From the Commission to the Mission Model: Technology Czars and the Indian Middle Class

Abstract

This article identifies a major transformation in India's approach to strategic technology development from an earlier Commission model, epitomized by atomic energy, that seeks the enhancement of sovereign power, to a Mission model, epitomized by telecommunications, directed toward the furthering of biopolitical power. It compares five strategic industries in India—atomic energy, space, electronics, biotechnology and telecommunications—and shows that no single factor is responsible for technological success or failure. Outcomes depend on the strength of political networks, the structure and maturity of the industry, the extent of bureaucratic resistance, and the technological strategy adopted. This finding contests the widely held perspective that success in strategic technology development is the product of the extraordinary efforts of a single individual, a technology “czar,” and explains the persistence of this narrative by highlighting the role of technoscience in mediating a highly ambivalent relation between the Indian middle class and the state.

Technological Development and Technology Czars

One of the most distinctive features of postcolonial Indian technoscience narratives is the preeminence of technology “czars,” as they are called: elite scientists and technocrats who appear to epitomize a particular state technology project and are metonymically identified with its creation and success. The following statement is typical: “Vikram Sarabhai is regarded as the father of the Indian space programme.… His wealthy background, his reputation as a scientist and institution builder, combined with a close relationship with the then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi enabled him to command the necessary resources to build the space research organisation” (Baskaran 2005, 160–61). All the key tropes of the standard narrative are present in the preceding sentence, from its unapologetic gendering to the celebration of elite privileged origins to proximity with the highest reaches of power, leading to the joining of person and program. This conflation is exemplified by Homi J. Bhabha and the Indian nuclear program but also includes, among others, Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya and the modernization of Mysore state; P. C. Mahalanobis and the Five Year Plans; S. S. Bhatnagar and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), the national network of applied research laboratories; M. S. Swaminathan and agricultural research; Sam Pitroda and telecommunications; and most recently, Nandan Nilekani and the application of digital information technologies to everyday life.

This narrativizing of technoscientific prowess through individual biographies is not in itself particularly surprising. It follows from the well-established practice in science textbooks and technology hagiographies of identifying particular individuals with notable discoveries and inventions. This practice in turn derives from distinct notions of authorship—Foucault (1977) calls it the “author function”—as well as the teleological imbrication of higher stages of modernization with technological achievement (Adas 1990). This familiar conflation, however, obscures an important shift that has taken place in the Indian state's approach to developing strategic technologies over the last seven decades, namely, the transition from an earlier “Commission” to a later “Mission” model.¹

The formation of five strategic technology sectors—atomic energy, space, electronics, biotechnology, and telecommunications—allows for exploration of the relationship of personalities to the success or failure in the creation of these sectors. The first four sectors adopted the Commission model of organization, following the lead of the atomic energy program. However, the relative failures of the electronics and biotechnology projects show that the Commission model by itself is no guarantee of success.² While the primary dynamic underlying the formation of new strategic sectors is often represented as a struggle between innovative technoscientific entrepreneurs and a stifling government bureaucracy, the former seeking as much autonomy as possible and the latter seeking control, oversight, and regulation, the story that emerges below is more complex than that (Chengappa 2000; Chowdhury and Dasgupta 2010; Kalam and Tiwari 1999). A number of discrete factors turn out to play important roles in the establishment, success, or failure of these projects, including personalities, high-level political access, bureaucratic resistance, official secrecy, the diversity and maturity of the industry, and, not least, technological mastery.

The failed effort to form an autonomous biotechnology commission along the lines of atomic energy and space marks the transition from the Commission to the Mission model. This failure was coincident with the remarkable transformation of a moribund telecom sector using a novel approach to technology development that would become the first example of the Mission model. Since then, this latter approach has become the template for strategic technology ventures, from earlier efforts to provide clean drinking water in India's villages to the ongoing national digital database “unique identification” or Aadhaar project (Abraham and Rajadhyaksha 2015).³

By comparing this range of technology sectors, this article interrogates the myth of the omnipotent technology czar by showing first that while individual personalities, access, and networks matter, they guarantee neither success nor failure, whether taken singly or in combination. There is no single formula for ensuring success in strategic technology projects. However, lacking political access at the highest levels does appear to be a limiting condition (“necessary but not sufficient”). The conclusion reflects on the reduction of these complex histories into the narrative of the technology czar. It argues that this figure is a product of complex contradictions emergent from shifting relations between the middle class, technoscience, and the postcolonial state.

The Commission and Mission Models

At the outset, it has to be emphasized that what I am calling the Commission and Mission “models” originated as highly contingent and unreflexive initiatives. Only retrospectively and by replication did they become distinctive approaches—models—for strategic technology development. The Commission is a familiar instrument of governance in the Anglo-Indian administrative tradition, albeit with no small amount of variety built into the institutions and activities covered by the term. Commissions are considered “hybrid” structures of governance that are permitted to combine executive, legislative, and judicial functions (Cushman 1939). They have been set up as quasi-judicial agents of enquiry (e.g., Royal Commission on Opium, 1895), to advise the government on issues of urgent public policy (e.g., the Sarkaria Commission, 1983), as well as to provide the structure for the administration of a single project (e.g., Public Service Commissions for the recruitment of civil servants) (Spangenberg 1976). Some commissions were created by the Constitution, others have been set up by Parliament, still others by the executive branch; some commissions were considered temporary, others established as permanent bodies. What is common among these considerably different institutions is the statutory provision of independence and insulation from short-term and narrowly defined political interests. It is further assumed that the work of commissions generally involves technical expertise in some form. However, until Homi J. Bhabha adopted this structure for the development of atomic energy in 1948, commissions had never been used as instruments for the development of new technologies.

