'Science, technology and medicine in India, 1930-2000: The problem of poverty.'
Dr Sarah Hodges, Warwick
Professor Mohan Rao, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Supported by a British Academy International Partnership Award (South Asia), 2010-2013
PROJECT OVERVIEW
This three-year programme of research, workshops and teaching connects established faculty, post-doctoral scholars and postgraduates in India and the UK to examine how far and how effectively projects of science, technology and medicine have addressed questions of poverty in India or instead contributed to their intensification (or concealment) between 1930 and 2000. Poverty was the predominant economic/political/social paradigm within which late colonial, nationalist and post-independence era policy was constructed. This project assesses what happened to articulate or supplant this optic by the close of the twentieth century. It explores the significance, for the earlier paradigm of poverty eradication, of India’s recent economic successes for the research, policy, and practice of science, technology and medicine in India. Has the problem of poverty in India been solved, or has the study of poverty become inconvenient alongside the rise of new narratives that frame India as a site of inspirational economic growth?