 Hi, I'm Venuta Malia. I'm delighted to be the moderator of this evening's session of Talking Red Books. Today, we are talking about this book, Knowledge as Commons, Towards Inclusive Science and Technology. It's not often that you hear of the word inclusive in relation to science and technology. And so, this is a very interesting evening for us to talk about these issues that bring science and technology together and look at it from the social relations and political economy of science and technology. I'd like to begin by introducing Robir, the author of the book, Robir Purya Purkayastha. He is an engineer and a science activist in the power, telecom and software sectors. He's a founding member of the Delhi Science Forum. He's co-author, along with Vijay Prashant of Enron Blowout, Corporate Capitalism and Theft of the Global Commons. And along with Nayan Koshy and P.K. Bhadrakumar of Uncle Sam's Nuclear Cabin. He's co-editor with Indranil Vichachintan of Political Journeys in Health, Essays by and for Amit Sen Gupta. He's the editor of newsclick.com. Welcome, Robir. I'd also like to introduce our panelists today who will be speaking about the book. We have with us Professor Ram Ramaswamy, who was at the School of Physical Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University from 1986 to 2018. From 2001 to 2018, he also held a concurrent position in the School of Computational and Integrative Sciences at JNU. From mid-2011 to early-2015, he was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hyderabad, also known as Hyderabad Central University. He retired from JNU at the end of October 2018 and is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Chemistry at IIT Delhi. We also have with us Professor Fred Madoff. He is an emeritus professor of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont. He's an activist and a Marxist analyst. His areas of interest include agriculture and food, environment, and the U.S. economy. He's the author and editor of numerous books, including Creating an Ecological Society with Chris Williams and What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism with John Bellamy Foster, both published by Monthly Review Press. Then we have Dr. Satyajit Rath. He's an eminent immunologist who is currently Professor Emeritus at Indian Institute of Science Education Research in Pune. He trained as a physician and a pathologist and has worked on mechanisms involved in the development and functioning of the human system. He was a member of the Faculty at the National Institute of Immunology in New Delhi before his retirement. His current research is focused on the generation and activation of TB and antigen-presenting cells of myeloid lineage. So, I'd like to begin by inviting Dr. Rath to talk about the relationship between science and technology and some of the themes that this book covers. Ruby points out that we're talking about artifacts as the focus of the idea of technology. And it struck me reading through Ruby's extended disquisitions on what artifacts mean and how they shape the directions of technology development and implementation. That, in the word itself, very semantically, there is art and there is fact. And it's almost as though we're talking about art made fact. And an artifact is made to perform to order in a very predictive and predictable sense. You want the success of a technological artifact is that it reliably does what is expected of it when it is expected of it. And that's a remarkably interesting way for me to think about technology. It provides me with a remarkably curious insight on the processes of science itself that Ruby doesn't comment on and yet gives me this to think about. And that is the following. Ruby talks about his unhappiness, which I share, that technology is referred to as applied science. And he points out a little gladiatorily that one can easily think about science as applied technology, which is perfectly correct. But here is an extension of that that he's and his book have gotten me to think about. And that is that in order to achieve the predictability of artifact performance that I just referred to, an artifact will do what is expected of it when it is expected of it. In order to achieve that, Praveer points out at various points in the book that artifacts tend to be sets of interlocking components that function reliably with each other. Here is a fundamental distinction that I think we need to make between empirical knowledge, which is simply observing facts, putting them in a correlative chain and inferring causality from correlation. Post hoc, dergo, proctor hoc. If one thing happens after another, then the first thing causes the second by at large. This is a major fallacy quite frequently that scientists stumble upon pretty much every day. But here's the problem. When you go from empirical knowledge which is what communities and traditional knowledge largely not entirely, but largely consists of, into rigorously conceptualized knowledge, effectively, what that rigorous conceptualization is doing is building a gedankin artifact, a thought artifact of the purkastakind, which has components that fit with each other that steadily enhance the predictive power of the scientific concept. And in this very basic sense for me, and this is very personal beginning, Praveer's book provided a very curious insight on how thinking about technology illuminates for me how to think about my own science. I'd like to now invite Professor Madhav to speak from his experience about the paradigm shifts in technology and the impacts they've had on ecology and on access to especially food. I was a graduate student in the 1960s. I was a professor at the university, mostly the University of Vermont from the 1970s through the mid early 2000s, 2007 is when I retired, but stayed active up until relatively recently in soils and keeping up with the science and what was happening. And basically, professors viewed themselves at the colleges of agriculture