As will be explained in more detail below, Bhabha successfully argued that, due to the strategic significance of this novel substance, the Atomic Energy Commission (created in 1948) required an unprecedentedly high degree of autonomy from normal governmental procedures, including financial and recruitment regulations. Furthermore, he insisted that information about the commission's activities needed to be highly restricted, that negotiations with international partners take place outside External Affairs Ministry channels, and that accountability be restricted solely to the prime minister rather than mediated by existing rules and norms. The net effect was to create a “strategic enclave,” segregating the atomic energy program from existing state regulatory practices as well as public scrutiny (Abraham 1992).

The Commission model would turn out to be extremely successful in creating advanced technology sectors where none had existed before, where a state monopoly faced no competition, and where private-sector investment was unlikely due to the large scale of investment needed and the low likelihood of commercial returns. Hence, it was most successful in the atomic energy and space sectors and less successful when these conditions were absent, most glaringly in the electronics sector, but also in biotechnology.

The Mission model emerged during the Rajiv Gandhi administration (1984–89) in the context of a renewed effort to upgrade India's technological capabilities, a process that had begun during Indira Gandhi's second coming as prime minister, between 1980 and 1984 (Parthasarathi 2007).⁴ The first application of the Mission model took place in the telecommunications sector through the work of the Centre for the Development of Telematics (C-DOT), led by the US-returned engineer Sam Pitroda. The Mission approach to technology development diverged markedly from the Commission model. C-DOT did not try to reinvent the wheel by producing all its needed components in-house, nor did it try to build new hardware from scratch, but rather creatively adapted and modified existing “off the shelf” technologies. Its emphasis on system design permitted oversight and control without having to worry about the production of every component that might be needed. Subcontracting work was outsourced to existing manufacturers from the public and private sectors. By not seeking to create a public monopoly and by combining public and private institutions in the same venture, new alliances were formed that added immensely to the political influence that C-DOT was eventually able to wield.

The most profound difference between the Mission and Commission models lies in the ultimate target of technological intervention. The Commission model takes the enhancement of the state's sovereign power as its main responsibility: most notably, atomic energy and space with their obvious national security implications. Mission projects, beginning with telecom, universal access to clean drinking water, mass immunization against commonplace diseases, and, later, welfare initiatives that used techniques of digital governance are best characterized as biopolitical interventions, namely, projects that identify the national population as their main target (Rose 2009). For this reason, the Mission model is politically fraught. When net improvements in the public welfare or the material well-being of a population are the objectives of intervention, results must be felt in unambiguous terms for the project to be deemed a success.⁵

C-DOT was able to claim success because the telecom experience in India was utterly transformed within a remarkably short period of time. Beginning in the 1980s, millions of potential customers used to waiting for years to receive a telephone connection were now rapidly added to the fixed line system; millions of others were able to make calls with ease due to a newly created and extensive network of public call booths; the price of a phone call, both local and long distance, dropped significantly; while the quality of telephony improved qualitatively. Markers of change were felt at all levels, including the tactile: making a phone call no longer meant encountering a now-classic heavy, black Bakelite rotary dial platform, but now took place on a sleek, light, and colorful molded plastic push button handset. Few other technological interventions are ever able to show qualitative improvement in such a manifest way. Even the Delhi Metro, which was completed on time and under budget, making its CEO, E. Sreedharan, a household name among India's urban middle classes, has lost its spectacular luster due to its very success. The very popularity of the metro system has exposed its capacity limitations and led to daily frustrations and public anger (Times of India2011).

What did not change between the Commission and Mission models was the continued association of each successful technoscientific intervention with a single individual—the technology “czar.” However, the czar was now a very different kind of person. Commission projects had always been led by scientists or technocrats whose primary affiliation was with a state science or technology institution. By contrast, the reform of the telecom industry was made possible by an individual whose expertise and credibility had been gained in the private sector—and overseas at that. Long-standing distinctions and value hierarchies imposed on (assumed noble) public and (assumed venal) private interests in the Nehruvian political economy had begun to shift. The distrust and condescension that had long plagued the state bureaucracy's approach to the private sector was being replaced with a more pragmatic attitude, reflecting a shift in the ideological framing of technoscience as an instrument of state legitimacy (V. V. Krishna 1996). Retrospectively, it can be seen that the Mission model was an important harbinger of what we now know to be a fundamental transformation of India's political economy, namely, from a state-led and dominated economic system to a neoliberal model privileging the private sector and a more open economy (Kohli 2006).

The Commission Model Takes Shape: Atomic Energy

A Third World nuclear power was an unlikely thought in 1948. Yet, almost alone among newly decolonized countries, India had a number of physicists of high ability who not only understood the significance of the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939, but felt that developing an atomic energy program should be a high state priority. Homi Bhabha, a cosmic ray physicist, and Meghnad Saha, an astrophysicist, served together in the newly created Atomic Energy Committee of the CSIR immediately following the end of World War II (Anderson 2010).⁶ Along with S. S. Bhatnagar, an industrial chemist who had been a powerful technocrat since the early 1940s, these three would successfully make the case that an Indian atomic energy program should become a national imperative.⁷

Bhabha soon realized that the structure of the CSIR Atomic Energy Committee was unwieldy and impractical from the point of view of getting an entirely new kind of technology enterprise off the ground. Composed not only of scientists and bureaucrats, but also businessmen with vastly varying degrees of scientific expertise, the twenty-odd committee members had little in common. He successfully lobbied Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to create an entirely different structure to organize and manage this new venture. He proposed creating an autonomous commission vested with far-reaching executive powers that would monopolize atomic energy decision-making (Bhabha 1989). Nehru would accept all of Bhabha's arguments, including his request for a budget of rupees 100 lakhs (US$33 million), a huge sum at the time. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) Act would be steamrollered through India's Constituent Assembly in 1948. The AEC's top leadership was composed of Bhabha, Bhatnagar, and K. S. Krishnan, a physicist and ally who was director of the newly created National Physical Laboratory, and would operate under high levels of official secrecy, reporting only to the prime minister (Venkateswaran 1967).

