b(u)t brinjal

[Kabir Arora]

It’s more than just brinjals

Jairam Ramesh presents the profile of a technocratic politician. He has attended IIT and MIT, gone through a curriculum vitae working with Lavraj Kumar and Sam Pitroda. He has also done a stint of organisational work for the Congress understanding populist and electoral politics, comprehending the logic of the aam aadmi.

As an environment minister, he has been both decisive and open-ended, allowing for rational decision-making. Yet politics for Ramesh will not be easy. The issues are radically different. Take Bt. Is his current decision to impose a moratorium on further use enough? Will favouring public over private research help? Does being open to people’s groups dent the image of science? There is a whole gamut of questions Ramesh has to confront.

His first political move was a creditable one. It was his transition from shareholder to stakeholder decision-making. Shareholders have a financial stake while stakeholders have a claim in terms of livelihood politics, which might be more asymmetrical. Monsanto and a marginal farmer may not be equally matched.

Ramesh has emphasised community knowledge systems and their innovation. Community groups, especially farmers, groups have done a commendable job emphasising the immense variety of brinjals available. They are asking, given the fact there are 2,500 varieties of brinjals available, should Bt brinjal be allowed entry? India is a vavilov zone for brinjals in the world.

The question of diversity becomes central to democracy. Diversity offers a different model of sustainability from productivity. If productivity emphasises maximisation over homogenous space, diversity emphasises difference and adaptability over time. Each ecological niche is treated as unique. Difference is emphasised both at the level of the environment and at the level of local knowledge. Each crop becomes, as it were, a commons of people’s skills, recipes and techniques.

While the recognition of community rights is crucial, the new IPR regime and the privatisation of research has created its own set of problems. The community knowledge system confronts both public and private research. While the green revolution was publicly driven, biotechnology is controlled by private companies. Regulation has to be public and governmental. But it is not only a process of standards and regulation. The community and the market sometimes ignore the norm. Bt cotton was grown in 10,000 acres in Gujarat. When smuggling is a form of technology transfer, regulation means very little. Also one has to understand that in India Bt might enter the food chain earlier than it does elsewhere.

What we face now are four stakeholders — the consumer, the community of farmers, the public and private regimes of research. For the first two, the liberalisation has altered things. Choice has become as critical as alternatives and the farmer as consumer prefers a cafeteria model of choices to a restricted regime of alternatives. Desire has been profoundly liberating and both the body and the seed have exploded beyond the sacramental. People wish to experiment and sometimes value choice and experimentation over consequences.

At the next level, we have the question of science. Unfortunately in India, science is misread twice and usually by intelligent people. The first is Kapil Sibal’s error of saying the prestige of science and Indian scientists must be protected. If Sibal wishes to protect public science from private science, or Indian scientific community from multinationals, there is no harm. But protecting science is a different activity.

Science and the prestige of science are too often twinned with the status of the nation state. Critiquing science or scientists is often seen as being anti-national. The Indian scientific establishment in particular tends to resent criticism of science. Witness for example the response to the debates on dams, or nuclear energy, or even the green revolution. India as a nation has not participated in the critical changes that have occurred in science. The role of dissenting groups in creating a critique of science in India is more respected abroad than here. But science and scientific debates have changed in a way our illiterate elite including our science policy establishment does not understand.

The nature of risk has changed science. Science is no longer the domain of predictable or repeatable knowledge. There are uncertainties to knowledge. The question is not just of ignorance. It is not just that we will find out a bit later. There is a possibility we will never know.

This uncertainty in science affects decision-making in knowledge systems. The conventional model of knowledge emphasises the possibility of maximising or optimising information. Now we face the possibility of uncertainty. One cannot merely engage in satisficing, making do with less information.

There are serious ethical consequences. One has to formulate the equivalence of a polluter pays principle, where a polluter is responsible even if he did not know the full consequences of an action. One needs a theory of prudence and humility which does not treat the expert as sacrosanct. Harbouring ideas of the prestige of Indian science, when science itself is changing might lead to quixotic decisions.

Ramesh’s ideas of ‘rationality’ in science have to be re-examined. When uncertainty is both epistemic and ontological, one has to search for other forms of ecological and philosophical connectivity.

We have to acknowledge the realism of a deeper level. Some of the choices made in biotechnology are evolutionarily irreversible. Decision is no longer a question of public vs private or of rational judgment; we have to realise our decisions affect the future in radically new ways, where repair may not be possible.

This raises the question of the rights of the future in our current ideas of democracy. The future, like the marginals, is a constituency that the stakeholders model of democracy must recognise. Neither market nor democracy has yet devised models or ‘the wild ethics’ required to meet such issues. They involve notions of time and uncertainty which will become more important in biotechnology and nanotechnology.

The issue thus is bigger than Bt brinjals as case law and Ramesh as environment minister. We have to think of frameworks that incorporate lives, livelihood, the multiplicity of time and uncertainties of knowledge into models of science and democracy. Jairam Ramesh can do a lot to open up the styles, rituals and content of the debates on science. Given the Teflon coating of arrogant expertise, science has become deaf to alternative voices. The minister is in a crucial position to act creatively to rework the relationship between science and democracy in India.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist