Sociologists argue for democratization of science and technology for inclusive development. Comment. (2022)
Democratisation means far more than spreading scientific literacy or distributing gadgets. It means opening the agenda of research, the definition of expertise and the assessment of risk to those who bear the consequences. The argument is strong and India’s experience supports it, but it has a limit its advocates often ignore.
Why sociologists make the argument
- Robert K. Merton (1942) described science’s institutional norms — communism of findings, universalism, disinterestedness, organised scepticism. Under patents, commissioned funding and corporate laboratories actual science departs from them, making knowledge private property; democratisation demands that science live up to its own norms.
- Thomas S. Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962) showed that paradigms are sustained by a scientific community; who is admitted to that community decides which problems are recognised at all — which is why the diseases and crops of the poor remain under-researched.
- Ulrich Beck (Risk Society, 1986) argued that advanced technology generates manufactured risks decided by experts but borne by everyone. Reflexive modernisation therefore requires sub-politics: technological choice shifting from closed expert bodies into civil society.
- Brian Wynne‘s study of Cumbrian sheep farmers after Chernobyl proved the point: official radiation models failed while farmers’ local knowledge of soil and grazing held. Lay expertise is knowledge, not ignorance.
- Sheila Jasanoff‘s co-production thesis holds that scientific and social orders are made together, so each society needs a civic epistemology — a public way of testing knowledge claims. For Amartya Sen, development depends on public reasoning: inclusion means a voice in deciding what is to be developed.
The Indian evidence
- The People’s Science Movements are India’s institutional answer. The Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad’s slogan, science for social revolution, and the All India People’s Science Network of 1988 — some forty organisations — have used science kala jathas, literacy campaigns and campaigns against sex selection to mobilise teachers, workers and farmers alongside professional scientists.
- Grassroots innovation networks built around the Honey Bee Network and the National Innovation Foundation treat farmers and artisans as knowledge producers holding rights, not beneficiaries of transfer.
- The structural case is in the numbers: India’s gross expenditure on research and development has hovered near 0.64% of GDP, two-thirds of it government-funded. A base that small and narrowly recruited makes exclusion from science an extension of caste and class inequality.
- Contestation is now institutionally recognised: in its split verdict on genetically modified mustard (July 2024) the Supreme Court directed the Union to evolve a national GM policy in consultation with States and farmers’ organisations — participatory technology assessment by judicial direction.
The limit of the argument
Harry Collins and Robert Evans identify the problem of extension: if every opinion counts as expertise, technical judgement dissolves into populism. Vaccine hesitancy and the marketing of pseudo-science show the cost. Nor should local knowledge be romanticised: much of it encodes the hierarchies democratisation seeks to dismantle.
Conclusion
The defensible position separates three moments. The agenda of science and the assessment of its risks should be democratised, since they are questions of value and distribution; validation should not, since it rests on evidence. Inclusive development needs a science publicly accountable in what it chooses to study, not one publicly voted on in what it finds.