A number of factors explain Bhabha's remarkable success in creating this new structure. In the first instance, there were close personal ties between Nehru and Bhabha, with the former seeing in the latter the one person who could translate his vision for the technological transformation of the country into reality. Bhabha also had intimate ties to the largest private Indian business conglomerate, the Tata group, which not only was funding his Bombay-based research institute but also was connected to him through kin networks. Tata support for Bhabha reinforced his standing by adding financial backing and a professional managerial element to his acknowledged scientific abilities. Finally, Bhatnagar, who was the most powerful technocrat within India's nascent scientific-industrial complex, supported him to the hilt. He would repeatedly enable Bhabha's plans by blocking resistance from a host of Indian scientists who questioned the scale of power and resources being awarded to the AEC (Anderson 2010).

Bhabha took the position that to succeed in his effort to build atomic power in India he would need to have complete control over the entire enterprise. It was one thing to marginalize other Indian scientists; his own high professional standing combined with Bhatnagar's institutional influence made that relatively easy. It was more difficult to sideline the power of the Indian civil service, the “iron cage” of the colonial state, which had long taken as a given that it would determine the final course of all governmental decision-making, especially through its control over finances (Potter 1996). Here, Nehru's support was critical. Bhabha had already seen how difficult it could be to create new institutions when he approached the Bombay provincial government for permission to start his Institute for Fundamental Research in 1944, even with Tata's financial and behind-the-scenes backing. Arguing that matters before the AEC required a high level of technical expertise and that secrecy was vital due to the highly sensitive nature of atomic energy, Bhabha designed a novel administrative structure that kept the influence of civil service bureaucrats to a minimum. He ensured that scientist-technocrats would always hold a majority of positions on the commission, and, even more important, he insisted that the chairman of the AEC be given a simultaneous appointment as permanent secretary to the Government of India. This was the highest rank in the civil service and had the effect of joining technical expertise with the considerable powers of state authority. Disagreements over policy would now be between equals in the government's administrative hierarchy, giving AEC scientists—with their technical expertise—a notable edge. Finally, after consolidating the formal powers of the commission and especially its chairman, he insisted that the headquarters of the new enterprise be located in Bombay, rather than New Delhi, in order to ensure that the administrative secretariat served the practical purpose of getting an atomic energy complex off the ground. This was an extraordinary demand, given how deliberately Delhi's mandarins protected their administrative control over the state apparatus; perhaps more than anything else, the success of this demand showed the extent of Bhabha's power (Abraham 1998).

Bombay was Bhabha's home turf. Apart from his extensive elite network, his research institute, the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR), was based there, as was the headquarters of the Tata group, his primary source of nonstate resources. In Bombay, India's commercial capital and far from the interfering eyes of the Delhi mandarinate, Bhabha would have far more freedom to organize and run the atomic energy project as he saw fit. Overriding the protests of the bureaucracy, Nehru gave this radical proposal the green light. In 1954, the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE)—based in Bombay, headed by the chairman of the AEC, a scientist who was also a secretary to the Government of India, reporting directly to the prime minister's office—came into being.

Bhabha was always much more than just the head of the atomic energy project. He soon became the government's go-to person for all new science and technology initiatives, acting as informal advisor, behind-the-scenes facilitator, international negotiator, official spokesman, and seer on all matters technoscientific (Chowdhury and Dasgupta 2010). He would advise the prime minister, chair the first UN conference on the peaceful uses of atomic energy, write the government's Science Policy Resolution, represent India at the International Atomic Energy Agency, negotiate agreements with foreign countries and companies, spot scientific talent around the world for potential recruitment, act as gatekeeper for important international scientific visitors, and identify new opportunities in global technological developments in which India should invest. Bhabha was the original template for the technology czar; the AEC would become the prime example of what I call the Commission model.

Consolidating the Commission Model: Space

In the early 1960s, space and electronics, particularly computers, were identified as two vital strategic areas for national technological development. Nehru turned to Bhabha to head an Electronics Committee, to “survey the needs of the country … and to recommend measures for planned development of electronics, so that the country as a whole may become self-sufficient in this field in the shortest possible time and in the most economical manner” (Menon 2011, 114). Joining Bhabha was the young Cambridge-trained scientist Vikram Sarabhai, who headed the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, and S. Bhagavantam, scientific advisor at the Ministry of Defense, the ministry responsible for electronics at the time. A. S. Rao, director of electronics at the atomic energy program's Trombay establishment, was appointed the committee's member-secretary (Parthasarathi 2007).

Even as the DAE was arguing for the need for a systematic national policy for electronics, Vikram Sarabhai in particular was also thinking about space research. In the late 1950s, the UN committee on the peaceful uses of space had proposed setting up a multinational project to study the atmosphere above the earth's magnetic equator (Sullivan 1961). The United States, the Soviet Union, and France had all promised their support. Sarabhai, whose research interests included cosmic rays and electromagnetic fields in outer space, had actively participated in the transnational scientific activities surrounding the first International Geophysical Year (1957) as a member of the International Council of Scientific Unions' Committee for Space Research. He quickly grasped the advantages to be realized if India was able to provide a base for the UN launch station (Siddiqi 2015). By February 1962, the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) was created under the aegis of the DAE, and had identified a site in southern India that would become the launch station for the upper atmosphere project. As early as 1963, the first French payload mounted on a US-supplied sounding rocket, monitored by a Soviet computer, would make its inaugural flight (Shah 2007). Throughout the 1960s, a small group of Indian scientists would build on this initial stimulus and begin reverse-engineering the US Scout rocket. By the end of the decade, they had progressed enough to begin to plan an indigenous satellite launch vehicle that would eventually become the SLV-3 rocket (Flank 1993). INCOSPAR would morph into the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in 1969, headed by Vikram Sarabhai. Sarabhai's laboratory in Ahmedabad, the Physical Research Laboratory, would be to the ISRO what the TIFR was to the DAE: ostensibly an independent scientific laboratory but in fact closely tied to the projects of the corresponding government agency, with personnel and resources shared between both.

