Science and Technology Studies (STS) aka Science, Technology and Society Studies is a fast growing field of academic inquiry in India since the 1980s. STS has developed in the country from the science movements of the 1970s and 1980s as well as the scholarly criticism of science and technology policies of the Indian state. Now the field is established with at least five generations of scholars and several departments and institutes specialising on science policy studies/STS.
Contents
Origin and Development
The field has a long history in India that goes back to the late 1970s, with the works of J.P.S. Uberoi, Ashis Nandy, Vandana Shiva, Claude Alvares and Shiv Visvanathan. However, there is a first generation of scholars from the 1970s who looked at science and technology generally from a Marxist perspective (and not from the purview of post-Kuhnian STS) such as Dharampal, Abdur Rahman,. Debiprasad Chattopadhyay, and SN Sen. Works of J.D. Bernal and Joseph Needham had a strong influence on the Indian STS in its formative years. The New Social Movements of the 1970s and 1980s in India contributed immensely to the emergence of the discipline, as these movements and activists groups influenced by Marxist, Gandhian and deep ecological perspectives could not avoid engaging with modern science and the modernization project in the post-colony. An important turning point was the creation of two institutions to study the social relations of science: Center for Interaction of Science and Society, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (estd. 1970), and the National Institute for Science, Technology and Development Studies (NISTADS), New Delhi (estd: 1980). However, the Center for Interaction of Science and Society was closed down in the late 1970s by the state, finding it too critical of the nuclear energy/weaponry policies of the Indira Gandhi regime. In the 1990s, the field became vibrant with the intervention of a group of social historians of science inspired by postcolonial studies such as Deepak Kumar, Dhruv Raina, S. Irfan Habib, Itty Abraham, and Gyan Prakash. Works of sociologists like VV Krishna, E. Haribabu and Binaykumar Patnaik also are significant to the development of the field, along with the philosophical enquiries of Sunder Sarukkai.
Institutes and Departments
Several departments of science policy studies were launched in the new millennium with a strong foundation in STS such as Center for Knowledge Culture and Innovation Studies (CKCIS), University of Hyderabad (2006), and Centre for Studies in Science, Technology & Innovation Policy, Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar (2009). The revamping of the Centre for Interaction of Science and Society at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, under the new name of Centre for Studies in Science Policy (CSSP) in the year 2000 was the first among this. The Humanities of Social Sciences Departments of many of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) have several faculty members trained in the field, and the number of scholars specializing on STS is steadily increasing in the country.