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Nipped in the
Bud
Indian inventions
I
once reasoned as follows: Consider the second largest Muslim country in the
world, India. Its Muslim populations is uneducated, poor and unhealthy,
especially its women. Quite a large part of Northern India is affected by the
fact that a large number read from right to left (or are supposed to) and the
remainder from left to right-indeed it is National Dyslexia Institutionalised.
Dyslexia is the inability to tell right from left and quite often results in
lateral displacement of words and letters. Examples are Nakhlau for Lucknow,
Jarnail for General, Iskander for Sikander etc. Since Independence we have not
really done much to bring these people into the mainstream; (India has one of
the poorest records in the world in mass educational programmes); Therefore we
could do the following; adopt a national boustrophedonic script; a
boustrophedonic script is one where one line reds from left to right, the next
line from right to left and so on. This I thought should convince Muslims
about our sincerity and help them to advance. To do this of course, your
letters need to have vertical symmetry, since each letter should read the same
seen from either side, e.g.’o’,’I’,’l’ etc. I then symmetrised the
Roman Script and proceeded to talk and write about my great invention. I was
laughed at, jeered at, sneered at and abused. I felt like Spallanzini (1700’s)
who at Pavia, Italy announced that bats located insects by sonar (echo)
"Ho, ho, ho" said the academics, "if bats see with their cars,
what do they hear with their eyes" and proceeded to boot Spallanzini out
of town.
This story is told here not because of the excellence of the idea itself, but
because the reaction is a common Indian attitude towards innovation.
Innovations must be resisted at all cost –‘nothing new should be done,
indeed cannot be done’ is the common attitude.
How often do we hear the following statements:
If this is an
invention why isn’t it marketed?
If it is so good, why has a white man not discovered it first?
You must have copied it from somewhere,
It will be only a drop in the bucket so there is no use,
Don’t re-invent the wheel etc.
Apart from telling people that if we don’t re-invent the wheel, we will
never get the maintenance manual, there seems to be really no answer or
antidote to being in this abyss of non-confidence that we have fallen into.
Indian needs, not a few but thousands of inventions in technology since our
problems are unique to us and cannot be tackled by easy modifications of
imported technology. Unless there are ten invention failures, we will never to
able to arrive at the one success. There is no short cut to trial and error.
Apart from telling people that if we don’t re-invent the wheel, we will
never get the maintenance manual, there seems to be really no answer or
antidote to being in this abyss of no-confidence that we have fallen into.
India needs, not a few but thousands of inventions in technology since our
problems are unique to us and cannot be tackled by easy modifications of
imported technology. Unless there are ten invention failures, we will never be
able to arrive at the one success. There is no short cut to trial and error.
Before I discuss some of the many technology innovations that we tried and
sometimes succeeded in, it is necessary to point out how much mental
bootstrapping Indians really need. Even the newspapers that staunchly
supported Mohandas Gandhi, today support only foreign technology since Indians
feel that they are part of a ‘Wounded Civilisation’, that cannot repair
itself. I shall take as an example a recent article in "The Hindu"
(a daily newspaper) in its Open Page. Incidentally the article is a long
lament from behind sack-cloth and ashes of how bad Indian Science and
Technology is. The author says:
‘The London Economist, in a recent study on innovation as central to
economic growth, noted that the average number of world-wide citations for
scientific papers published in the countries of the West in the decade from
1981 varied between 1,12,000 in Italy and 17,63,000 in the U.S,,,’
‘It is said to reflect that India has not been able to present a single
paper acceptable to the international scientific community in the past decade’.
The point has been completely missed. Inventions, to say the least, are not
publishable. Even if someone in the West is philanthropic enough to share his
knowledge and not worry about patents etc, an invention by definition is so
new that it will mostly be rejected at peer review because of lack of
sufficient information. So publications and invention have little to do with
each other. The fact that Indian papers are not cites is a travesty of Science
but most Indian scientists, I know, are not cited because they are quite
simply not published by Western journals. To say that Indians do not innovate
(evidence: they are not published) is rubbish.