Bhabha was killed in an accident in 1966, but his institutional vision continued under new leadership. Sarabhai was appointed as the chairman of the AEC. Other AEC members would include Bhabha lieutenants M. G. K. Menon (who took over at the TIFR), as well as Homi Sethna and Raja Ramana from the atomic energy establishment. Sarabhai's tenure at the AEC would add space to atomic energy and electronics as the main activities of the commission. While his prominence abroad would lead to his election as chairman of the UN Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 1968, his tenure as head of the AEC was a rocky one. The Bhabha clique saw him as an outsider and resisted his pragmatic vision for the atomic energy program (Chengappa 2000; Shah 2007). Ramana and Sethna saw space as a distraction and a dilution of resources from their main mission, an autonomous nuclear program that was increasingly turning in a military direction (Abraham 1998).

In December 1971, after just five years as head of the AEC, Sarabhai unexpectedly passed away at the age of fifty-two. Menon took over as interim head of the ISRO, and the search for new leadership began. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi appointed Sethna as chairman of the AEC, much to the relief of the Bhabha group (Ramanna 1991). She also decided to return the AEC to its original mission and to create a separate Space Commission and Department of Space to continue Sarabhai's work. Her choice for chairman of the new Space Commission was Satish Dhawan, a Caltech-trained aeronautics engineer and the well-regarded director of the premier Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore. Two years earlier, Dhawan had been offered the position of scientific advisor to the Ministry of Defense and had turned it down in order to continue with his academic research. He only agreed to accept this even higher-profile appointment on condition that he also remained the director of the IISc and that the Department of Space be based in Bangalore rather than Delhi (Chengappa 2000). The government agreed. The combination of his scientific prominence, Indira Gandhi's respect for him, and his avowed reluctance to take on the job gave Dhawan the freedom to chart his own path. Just as Bhabha had done in atomic energy, Dhawan was able to maintain freedom from Delhi and the strictures of formal bureaucratic oversight for the newly created Space Commission and its executive apparatus, the Department of Space.

The Failure of Electronics

Beginning in the 1960s, the Electronics Committee produced an ambitious series of reports charting the prospective development of this new sector over the next ten years. The backdrop to these reports was a border war with China (1962) that ended with a disastrous defeat for India. Hence, the development of an electronics industry was promoted with a clear understanding that the sector would contribute directly to the national defense effort (Subramanian 1992). However, divided leadership and competing policy objectives stymied the growth of this industry from the outset, beginning with a culture clash between civilian and military specialists serving on the committee (Parthasarathi 2007).

M. G. K. Menon (1926–2016), who had succeeded Bhabha at the TIFR, was appointed the first chairman of the newly created Electronics Commission and secretary of the Department of Electronics. Among its first priorities was the development of small and mini computers, to be built indigenously (Evans 1979). Domestic expertise in computer engineering was in its infancy at this time (Sharma 2009). The TIFR had built a computer with a 40-bit processor and ferrite core memory (TIFRAC) that was completed in 1960. The atomic energy establishment had also developed a variety of electronic instruments in aid of nuclear research. These achievements led to the decision, in 1967, to spin off a new state-owned enterprise devoted to the manufacture of electronics, the Electronics Corporation of India (ECIL). ECIL was set up as a state enterprise under the DAE, and A. S. Rao, member-secretary of the Electronics Committee, was appointed its first managing director. AEC Chairman Sethna and Rao pushed to have ECIL designated the so-called “national champion” in the field of computers, seeking to reproduce the AEC's monopoly in the atomic energy sector; however, Menon, who chaired the Electronics Commission, was in favor of greater competition in the computer industry, including permitting private-sector and foreign manufacturers to participate on relatively equal footing. Menon's views ran into immediate resistance, especially from organized labor, a key pillar of the political coalition backing the Congress Party since independence, as well as a number of other public bodies, including the powerful Public Accounts Committee (Subramanian 1992).

It was common at the time to think of the introduction of computers as a pro-business strategy leading to what was then called “automation,” namely, replacing recalcitrant human labor with pliant machines (Dandekar 1972). Menon's position favored the foreign and private sectors and opened him up to the charge of marginalizing the national priority of self-reliance. Caught in this political crossfire and internally divided, the Electronics Commission failed to make a significant contribution to this rapidly growing industry. Eventually a major national conference on electronics was convened in 1970, bringing together technocrats, the private sector, academics, and top civil servants to discuss the future of the industry. Ashok Parthasarathi, a young Cambridge- and MIT-trained physicist and science policy specialist, presented a paper proposing the creation of a “national electronics development board … on the lines of the Atomic Energy Commission.” It was the first time that the AEC model had been explicitly articulated as a self-conscious strategy for advanced technology development (Parthasarathi 2007, 8).⁸

In retrospect, we can see the irony. The first commission created after the adoption of the Commission “model” as the preferred path to developing strategic technologies was in a sector that exposed the model's limits. Electronics' greatest structural weakness was the absence of what might be called a natural monopoly, a problem that atomic energy and space did not face. The Indian atomic energy and space complexes were literally called into being through government fiat. Neither sector existed at the time of their creation and had no obvious or existing domestic competition. Both required enormous capital investments and technical expertise with little promise by way of potential financial return. The state could define and order these industries precisely because in its absence they would not exist. By contrast, the Electronics Commission faced a triple bind: it did not have the advantage of a natural monopoly; the industry was already well established at the time of its creation; and its first leader did not have the necessary stature and political capital needed to ride out labor, bureaucratic, and private-sector opposition to his plans.

