One of the greatest challenges that the nation faces today is the uneven distribution of benefits of economic development and the widening gaps in income, Member of Planning Commission, Government of India, K. Kasturirangan has said.
He was delivering the keynote address at the inaugural ceremony of the 23rd Kerala Science Congress at the Centre for Earth Science Studies here on Saturday.
He said that science and technology played a crucial role in inclusive growth. With decentralised planning and resource management becoming the norm, the need for access to better technologies at the grassroots would become more critical. There was an urgent need to strengthen the capacity of decentralised institutions, especially panchayats, to manage the resources more efficiently and sustainably.
“Improvement in governance and delivery of basic services is a key element of empowerment and as you all know we have a very serious deficit as regards transparency and governance,” Dr. Kasturirangan said.
Productivity
A major issue in the context of Kerala was the need to improve productivity and income in the traditional sectors, especially agriculture—in particular rice and coconut—and traditional industries such as coir, bamboo and textiles. The small size of holdings necessitated significant refinement of technologies to make them appropriate to the needs of small-scale operations. “We all know that low productivity and hence low wages are reducing labour availability and the increasing dependence on migrant workers. The only option is to improve productivity of both land and labour, in order to provide better income,” he said.
Value addition
Of particular importance were value-addition technologies. As such the nation's value addition was rather insignificant and several products were marketed without any value-addition at all. Considering that most technologies had evolved in the context of relatively cheap supplies of fossil fuels, long-term sustainability and reducing the carbon footprint would require a major shift towards renewable energy technologies, Dr. Kasturirangan.
He said managing municipal solid waste continued to be a major challenge, particularly so in a densely populated State such as Kerala. Here again, the need was to develop small-scale waste management units and their wider diffusion so that waste could be recycled at source.
Building a sustainable and equitable society required significant investments in science and technology. Although there had been a spurt in such investments, it was still far short of the investments in developed economies. In terms of conventional indicators including number of patents, number of researchers per million people and share of high-technology exports, India lagged behind its competitors, both in terms of innovation and diffusion, Dr. Kasturirangan said.
Quality improvement
“While we have built up a strong institutional foundation for science and technology, more efforts need to be directed at qualitative improvements and in particular nurturing a culture of enquiry and questioning and building an environment for critical analysis. Many of our science institutions are still in the traditional management mould and this is not conducive for the development of science. More worrying is the persistence of the ‘silo approach' and the strong barriers to inter-disciplinary research…. Certainly this would require a very different approach to accountability of the R&D system. Accountability as such is defined in a very narrow sense, mostly to satisfy outdated accounting manuals and not from the perspective of outputs and outcomes.”
Taking advantage of the human resource with the highest development index in the country, the Kerala Development Model has to be transformed into a green economy. Popularly defined sectors of a green economy were renewable energy, clean transportation, water management, waste management and land management on the three cardinal principles of environmental sustainability, socially justifiability and having local roots, he added.