Development Alternative’s mudblock presses (Balram) deserve Ph.Ds en
masse,
but they would not be considered science. To say that Indian innovation is
valid only when the White Man accepts it is so defeatist as to belie belief.
Unfortunately it is an attitude from the Prime Minister to peasants.
The key word is "innovation". Indians have been innovators for
thousand of years. One sees this even today in every small shop which repairs
bicycles, umbrellas, vessels, plastic buckets, shoes; this list is by no means
complete. I have dealt with mechanics who have repaired parts which were
condemned and presumably could only be imported. To give an example, a giant
pile river which was imported, and which had to be replaced, was repaired, a
feat considered impossible by the Englishman who had imported it. I have seen
a perfect globular stainless steel sphere, hand-fabricated to equal the best
model available from Czechoslovakia and sold only in one street in Zhaveri
Bazaar in Bombay. Hundreds of examples can be found among barely education but
skilled workers.
We Indians, as said before, have been inventors and innovators. Only if you go
to Africa or South East Asia or Australia you realise how advanced our
artisans really are. Nature survives on innovations; that is what evolution is
all about. Indians have survived under conditions that no one else can,
because they are inventive.
Until we realise that traditional knowledge systems are what have brought us
this far, and we are proud of our heritage, we can never build on our past and
be a part of so-called progress. The following example may serve to focus
attention on some aspects of our Science & Technology traditions. It may
be noticed that encouragement in all these areas has been negligible since
Independence and none of these has been held up by Indians with any national
pride; needless to say, financial support unlike in glamour areas, (or violent
areas) like atomic energy or space or defence has been zero.
As an example consider this: between 1760 and 1880 the British merchant navy
and the Royal Navy increased four fold. Britannia truly ruled the waves. The
consequence was that the teak forests of India were ravaged. But who taught
the British to build ships out of teak?
Ever since antiquity Indian shipbuilding was famous. Our ships sailed the
Eastern and Western oceans. From Bandar Abbas to Guangzhou, the hulls of
Beypore were famous. Today the ship building industry of Calicut/Beypore is
barely alive. Even now there has been no engineering study of our native naval
architecture. Possessing 7000 kms of coastline, we are an nth
rate-sea-power. None of our fishing community are encouraged to develop their
traditional skills.
At one time, the Mediterranean Sea was an active pearl fishing area using the
dark Tamils of India. How did they alone end up in the service of Greeks and
Romans for pearl diving? They had developed the art of diving for pearls in
the Gulf of Mannar, which knowledge was respected world-wide.
Let alone large boats and pearls, the art and craft of rafted hulls,
exemplified in the modern Catamaran (Kattumaram) was exclusive to us. To my
knowledge, even Rs.5/- (five only) has not been spent on Catamaran research
since Independence. In spite of this, our tiny fishing sector supplies fish to
eight of the largest cities in India: Calcutta, Bhubaneswar, Vishakhapatnam,
Madras, Pondicherry, Trivandrum, Goa, Bombay etc - perhaps the bulk of the
protein consumed.
When we came up with an idea for catamarans using polyethylene pile because
wood was difficult to get, we realised that the traditional craft had evolved
over thousands of years and was almost a perfect design for the conditions
under which they were needed in the tropical warm waters of India. The attempt
was therefore not an innovation in design but an innovation in materials
technology.
IPCL was the largest supplier of polyethylene in India. Their officers scoffed
at the idea of making hulls out of polyethylene water-pipe. The Swedish FAO
Officer in India said that such boats did not exist in India. NABARD said that
since they had already subsidised fibreglass boats, they could not possibly
help in polyethylene craft and set off "a battle between plastics".
DST said that they were not in the business of rural technology and CAPART
said that they do not do Science and Technology work, only extension. So here
we are.
After writing this article, we have just received an invitation from Delhi
(another way of saying HEAVEN) to come for a meeting to understand Technology
Absorption from abroad. It is clear. No technology can be invented or
innovated without the white man’s approval.
Oh for someone to encourage creativity!
Dr. C.V.
Seshadri
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