Electronics was a huge and growing industry, ranging from consumer goods such as transistor radios to industrial products, including advanced instruments and digital computers. The industry had been identified as a defense priority, and the Ministry of Defense Production was hard at work behind the scenes to maintain its control over public-sector electronics firms (Sharma 2009). Foreign multinationals including IBM (US) and ICL (UK) were already entrenched in the Indian market. Other foreign firms, such as Burroughs, were seeking to strengthen their position through strategic partnerships with Indian companies, notably the Tatas. A number of Indian public-sector companies were also well established, including the giant Indian Telephones (ITI) and Bharat Electronics (Singh 1999). The DAE had already spun off a wholly owned venture in ECIL and was loath to subordinate this enterprise to the dictates of a newly formed Electronics Commission, even one led by M. G. K. Menon, a Bhabha loyalist. In spite of being Bhabha's replacement at the TIFR, the first chairman of the Electronics Commission, and a trusted scientist-technocrat who would go on to have a long career in government service, Menon never achieved the public recognition and respect attained by Bhabha and Sarabhai, who are still spoken of with hushed respect today.⁹

The final blow to the effectiveness of the Electronics Commission was its official charge of achieving national “self-sufficiency.” Claims of success in a highly consumer-oriented industry would need to be backed up by the daily mandate of millions of unsentimental users, quite unlike the situation in atomic energy and space. These latter areas were rarified sectors answerable only to the state, needing only to show the occasional “technology demonstration” to claim success in their protected domain (Abraham 2009). Not only was electronics a fast-moving field of research and product development across a large number of discrete fields that Indian firms were unable to match, but also without the benefit of official secrecy the commission was unable to prevent knowledge about the latest advances around the world from becoming common knowledge. With the added fear of widespread “automation” displacing large numbers of workers, the Electronics Commission would fail both discursively and materially to achieve the successes claimed by atomic energy and space.

The technocrat-dominated approach to strategic technology development—the Commission model—emerged originally in atomic energy and space, sectors led by powerful and widely respected personalities, where a natural monopoly was possible and official secrecy permitted a discourse of self-reliance to be deployed to cover up material shortcomings. Perceived successes in these two sectors led to the Commission approach being proposed as a generic model for strategic technology development across any domain. As the case of electronics shows, however, the moment of its generalization as a self-conscious national strategy was also the first instance of its breakdown. The reasons for this failure began with the lack of a natural monopoly, but also included weak leadership unable to discipline competing state agencies, as well as the inability to contain information about domestic industry's shortcomings in the face of overwhelming counter-evidence.

Enter Biotechnology

The life sciences establishment in India was slow to come to terms with the discovery of DNA and the postwar emergence of the field of molecular biology (Chadarevian 2002). As late as the 1980s, botany and zoology still defined the core of the undergraduate life sciences curriculum at most Indian universities. This neglect was reflected in the lack of any coherent state policy toward what would come to be called the biotechnology sector. In the early 1960s, there were a tiny number of centers for modern biological studies: a handful of labs at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore; the Bose Institute in Calcutta (now Kolkata); Banaras Hindu University; Madurai Kamaraj University; Obaid Siddiqi's lab at the TIFR; and isolated work at a few leading hospitals, notably Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences and the Christian Medical College in Vellore. The small number of modern biologists, almost all recent returnees from overseas, were scattered across the country and only met one another at the annual Indian Science Congress meetings. Eventually, experimental biology would take institutional root in the Society for Biological Chemistry, and a handful of modern biologists would get together to create the remarkable Guha Research Conference, an annual event that celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2010 (“Guha Research Conference” 1982).

In 1960, the first official effort was made to assess the state of biochemistry and molecular biology with an eye to building up this field. S. Husain Zaheer, then director general of the CSIR, found little to be optimistic about in his assessment of the review committee's report (Zaheer 1960). In 1972, a proposal was made to create a National Biological Laboratory along the lines of the existing national Physical and Chemical Laboratories. The idea went nowhere, but over the next decade, the numbers of molecular and cell biologists began to grow. News of the famous Asilomar conference in 1975 led to a large conference in Baroda a year later to discuss the potential and risks of recombinant DNA technology (Wright 1986).¹⁰ While the number of Indian scientists engaged in this field was beginning to reach a critical size, there was still little formal recognition of biotechnology as a prospective area of strategic technology development. It was not until the mid-1970s that the country's first dedicated molecular biology center, the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), was set up in Hyderabad. A few years later, another center, the National Institute of Immunology, founded by Pran Talwar, was created as an independent research institute in New Delhi with support from the Department of Science and Technology (DST).

The return of Indira Gandhi to political office in 1980 prompted policy makers to begin to take this burgeoning field seriously. The Indian National Science Academy convened the first-ever meeting of molecular biologists to discuss the long-term outlook in biotechnology in July 1980. An even more important catalyzing event took place in 1981 when the United Nations Industrial Development Organization established an expert committee to explore the possibility of creating an International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB). The committee would visit a range of countries, including Mexico and Argentina in Latin America, Tanzania and Egypt in Africa, and India, the Philippines, and China. In preparation for the expert committee's visit in August 1981, Electronics Commission chairman M. G. K. Menon, now also serving as secretary of the DST, hosted a meeting with the objective of shaping a biotechnology strategy for India.¹¹ He received enthusiastic support from the assembled scientists and took the findings of these meetings to the Science Advisory Committee of the cabinet.

Menon had no difficulty getting cabinet approval to set up a National Biotechnology Board under the DST: in an interview, he explained that his decision was entirely pragmatic.¹² Based on his long experience in government, Menon argued that boards were much easier to create than independent departments. He justified his decision by noting that it was more important to obtain official government recognition of the importance of biotechnology than to initiate a bureaucratic struggle over the need to have an independent biotechnology department or commission. His cautious approach was reflected in the board's official mandate. Rather than encouraging research in the field of biotechnology, the board was tasked with “determining the institutional structure best suited for the rapid development of biotechnology in India” (National Biotechnology Board 1983). By contrast with the compact and centralized AEC, the composition of the Biotechnology Board reflected an extremely inclusive definition of the field of biotechnology, reflecting a bureaucratic vision of consensus. The board included the chairman of the science advisory council to the cabinet, the leaders of the CSIR and the state medical research and agriculture councils, as well as the head of the University Grants Commission. Reflecting the continuing power of the atomic energy establishment in strategic technology policy formulation, the chairman of the AEC was included too. To the alarm of scientists who believed in the importance of national self-reliance, the Biotechnology Board would also create a standing advisory committee composed of overseas Indian scientists to help in its work. This elaborate and unwieldy architecture was not the kind of governance structure one would have expected of Menon, a Bhabha protégé, technocratic insider, and veteran of the AEC.¹³

