In memoriam
Amulya K.N. Reddy
IN an autobiographical piece published in the pages of this journal, Professor Amulya K.N. Reddy referred to himself as a socially responsible scientist and maverick. This self-description fitted him to the cue. Prof, as he was known to those who worked with him at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and the Karnataka State Council for Science and Technology, passed away on 7 May after a protracted illness. He was 75 and is survived by his wife Vimala and three daughters.
Over the past two weeks, those of us who worked with Prof have asked ourselves repeatedly what could possibly explain the loss of concern of scientists in India with the socially and economically depressed sections of society. In the current celebration of the information and knowledge society, there is little concern for the broad majority who do not participate in these fantasies.1 Prof understood that technological hubris never took anybody very far and, as a scientist, he tried to address the gap between the promise of technology and the millions of Indians who were denied its benefits. It is this concern that inspired his move from a career as an electrochemist at the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore to the energy and developmental needs of rural India in the early 1970s. Reflecting upon this shift in a piece in the Annual Review of Energy and Environment, he wrote:
I criticized Indian science and technology for allying itself with the elitist pattern of industrialization and demanded that it should devote itself to the generation of an alternative pattern of capital-saving labour-intensive technologies of relevance to the rural poor. While the essence of this argument is still valid, I soon realized that one must also consider the downstream benefits of investment. Thus, capital-intensive chip manufacture can generate considerable downstream employment in the services sector.
The optimism characterizing science and technology that marked the 1950s began to come undone in the 1970s. The world of science was under pressure to devise credible responses to the energy and environmental crises of those years. And that apart, there was growing scepticism about how far science had addressed the developmental mandate that it was conferred with in the early years of Indian independence. Other than the convulsions this triggered within the realm of science policy, a number of experiments to reinvent science and technology to a different developmental context had begun to blossom in those years. Bangalore, Chennai, Hoshangabad, Jaipur, Mumbai, New Delhi, Shahdol, Tilonia, Thiruvananthapuram, were some of the places where scientists and students strained to work towards developing a new thinking about science in relationship to society. At the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore a reputed electrochemist was making a career switch during this period. He mobilised a group of scientists at the Institute to create a Cell for the Application of Science and Technology to Rural Areas (ASTRA). The underlying economic dualism and the failure of trickle down were pivotal issues from where he drew the stimuli for his new thinking about technological innovation for rural areas.
The act of proposing a research programme that radically differed from research priorities at Indias premier scientific institution required daring and courage. In the most heated of discussions, he reserved the right to what he would much later call polite dissent.
In proposing a centre to work on the technological needs of rural areas, Prof saw that his task was to convince his peers that there were problems that required technological skills and inputs from first-rate scientists and that this endeavour was not of any less importance than the conventional pursuits of research departments. Thus while he developed new criteria for the choice of technology and relevance, at no point did he undermine existing research priorities. He was opening a new window and several of his colleagues responded positively to his exhortations to join the new endeavour. Amongst the pioneers in India on research into non-conventional sources and energy policy, the insistence on high quality science and peer review was, he felt, essential to nurturing the discipline.
One of the high points in his career was his collaboration between 1978 and 1988 with Thomas Johansson, Jose Goldemberg and Robert Williams that resulted in the two-volume book, Energy for a Sustainable World. The quartet was awarded the Volvo Environment Prize in 2000 for this work, and Profs acceptance speech at the awards ceremony reveals the careful, sensitive and painstaking nature of collaborative research.
In this transition from hard core science to appropriate technology, Prof enlarged his collegial circle to include some of Indias leading social scientists. This dissident scientist, who never parted from his moorings in the world of science, engaged creatively with the social sciences in his pursuit of a new idiom of social relevance. His conversations with the educationist J.P. Naik, and leading economists such as Amiya Bagchi, Nirmal Chandra, C.T. Kurien, K.N. Raj and Joan Robinson, and policy-makers that included P.N. Haksar, C. Subramaniam and M.Y. Ghorpade, as well as his relationships with leading scientist colleagues both in India and abroad played a significant role in setting the agenda for ASTRA. A story he was fond of relating in his lectures and talks recounting the founding of ASTRA, was the difficulty in finding any consensus on the notion of development in the economics literature. Joan Robinson, whom he probably met at the Centre for Development Studies told him that if he got embroiled in that debate ASTRA would end up doing little, and urged him to start work and leave the economists to sort that one out.