as public employees. We were paid mostly by state, that is our individual states and national government or federal funds. And we considered ourselves to be state employees. We kept regular hours when other people at the university would come and go sometimes. We were expected to be there during the regular working hours of the day, which happened to be 8 to 430. And what we developed or what we wrote about, we all considered to be open information because this was government monies that were supplying our salaries. We were doing this on government time, shall we say. It was a university, but still. And so the new varieties were developed and they were out there. New varieties of crops were developed and they were out there for anyone to use. Now, a lot of times private seed companies would pick it up and use it and reproduce the seed and sell it, and that was allowed. But it couldn't be patented. And it couldn't be, it was not privatized in the sense of being able to exert exclusive ownership over it. Now, things changed dramatically in the 1980s. And I wasn't aware of the name of the law, but Prabir talks about it in a number of cases. This was the Baidol Act of 1980 named for two senators in the United States Senate. And there must have been incredible lobbying from industry to make this happen and from universities. But basically a law was passed that allowed universities and faculty who worked for them or anyone who got private, excuse me, got public money from the national government to privatize the results of the research. So you could take your research that you did on government time with government money, you hired a technician, you bought equipment for laboratory, whatever you did with those funds, and you could come up with some new invention and you could patent it and you could get the rights to it and the university could get partial rights to it as well. And so this was really the beginning of the corporatization of the universities in the United States. And it's gone very far after that. And now students are no longer called students many times, they're called customers. Like you're a customer at a McDonald's or whatever the equivalent is an India fast food restaurant or someplace else, you're a customer at a university if you're a student nowadays. What happened was in this system, you developed a way of approaching agriculture as a reactive way where there's a problem that you see maybe a weed or a pest or low fertility. Okay, we have a way to solve it just by my product, my herbicide or my insecticide or by my fertilizer and we will solve your problems. And what was really needed and what is really needed is an ecological approach where you take a whole system approach and you try to prevent these problems from developing. So like preventive medicine, you try to prevent the problems by keeping a person healthy. Doesn't mean they don't get problems, they don't get sick, but it means they have fewer problems and you're not dealing with each one singly, you're dealing with the human as a whole. And the same thing with agriculture dealing with the agro ecosystem as a whole rather than little tiny parts of that ecosystem and then providing products to deal with the problems that develop in those little parts, you deal with the whole system and you eventually have a healthier system, a healthier soil, healthier plants, fewer pest problems, etc. There's not money to be made in this by capital and so they're not particularly interested in funding this type of research. However, it sometimes does get funded and that's something we can talk about. But open science is something which is on the table now. I'm in correspondence with people in Venezuela and they are trying to institute a system for open science at the time. So this book of Probeers is quite timely. I want to extend that idea that you're ending with and ask Professor Ramswamy to comment about how funding has worked in the science and technology sector in India and whether that has shaped particular ways in which we've approached these two fields. Before I turn to that though, let me congratulate Prabir on this book because for a variety of reasons. For one thing, Prabir has managed to keep a train of thought more or less intact over a almost 50-year period. The earliest essay in this book which is adapted is from 1978 and the most recent one is just from a year or two ago. So there has been a consistency in Prabir's thinking that you can see the development. It makes the book very interesting to read. One major idea that Prabir has explored of course is in the title itself, knowledge itself as a common good. And this is an idea that has a lot of currency in different ways. First of all, it's important that we not support monopolies but also a very simple enunciation of everybody's right to access to knowledge that is produced with everybody's money. Namely, all publicly funded science should be made publicly available to as many people as possible. This is something which is loosely called the access principle and it's been written about most notably by John Willensky many years ago. What we I think are beginning, we are going to have to cope with is how science gets funded in our country. Already we've seen a new education policy, the national education policy of 2020 and there is a complete restructuring of the governance of higher education in our country. Most notably the National Research Foundation or the NRF has been set up very recently and its very structure seems to suggest that knowledge production will in a very practical way be guided by governmental policies and one has to wait to see how it comes through. But even in the structure of the funding, I mean there is an ideological one over here of the funding is going to be essentially three quarters by private industry one way or the other and only a quarter by the government. Now there's a very significant tension between the interests of governments which are to try to do as