Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis : An essay on science and autonomy

The period since the 1990s has seen a fundamental change in the manner in which science and technology had been practised in India, viz. from an emphasis on development and self-reliance to an emphasis on integration into and connectivity with the world of global scientific and technological knowledge that – centered as it is in the US and Europe – underlies much of the global economy. While such changes naturally call for a reassessment of the earlier development model and formulation of appropriate models that overcome the inadequacies of the earlier model – a non-trivial task under any circumstances – a useful first step could be the study of a well known and successful experience under the earlier pre-liberalisation model, from the changed perspective of post-liberalisation India.