Kirti Jayakumar, from the India-based Gender Security Project, interviewed Shobita Parthasarathy about her journey into science policy, her research in India, using a social justice perspective to advance technology, and the role of law and policy. Below is an excerpt from the interview. View the full story here.
"A lot of the research I've done along the way has made me quite critical and skeptical of innovation systems, by which I mean the institutions, policies, processes, and norms that shape how we think innovation must be done. At the heart of this is the assumption that innovation must center economic benefit and impact, and that if we do that, we will produce societal benefit along the way – that is, either the economic impact will produce the social benefit, or the technologies themselves will do so. Through different projects, I've learned that it's a far more complicated story."
What is that complicated story like?
"A few years ago, I had for a long time been wanting to do research in India. I noticed that there was a lot of language about using technology for good or for equity in the Indian context. India is a particularly interesting place because it has for a very long time had the independence to think differently about the relationship between technology and society.
You can think about how Gandhi talked about the spinning wheel as a technology that could liberate the country from the colonizers. You could think about import substitution policies, you could think about India's frugal approach to the space program. All of those are attempts to implicitly or explicitly challenge the dominant approach to innovation that we use in the West. But in recent times, India's been investing heavily on what they call inclusive innovation.
I became particularly interested in sanitation and hygiene, specifically menstrual health and hygiene, which is the space where a lot of this inclusive innovation was designed to address poverty and inequality. Along the way, I discovered that it tends to become a conduit for the more dominant innovation system to take over, and attempts to foster grassroots innovation as a means of inclusive innovation fall away. Ultimately, what you have is a pretty traditional Western approach to innovation in the name of inclusion and equity, which ends up not serving the people it is designed to serve in a variety of ways. In some ways, it even ends up harming them. It is a depressing story – I am in the process of working on my next book and I'm hoping that the end of the book will be hopeful and leave people with a few strategies to really think about whether and how technological innovation can serve populations better—or, how we can design innovation systems to serve populations better.
One of the things that we see, now, is that with time, people are recognizing that this dominant innovation system is not serving them and they're fighting against it. In many ways, it has led to increased mistrust and frustration. But the dynamics are different in the Indian context. For example, where on the one hand, there's the idea that technological innovation can be the avenue and route to equity – we don’t question this because of the notion that we have extreme technological capability, and on the other hand, you have marginalized populations across the country that are not actually being served. They may not have the significant voice in pushing back, but they will. And that in itself makes it necessary to think about these issues, if we want to simply advocate for equity as a moral good."
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