Explain the idea of social responsibility of science. Analyse the social consequences of development of science and technology in the context of removal of backwardness in developing societies. (2006)
Science is not only a method but a social institution with its own norms, patrons and consequences. The question carries two demands: what obligation that institution owes society, and what happens when it is mobilised by a late-developing society to abolish backwardness.
The idea of social responsibility of science
- Robert K. Merton, in “The Normative Structure of Science” (1942), described the ethos of science as four institutional imperatives — communism (findings are common property), universalism (claims judged by impersonal criteria, not by the claimant’s race, nation or caste), disinterestedness and organised scepticism. Responsibility is built into this ethos: publicly owned knowledge carries a public obligation.
- J. D. Bernal (The Social Function of Science, 1939) pressed the stronger claim that science must be consciously planned for human welfare rather than left to the market or the military.
- Max Weber (“Science as a Vocation”, 1917) set the limit: science establishes means and consequences but cannot supply ends. The scientist therefore cannot hide behind neutrality, because choosing what to investigate, and for whom, is already a value choice.
- The atomic bomb made the obligation concrete. The Russell–Einstein Manifesto (1955) asked scientists to remember their humanity, and produced the Pugwash Conferences from 1957, which with Joseph Rotblat received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 — scientists constituted as a transnational moral constituency.
- India located responsibility in society as much as in the laboratory: Jawaharlal Nehru‘s scientific temper (The Discovery of India, 1946), Homi J. Bhabha‘s framing of atomic energy as a development instrument, and Article 51A(h), which since 1976 makes developing scientific temper a fundamental duty of every citizen.
- Ulrich Beck adds the contemporary twist: science now produces the very risks it is asked to adjudicate, an organised irresponsibility in which no institution owns the harm.
Social consequences in the removal of backwardness
The gains are real and measurable. Improved seeds and irrigation turned a food-importing country into a surplus producer; vaccines and antibiotics transformed survival, with full immunisation coverage rising from 62 per cent in 2015 to 98.4 per cent by January 2026, and the Universal Immunisation Programme now reaching about 2.54 crore newborns a year.
But consequences are distributed, not shared.
- Francine Frankel (India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs, 1971) showed the gains concentrating where irrigation and capital already existed, sharpening class and regional differentiation and creating an assertive propertied peasantry.
- Michael Cernea‘s impoverishment-risks model names the hidden cost. Walter Fernandes estimates over 60 million people displaced by development projects between 1947 and 2000, roughly 40 per cent of them tribal, with only about a fifth resettled.
- Shiv Visvanathan argues that transferring technique while discounting local knowledge denies cognitive justice, and Yogendra Singh (Modernization of Indian Tradition, 1973) found modernisation being absorbed into caste and kin structures rather than dissolving them.
Conclusion
Science removes backwardness only where it is coupled to redistribution and to institutions that can absorb its costs; otherwise it modernises inequality. Social responsibility is therefore not an ethical supplement to science but the condition on which its developmental promise depends — which is why Amartya Sen‘s test, what people are actually able to do and to be, remains the right measure of any technology.