much as it can for its people and private industry which would like to presumably support quote-unquote profitable research. This is I think one of the major tensions of current time because we do celebrate science, we do in some way or the other whether it is Chandrayaan landing on the moon or whatever, we do actually I think as a nation there is a fundamental belief in whichever way in a complicated way we do believe in science, we realize we are a scientific society but at the same time we coexist uneasily with conflicting approaches to science and to governance and one of the important themes that Praveer has discussed in his book is the way in which science is shaped by the societal needs. DD Kosambi with whose quotation this book starts which of course made me already like the book even without having read more than a page where Kosambi defines science as the cognition of necessity. This tellingly Kosambi's quotation is from a book of his collection of essays known as the exasperating essays. Praveer's collection of essays is not exasperating but they are very thought-provoking and they I would let me just say that you know if I were to call this give it an alternative title I would say inciting essays. Thank you, thank you Professor Amashwamy. I'd like to ask Praveer how he'd respond to the alternative title that you've suggested which is inciting essays. Praveer can we please have you respond to that? I'm going to respond to all three and come to Ram last. How do you make what you postulate a science more predictive and therefore that the how do you actually take out from nature the degree of uncertainty that exists and I think that's a very interesting thought that I never in that had never occurred to me. So I think that that within science therefore to stick to define the boundaries within which that you formulate your laws is I think an interesting thought and calling them as artifacts I think that is even more interesting for me and there was thought of it in this sense. Now it is also true that when we talk about and again I'm going to pick up only one of his other ideas that how do you resolve the contradiction between knowledge as commons and knowledge as a part of self-reliance and therefore of nationalism. I would argue that that's a that is actually not probably the right dichotomy to focus on because if you picture knowledge as commons then if you don't decide to use it for only profit making purposes expand it as national power in the globe then you can think of it as knowledge that is shared amongst countries and therefore allows each to grow and each of them to develop what their interest skills and needs are. Therefore they necessarily are not anti-ports they're not opposites but how do you resolve that tension depends which kind of framing that you adopt whether you adopt the good the larger good of humankind or you say the larger good of my kind and I think that is something that we have to keep in mind that how do you resolve this contradiction hopefully Satyajit can be asked a set of questions and give a set of written answers then we can put it into a next book. I'm going to leave Satyajit here and move on to what Fred discussed and of course the critical issue that he has raised on how enclosures of knowledge ultimately lead to enclosures which are physical who owns the product who owns the crops essentially the seeds who then owns the herbicide and then how instead of promoting a more healthy agriculture you want to promote more herbicides you don't want your seeds to be such that they can continue replicating themselves but you want every year people to buy seeds from your seed company and so on. So here of course is the classical issue public good versus private green and that's the central issue that of course when you talk about knowledge as commons you're also talking about who owns knowledge and should it be society as a whole should it be individuals and we know individuals really need individual companies. Ram has raised of course a lot of issues again he's also paid me I think much more compliment than I deserve thank him for that education itself becoming commodity is clearly an issue but here much more narrowly focusing on that if research is going to be driven by companies what happens three fourth private and as you know the three fourth private is notional but it will be a significant of public investment in different forms will go into it as well though it will be called one fourth the reality is that who drives the agenda and who gets to use the products of that now here is the technical issue which is can be narrowly focused which is that earlier there was an attempt in India to reproduce the Baidu Act at that time there was enough political support for that science and technology which is coming out of public domain universities public domain institutions should not be privatized but now that this kind of new education policies being formulated where they are going to shell out supposedly the three fourths of the money and the government one fourth of the money then it means giving putting them in the driver's seat and that is going to then lead to all the problems that Fred had talked about which has taken place which has taken place in the US universities and also now across the globe and I think that is an arena of struggle that means knowledge as commons remains for the university system for the colleges for the science institution the research laboratories an arena of struggle where we have to see how to expand the commons rather than let it shrink so with this I'm going to close my contributions to what I had to respond to though it has not been a full response because that would have taken a lot more time and of course I think that a lot of this was very complementary but I'm sure that I will hear from at least some of them what they really feel about the book thank you very much Linuta Leftward for publishing the book and letting it go to the market and to my