Pushpa M. Bhargava, founding director of the CCMB, who had strongly advocated for an ambitious national biotechnology strategy at preparatory meetings, was disappointed with the decision merely to set up a Biotechnology Board rather than a full-fledged and autonomous department. He would write directly to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, expressing his concerns. His main point was that without an autonomous Department of Biotechnology, little genuine progress could be made in the field. Not surprisingly, he drew on the examples of the atomic energy and space commissions to reinforce his point:

Eventually, a full-fledged Department of Biotechnology would be created during the administration of Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi's successor. What was missing was an autonomous biotechnology commission led by a prominent scientist reporting directly to the prime minister to oversee its affairs, as with space and atomic energy.

Rajiv Gandhi had entered politics following the assassination of his mother in 1984. From the outset, his administration would be marked by an urgent commitment to advance Indian technological development, leading to his being known (affectionately by some and with skepticism by others), as “Mr. Computer-ji.” He soon realized the need to put biotechnology policy on a more formal and financially stable footing by making it an independent department. The first step was to find a suitable leader. Bhargava, widely acknowledged to be one of India's leading molecular biologists, had completed his PhD at the age of twenty-four and was introduced to experimental biology as a postdoctoral scholar in Wisconsin and France. After his return to India, he helped found the Guha Research Conferences. He had proposed the formation of a National Biological Laboratory as early as 1972, and finally convinced the CSIR of the need to set up a specialized molecular biology center in Hyderabad in 1977. The CCMB soon developed an enviable international reputation, thanks to Bhargava and the able team of young scientists he had assembled.

Bhargava was sounded out informally about whether he was willing to become the first secretary of the new department, prior to an official announcement. He agreed to head the new department, provided the following conditions were met: first, that an autonomous biotechnology commission first be created, as in atomic energy and space; second, that the chairman of the commission also serve as secretary to the department; third, that the commission report directly to the prime minister rather than the DST; and fourth, that the commission and department be based in Hyderabad and affiliated with his institution, the CCMB, just as atomic energy was closely tied to Bhabha's Tata Institute for Fundamental Research and space to Sarabhai's Physical Research Laboratory and Dhawan's Indian Institute of Science (Bhargava 1986). These conditions were no different from those demanded by Bhabha and Dhawan with respect to atomic energy and space respectively, but this time the outcome was altogether different. The government withdrew the offer to Bhargava to head the department and chose instead to locate the department in New Delhi. Biotechnology would remain under the control of the DST. The appointment of secretary went instead to S. Ramachandran, a scientist-administrator who had been member-secretary of the original Biotechnology Board.

Biotechnology, like electronics, is not a natural state monopoly. The industry includes a wide range of activities, from food and beverages to pharmaceuticals and agriculture. In recent years, the industry has expanded to include biomedical instrumentation and genetic engineering firms. Most of the established biotech firms, private and public, preceded efforts by the government to shape the sector. Given how rapidly biotechnology was expanding in the 1980s, calculated state intervention could easily have made a significant impact and usefully shaped the direction of the industry. Moreover, thanks to a legal code that only allowed firms short-term product patents (rather than process patents) in the pharmaceutical industry, a thriving generic drugs industry had emerged in India since the 1970s (Hamied 2005; Tyabji 2012). Self-reliance, in other words, in this industry was not just official rhetoric but could claim a strong and visible domestic presence that an activist biotechnology commission could potentially build on.

Bhargava's proposals for the future direction of a biotechnology industry furthered a territorialized and indigenous vision of a thriving local industry while adding a strong protectionist element: he also argued that Indian biotechnology should also capitalize on the value of indigenous knowledge and domestic botanicals to give a unique shape to this industry (Bhargava 1985). He proposed that with more direction and resources from an autonomous and far-sighted biotechnology commission, the industry could easily reach a self-sustaining level. What Bhargava lacked, however, was political support to allow this vision to take shape. Retrospectively we can see that with no independent route to the prime minister and access to the highest levels of political power blocked by a turf-conscious science and technology bureaucracy loath to see the formation of another autonomous commission, Bhargava's effort to reimagine biotechnology from the ground up was doomed to fail.

Looking back, it becomes clear that Menon's initial reluctance to go beyond the creation of a biotechnology board was also shaped by the imperative of establishing the centrality of the DST as the nodal state agency for science and technology policy making and resource allocation. Although he was a product of the atomic energy establishment, which had thrived on the autonomy offered by the commission model, Menon had internalized other institutional priorities as secretary of the DST. He used his access to the cabinet-level scientific advisory committee and the prime minister's office to ensure that science and technology decision-making power was concentrated in the DST and expanded the department in a number of new areas, including nonconventional energy sources, environment and forests, and, ocean development, increasing the budget of the agency many times over. He was also not opposed to private-sector involvement in strategic science and technology sectors, both domestic and foreign, a controversial position at the time; however, it was also a decision that strengthened his position as a key mediator between the state and the interests of an increasingly powerful private capital. Seen in this light, the possibility of an autonomous biotechnology commission, led by an independent and outspoken scientist who was unlikely to bow to DST oversight, now takes on a different cast. It was precisely Menon's knowledge of the potential inherent in the autonomous commission model that led him, first, to create a far weaker board structure, and second, when the biotechnology commission was created, to ensure that it was led by a more pliable scientist to ensure DST control over its direction and planning.

