The unfinished promise of Indian science

This book, The Scientific Enterprise in India, published by the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) commemorates 90 years of the institute’s service to science and humanity. It covers vast array of scientific subjects and is characterised as distinctive in its focus on the philosophy, principles and governance of science, rather than on its outcomes alone.

A country as vast and diverse as India, with its many layers of knowledge and ways of life, no doubt needs a publication that asks what science has done to ameliorate the everyday problems of ordinary citizens. Yet, over these 90 years, centuries-old drudgery has persisted. Blind beliefs are reinforced. Scientific temper is waning. Traditional and experiential knowledge is being lost across generations as textbooks, digital notebooks displace it with banal texts.

By drudgery I mean something quite specific. Consider the sanitation worker who must still enter a septic tank or handle faecal sludge by hand; or the farmer offered a choice between an age-old hand tool and a machine that performs the same task faster but deprives them or a hired labourer of work. Neither case offers a technology that eases the burden while preserving the person’s livelihood. Instead, technology either leaves the drudgery intact, dressing it up in a tracking application or a subsidy scheme, or eliminates the drudgery by eliminating the worker. That distinction, between easing work and displacing the worker, is largely absent from this book. It is this yardstick by which I assess the volume in this review.

There is a second, related opportunity that the book largely misses, one that goes directly to the “perceptive and prescriptive” brief set out …

This review was first published in the November 1-15, 2026 print edition of Down To Earth