Write short note: Social consequences of science and technology in India. (2005)
In India science and technology arrived as instruments of a planned developmental state, so their effects were filtered through caste, class, gender and region rather than dissolving them. The record is one of genuine new capability alongside newly technologised inequality.
Agrarian transformation
- The seed–fertiliser–irrigation package ended dependence on food imports within two decades.
- Francine Frankel (India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs, 1971) showed the gains concentrating in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh among owner-cultivators with capital, producing a politically assertive middle and rich peasantry while tenants and labourers gained least.
- Mechanisation displaced labour, and Vandana Shiva (The Violence of the Green Revolution, 1991) added the ecological indictment — groundwater depletion, monoculture and input dependence, now visible in the falling water tables of the north-west.
Health transition
Vaccines, antibiotics and institutional delivery transformed survival; full immunisation coverage rose from 62 per cent in 2015 to 98.4 per cent by January 2026, life expectancy more than doubled since independence, and the disease burden shifted from communicable to chronic illness. Medical technology also restratified care, concentrating specialists and equipment in private urban hospitals, so that access to advanced treatment now tracks income rather than need. The public teleconsultation platform eSanjeevani had provided over 43 crore consultations by November 2025, largely because specialists are absent where patients are.
Technology and gender: sex determination
Ultrasonography, a diagnostic advance, became an instrument of son preference — a technique acquiring the values of the society that adopts it. The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994 prohibits sex determination, yet NFHS-5 (2019–21) records a sex ratio at birth below 900 in Goa (838), Himachal Pradesh (875) and Telangana (894), and a fall in Kerala from 1,047 to 951. Prosperity and technology together worsened the outcome — evidence against any simple modernisation thesis.
Digital stratification
The 75th round of the national sample survey (2017–18) found computers in 4.4 per cent of rural against 23.4 per cent of urban households, and internet access in 14.9 against 42.0 per cent. Digital public infrastructure has since widened reach, but Pippa Norris‘s distinction between a divide in access and a divide in meaningful use still separates those who transact online from those who are merely enrolled.
Displacement
Walter Fernandes estimates over 60 million people displaced by projects between 1947 and 2000, about 40 per cent of them tribal, with only a fifth resettled — Michael Cernea‘s impoverishment risks realised. The 2013 land acquisition law made consent and rehabilitation statutory, acknowledging the cost long after it was incurred, and the resistance it followed — from the Narmada valley onwards — shows displacement generating a politics of its own.
Conclusion
Technology in India has worked as an amplifier rather than a leveller: it multiplies the capacity of whoever already holds land, literacy and capital. Its social consequences are decided by the structures it enters, which is why regulation, redistribution and rehabilitation belong inside technology policy rather than beside it.