Ironically, Bhargava could also not mobilize the discursive power of self-reliance in support of his case. Although his vision of an autonomous biotechnology commission strongly resonated with received meanings of self-reliance, without high-level political support it could not generate enough traction to become an independent source of political support. The case of biotechnology shows that the discourse of self-reliance, while remaining a powerful and resonant trope in Indian technology discourse, is better understood as a supplement to existing institutional interests, rather than an independent vector of action (Nayar 1983). No matter how creatively indigenous visions of technology were articulated, invoking self-reliance was not sufficient to overcome resistance from entrenched interests within the state bureaucracy. What was indispensable in moving—or blocking—the bureaucracy was political capital at the highest level.

Comparing electronics and biotechnology—both relative failures but for very different reasons—adds further nuance to our understanding of the factors shaping the meanings and outcomes of technological success. These include the presence or absence of a natural monopoly, the relative influence of competing state and private agencies, the maturity of an industry, a plausible vision of self-reliance, and high-level political support. However, none of these factors are by themselves sufficient to achieve success. As I demonstrate in the next section, the case of the telecom sector further complicates this picture. Although also not a natural monopoly (as with electronics and biotechnology), the telecom experience was an extraordinary success. While high-level political access remained an important consideration, the importance of the choice of technological strategy and the virtues of cross-sector political alliances now emerge as significant factors in understanding how the telecom industry was able to achieve its remarkable successes in such a short time.

Emergence of the Mission Model: Telecommunications

By the early 1980s, the Indian telephone industry was in a universally acknowledged state of crisis (Singh 1999). The large state-owned enterprise, ITI, presided over a telecom landscape where the demand for phones had outstripped supply for decades, and where high rates and poor service were the norm. Satyanarayan “Sam” Pitroda, a US-based innovator of Indian origin who had developed a digital telecom switch with microprocessor controls, arrived in India just as the government was considering increasing the capacity of the telephone industry by building a large production facility for analog switching systems. Pitroda helped convince the Department of Telecom's Sarin Committee to think more ambitiously and to opt instead for the latest digital switching technology. He then joined forces with a group at the TIFR that had built a robust mobile and secure communications system for the Indian army, and the Telecom Research Center in Delhi, which had created its own electronic switching system. Their three-way joint venture, the Centre for the Development of Telematics (C-DOT), was set up in 1984.

C-DOT's technological success came from a modular and scalable core architecture customized for rugged Indian conditions that could be multiplied indefinitely. The Centre began with a basic switching module of 128 ports designed for a rural automatic exchange. When that design was perfected, it moved to a much larger-scale urban system based on a standardized 512-port module capable of serving 400,000 lines. In the process, due to economies of scale, costs were slashed while capacity was increased manifold. At the same time, C-DOT extended telephone access enormously by inaugurating a network of manned public call booths across the country that had the added benefit of providing low-skilled employment to tens of thousands. The net effect was to revolutionize the experience of using telephones in India in less than five years.

Pitroda affirms that no small part of the success of C-DOT, technological innovations aside, had to do with the strategy adopted to build support for this novel and inclusive approach to technology development. This included reaching out to a broad coalition of “influential friends, politicians and journalists, meeting with top scientists and technologists, sending articles to the press, [then using their combined resources for] dealing with the strong opposition of some bureaucrats[,] finally making a presentation … to the then prime minister Indira Gandhi, who gave a favourable indication” (Pitroda and Pitke 2011, 133). Rajiv Gandhi attended this meeting as well and came away impressed. Once he took over as prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi put his full support behind Pitroda's venture. The Indian cabinet gave C-DOT special facilities and a unique dispensation as a scientific society “vested with the total authority and flexibility [to operate] outside government norms to ensure dynamic operation” (Pitroda and Pitke 2011, 134; emphasis added). A three-tier operating structure headed by a powerful steering committee that could make decisions rapidly and without requiring cumbersome approvals from state agencies was created. Following from its high-level political access and ability to draw diverse allies from across a rapidly changing telecom sector, C-DOT achieved organizational autonomy and demonstrated success based on a new approach to technology development: the Mission model.

C-DOT learned from the experience of similar projects undertaken in Brazil (TROPICO) and Korea (TDX) and sought to improve on both ventures. Notably, it saw its mission as the production of a viable technology, not the control of an entire telecom infrastructure. A variety of subcontractors—ranging from small-scale manufacturers of passive systems such as capacitors and relays to large-scale businesses, including giant public-sector firms from around the country—were invited to supply components to the C-DOT-designed system. This strategy automatically created a host of private and public allies, large and small, all invested in the success of the larger venture. Academic and research institutes were brought in to help deal with the multiple technical challenges facing the project, again increasing the number of parties seeking a successful conclusion to the project.

Pitroda would later write that “to survive, India had to bring telecommunications to its towns and villages; to thrive it had to do it with Indian talent and Indian technology” (Sharma 2009, 164). Unlike the experience in electronics, C-DOT achieved success in a sector that was not a natural monopoly for the following reasons: it offered a viable and visible solution to an widely acknowledged crisis; it took advantage of the appearance of offering an “Indian” solution to an endemic problem, hence tacitly invoking technological self-reliance; it deployed expertise through clever design and skillful incorporation of easily available and cheap components; it used a strategy of inclusion that brought a wide and diverse array of allies to the project; and finally, it used this coalition effectively to diffuse political resistance to its efforts. Once success had given it access to decision makers at the highest level, C-DOT was able to translate access into a novel organizational structure that gave it a high degree of autonomy and freedom to maneuver. The experience of successfully transforming the telecom sector in a remarkably short period of time had created the Mission model ab initio.

Technology Czars, the Middle Class, and the State

The preceding discussion has traced the origins of five strategic technology sectors in postcolonial India: atomic energy, space, electronics, biotechnology, and telecommunications. By comparing their respective experiences and particularly drawing insights from two cases of relative failure, namely electronics and biotech, I have shown that no single factor can explain the outcomes of these technology initiatives. Far from the singular virtuosity of the technology “czar,” success and failure are traced to a wide variety of factors, including the need for high-level political access, the successful deployment of elite networks, the maturity and structure of the sector in question, the extent of bureaucratic resistance, and the ability to mobilize heterogeneous alliances across state agencies and private industry. Through this comparison, I was able to identify a major shift in Indian technological strategy, namely, from an earlier “Commission” to today's “Mission” model.