The important point nevertheless was that Prof Reddy was comfortable in the world of social sciences and saw its deep relevance to his own work. While confident in his own paradigm, he was curious about the work and approaches of social scientists. This curiosity did not just extend to the social sciences, and was evident in the time he spent with students and young scholars discussing their research and constantly encouraging them. Students at CDS recall his visits to the centre where he spent his mornings in the canteen learning about their research.
Two related issues dominated his thinking: the relationship between science, technology and equitable development; and in his later years the relationship between technology and values. As a doctoral student at Imperial College, London, he had become acquainted with the writings of the Visible College on science and society. However, in personal conversations he professed to have been more deeply influenced by Hyman Levys humanist approach the web of thought and action than by J.D. Bernals, which he considered ideological dogmatism. In Profs own words:
In 1955, I went to Imperial College, London, for my Ph.D. Vimala joined me there after a few months those were wonderful days. We saw plays, visited art museums, participated in poetry reading, and made many friends. In particular, we developed a friendship with Hyman Levy, Professor of Mathematics, Imperial College, and a prolific writer on social thinking. I read his books, discussed them with him, and learnt how to think dialectically about dynamic systems.
He was deeply embarrassed about being a signatory to the scientific temper document and sought in subsequent years, as controversy burgeoned over the seeming prescriptive arrogance of the document, to distance himself from its message. Many years after the debate had died down; he returned to the question of the scientific approach and attempted to codify how he worked as a scientist. The critique of modern technology launched by Ashis Nandy and Shiv Visvanathan and others disturbed him profoundly. Engaging with their scholarship and in conversation with them, he was compelled to clarify his own views on the matter and to come up with an effective riposte. An evolution of his thought on technology and values is seen in his Sadaat Hassan Manto Lecture where he came down heavily on the notion of technological neutrality and sought to delineate the linkages between science and violence. Almost as an afterthought to that lecture he pointed out that: After Pokhran II, there was a distressingly and disappointingly small minority of Indian scientists who spoke up against the nuclear tests. Though I was one of them, my attitude intensified after.
This brings me to his close association with social movements and in particular with the peoples science movements. Whether the struggles of the science movements involved issues of energy policy, big dams, intellectual property rights or nuclear disarmament, Prof always lent his analytical weight and skills to the cause. He will be deeply missed in those circles. This is particularly so in an environment where science is considered not so much about the common good, but about commodities, products and patents.
The efficient management of science was another important concern which is reflected in his writings on R&D management and consistent interventions on questions of governance. Having seen through the miserable experiments with building scientific institutions and organizations in India, he struggled, to say the least, to go beyond the impediments he had identified. Putting it mildly, he was finally dissatisfied with the results. This may have been an outcome of his nonconformist nature that possibly distanced him from the concerns of the mainstream of academia. N.V. Krishna, an associate from the early years of ASTRA and KSCST, could not have put it more aptly: His ambitions were somehow not aligned with institution building, while at an intellectual level, he saw the need for doing so.
Prof lived in a lane in Bangalore where he had his colleagues, Satish Dhawan and S.Ramaseshan, both now deceased, as neighbours. All three of them entertained a vision of science in India. Many elements in this vision were shared though the pictures may have differed in detail. Straying down that lane I cannot but with dismay and sadness see the end of an era when scientists displayed a deep social commitment and ethical responsibility.
Dhruv Raina
Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies,
School of Social Systems, JNU, Delhi
Footnote:
1. I owe much of what is said here to a collective exchange over several years and more so recently between Amarnath Bhat, Kisan Bhat, N.V. Krishna, S. Rajagopalan, and Vinod Vyasulu.
