Science, Technology and Innovation Policy in India under Economic Reform: A Survey T. Jayaraman INTRODUCTION In the pre-economic reform era, the question of scientific and technological development in India had a central role in the general debate on the country’s development strategy, whether in policy-oriented discussions, in academic considerations or in discussions in the public and political arena. Unusually, compared to several other contentious issues, science and technology was the subject of a rather broad consensus that, barring a few notable exceptions, drew support from across the political spectrum and from many strands of public and political opinion. The exception was of course the Gandhian critique that originated in a foundational critique of industrial technology and industrial production. But barring this critique it was generally agreed that science and technology were one of the key elements of national economic growth and the general improvement of the material conditions of the population. Indeed the role envisaged for science and technology in national life went well beyond an instrumental view of science and technology in any purely economic view of development. Science and scientific temper were, in a view most elegantly articulated by Nehru, indispensable to the development of a new ethos and world-view that would privilege rationality and a critical attitude. Scientific and technological development was also closely linked to the paradigm of self- reliance. Whatever the vicissitudes suffered by this paradigm in the sphere of industrial policy, the rhetoric of self-reliance held the high ground in the formulation and implementation of scientific and technological goals and policies. The origins of this link, as is well known, are to be found in the colonial era in the views of the freedom movement. These views saw the possession and control of scientific and technological knowledge as the key both to a significant presence on the world stage as well as the surest way to avoid the perils of economic dependency that characterized the colonial era. The rhetoric of indigenously developed science and technology together with the paradigm of self-reliance framed the policy discourse on science and technology for several decades after the attainment of national independence. In its early years clearly the rhetoric was in some way matched by the performance of several sectors of Indian science and technology. However the promise held out by this performance was belied by a number of weaknesses. These included the many weaknesses and gaps in the performance of even the sectors that were hailed as the exemplars of Indian S&T. S&T performance clearly failed in part to impact on poverty alleviation and overall development, as the rhetoric of the State had promised. In the 1980s, the increasing distance between the rhetoric of self-reliance and the actual level of technological development and innovation in Indian industry was becoming apparent. Critical discussions of Indian science and technology policy have tended to founder on the issue of assessing this gap between the