The displacement of the Commission by the Mission model corresponds to a broader shift in Indian political economy from an earlier state-led dirigiste model to the currently dominant neoliberal alliance. Paralleling this structural shift was a move from strategic technology projects that sought to enhance a territorialized vision of state sovereignty (atomic energy, space) to a biopolitical model (telecom, basic needs, infrastructure, digital governance) that foregrounded the welfare of the national population, seen now as actual or potential consumer-citizens (Fernandes 2006). The shift to the Mission model, with its emphasis on social inclusion and the expansion of the public sphere to include the poor, minorities, lower castes, and other marginal national subjects, brought with it an inevitable decline in the ideological significance of a technology czar. As a continued embodiment of the contradictions joining technoscience with the Indian middle class and state, however, this figure remains a potent point of entry to untangling these relations.

The much-vilified Nehruvian state has long been the source of enormous benefit to the Indian middle class, ranging from subsidized education, food, and energy to secure and prestigious employment. This state is also the primary source of political identity in a competitive international world. Where India stands in the international pecking order matters hugely to a globally oriented middle class who identify as natural embodiments of the nation (S. Krishna 2006). Euphoric celebrations of spectacular technological achievements, from conducting nuclear tests to sending a rocket to Mars, are the most obvious symptoms that the middle class measures their international standing by the technopolitical accomplishments of the Indian state.

This article began by reflecting on the intimate association of particular individuals with the creation of strategic technologies in the Indian middle-class imaginary. It showed that the objective of creating a materially advanced state that could claim its rightful place in the upper echelons of the international community appeared only to be possible when the technology czar successfully bypassed regulatory institutions and norms. The common feature of both the Commission and the Mission models is a discourse that proposed the need for organizational autonomy from established state institutions and norms in order to let allegedly exemplary technoscientists “get on with the job.” From this standpoint, regulatory bodies are only seen as hindrances to the achievement of strategically vital technology projects. The avowed superiority of the exceptional individual is then used as justification to trump mundane rules designed for the regulation of the average and normal citizen. The alleged importance of the strategic technology project thus became (circular) proof that the institutionalized exception was both permissible and desirable. The original narrative of the technology czar was built around the enhancement of the sovereign power of the state, a mode of power that corresponded well with a middle-class vision of society as a naturally hierarchical formation.

Bhabha, Sarabhai, Mahalanobis, Swaminathan, Dhawan, Pitroda, and others have become so identified with particular technology projects that they stand in as metonymic representations of the project in the public mind. Actual successes and failures notwithstanding, these individuals reinforce the widely circulating belief that advances in technology come from the genius of individuals who are able to circumvent bureaucratic hurdles and material difficulties of innovation through the sheer application of their unique talents and skills. This relation is nowhere better exemplified than in the hierarchy embedded in the following statement by N. R. Narayana Murthy, the enormously successful co-founder of the global Indian IT firm, Infosys. Looking back on his experience in helping transform India's telecom sector while working at C-DOT, Narayana Murthy summed it up simply: “I was proud of Sam (Pitroda), C-DOT, and India” (Pitroda and Pitke 2011, 137). This descending ranking of “Sam, C-DOT, and India” speaks to the desire of India's middle classes to believe above all in the transformative power of individual abilities, a condition glossed as “merit” in Indian political debates.

The Indian middle class, like their counterparts around the world, are loath to believe that their class privilege could be inherited or acquired through means other than individual effort or “merit.” In India, this belief has taken root in a long-standing opposition to affirmative action quotas—“reservations”—for economically and socially marginal communities, a movement that reached fever pitch in the last decades of the twentieth century (“anti-Mandal”). The conviction that upper-caste and middle-class Indians could not get a fair shake in their homeland led thousands of Indian professionals to seek employment overseas, especially after 1965 due to changes in US immigration rules. Their economic success overseas, in a context where they could legitimately argue that they had no special privileges as recently arrived immigrants, proved to be the turning point in this debate. Three decades later, armed with newly acquired wealth and influence, these Indian diasporic subjects now returned to their homeland as “global Indians” who had proved themselves abroad, absent elite social connections and hidden advantage (Varadarajan 2010). The ethical and compensatory logic underlying the policy of reservations, namely that a legacy of social and economic discrimination should deserve material redress, could now be countered by saying that the achievements of Indians overseas proved that there was a natural hierarchy in Indian society. In other words, upper-caste status reflected inherent ability, not congealed and concealed privilege, and thus should be celebrated, not subject to reverse discrimination. Democracy was the problem, not the middle class. The global Indian was represented as a true patriot who had had no choice but to go overseas to achieve his full potential (Abraham 2014).

In this context, stories of those rare individuals who had chosen not to leave India and yet had managed to prove their “merit” through spectacular technological achievements at home came to acquire an altogether special status. Not only had they been the initiators of successful technology projects that had raised the standing of the country around the world, they had produced national self-reliance through their individual brilliance, notwithstanding all the difficulties of doing so. Technology czars are the extraordinary exception that proved the rule that the Indian middle class had no choice but to leave the country in order to achieve their full potential.

Notes

Acknowledgments

The earliest draft of this paper was improved considerably thanks to feedback from the virtual Labor-Tech group, especially Lilly Irani, Kavita Philip, Winnie Poster, Karl Mendonca, and Lilly Nguyen. Shekhar Krishnan and Connor Graham offered valuable comments during a presentation at Tembusu College of the National University of Singapore. Mrinalini Sinha helped shape my understanding of the Commission. Two anonymous JAS reviewers gave me excellent advice and suggestions for improvement, and the support of Jeff Wasserstrom is gratefully acknowledged.

List of References