to come down heavily on them to go ahead with the project. Ironically, the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh and the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch do not seem to believe the science and scientists involved in developing GM foods.

It is really not the science, but things other than science that seem to drive these activists to keep fighting against these technologies at a time when the country is reeling under acute power shortage and future food security is under severe threat due to the effects of climate change, and serious water crisis in agriculture.

War on science has been going on since ages, and is nothing new. Pioneer-ing scientists have been condemned as heretics by the Church, and it is the same kind of people who have been attacking the sciences they become uncomfortable with. They appoint themselves arbiters of society and become interlocutors whose views must not only be respected, but implemented. Many of these objec-tors to modern science and technology consider themselves “thought leaders” whose views on a subject are supposed to be authoritative.

Yet, if one looks at these “thought leaders” in the anti-GMO firmament, most of them have no knowledge of mod-ern biology, and yet advise the govern-ment and the parliament on biotechnol-ogy’s safety and utility and even agitate, and militate against it. If nothing works, they file a PIL in the court system that will take decades to settle.

The same is the case with the nuclear energy protestors. Agitation is the most common route used in India for political purposes. Liberals thoroughly confuse the public, increase anxiety and politi-cize the issue so much that any chance of reconciliation is thrown out of the window. They also rope in the media with a saleable narrative and amplify it. Every campaign activist makes a careful decision to choose a narrative that suits his worldview.

The anti-GM lobby has been way more accomplished in shaping media coverage

than scientists. Misinformation abounds in both nuclear technology and biotech-nology debates, and it becomes a potent political tool that would take decades to resolve. Anti-technology activists have become epistemicological brokers pre-senting themselves as trusted intermedi-aries for knowledge transfer to those who have shared values.

It is critical for the general public and the not so science or techno savvy politicians to be wary of these knowledge brokers as most of them are not really trustworthy, with no expertise in the subject they are talking about. It is a gigantic task to influence public opinion; sensational and negative narratives are a lot easier to sell than thoughtful and constructive ones. But the scientific com-munity and other right-minded people should not yield to these purveyors of fear and anxiety at the cost of the coun-try’s development.

The author is a Visiting Professor at the Seed Science Center and the Biosafety Institute for the Genetically Modified Agricultural Products (BIGMAP), Iowa State University, Ames, and a graduate teaching faculty with the Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology. A former biotechnology regulator with the United States Department of Agriculture, Dr Shantharam has served as consultant to UN-FAO, UNIDO, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank. He was responsible for initiating the development of India’s biotech regulations in the early 1990s.

In India, GM foods technology has come under severe attack from left wing liberals, and ironically, also from the right wing of the Sangh Parivar