I once reasoned as follows : Consider the second largest Muslim country in the world, India. Its Muslim population 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 reads 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, summarized, the Roman Script and proceeded to talk and write about my great invention. I was laughed at, jeered at, sneered and abused. I felt like Spallanzini in the 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 ears, 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. Innovation must be resisted at all costs. ’Nothing new should be done, indeed cannot be done’ is the common attitude.
  
How often do we hear the following statements:
  
n If this is an invention why isn’t it marketed?
n If it is so good, why has a White Man not discovered it first?
n You must have copied it from somewhere
n It will be only a drop in the bucket so there is no use
n 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 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 worldwide 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 sad 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 cited is the 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 Alternatives’ mudblock presses (Balram) deserved 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 thousands 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 driver 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 educated 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 innovation; 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 ourpast 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 ship-building 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 at 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 seapower. None of our fishing community is encouraged to develop the 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 worldwide.
   
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/- 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, Trivandrum, Goa, Bombay, etc. - perhaps the bulk of the protein consumed.
   
When we came up with an idea for catamarans using polyethylene pipes 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.
   
Indian Petro Chemicals Limited (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 have 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!