Innovation Demands Freedom
Read VA Shiva’s Article on His Efforts to Unleash Innovation in India
VA Shiva Reflects on Why America Innovates and India May Never as Long as Feudal Lords Control Indian Innovation.
VA Shiva argues that innovation in India cannot take place in any substantive way until the feudal culture persistent in its scientific institutions is addressed. His observations come from being an insider serving at the top-most scientific position in 2009 at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). VA Shiva was appointed in 2009 by the Prime Minister of India to the highest scientific position attainable in India within CSIR to unleash innovation. As an insider, he observed many core dysfunctions, which he published in an honest report. The contents of that report were released to the press for which he was subsequently dismissed and threatened, leading to him having to flee India. On the Innovation Demands Freedom website, he shares the details of this journey.
The Indian Situation for Innovation
VA Shiva’s central critique and complaint of India’s scientific infrastructure and subculture concerns the blockages within India’s social infrastructure to rising innovators and entrepreneurs based on a feudal hierarchy. Emigrating to the United States at age seven in 1970, VA Shiva returned decades later in 2009 to India on a Fulbright to study the links of eastern medicine with modern biology. Concluding his year-long Fulbright grant, VA Shiva was asked to join the CSIR where he found himself at odds and at the center of controversy concerning the council’s leadership. Issuing a report to deploy innovation across India, VA Shiva identified and critiqued India’s backward feudal hierarchy as a detrimental barrier to innovation. Issuing a direct critique of the CSIR’s insufficiencies insofar as leading toward the creation of an India with greater innovative freedom and integrity of scientific organization, VA Shiva was dismissed from the Council and returned to MIT where he has since written compellingly concerning the power of freedom of thought and scientific inquiry that must necessarily exist alongside a supportive infrastructure for the generation of innovation.
What did VA Shiva Accomplish in India?
While at CSIR, VA Shiva spoke to nearly 1,500 scientists and soon found strong echoes of agreement that CSIR was in fact an organization corrupted by its own management, suffocating ingenuity and innovation and suppressing the voice of India’s scientific community from achieving its largest potential. Seventy years following Britain’s occupation of India- there have been zero Nobel prize winners in India in any category of science or medicine and even prior to that. Ironically, under British occupation, two Indians received Nobel Prize awards. Facing public outcry concerning lack of performance of India’s scientific facilities and of India’s scientific community at large, VA Shiva was brought into the organizational fold and hired at least in theory to ignite a sustained trajectory of innovation in India. Sadly enough, however, the internal agenda of the CSIR’s management had in reality only brought in VA Shiva as a palliative solution to a tired and corrupt organizational infrastructure, plagued by nepotism and failure to deliver on its organizational promises and intentions.
The Honest Report
Within three months of his extended stay in India, VA Shiva had organized a new model for India’s innovation, as approved by India’s Former Stock Exchange Board chairman and as hailed by “nearly all the scientists across India.” VA Shiva’s model for innovation was based on driving hands-on entrepreneurship, such as encouraging scientists to find real customers for their laboratory innovations. Recall the original intention of CSIR was to be a translational institute, converting ideas to tangible products for the Indian masses. VA Shiva’s report provided a bold new model for implementing that vision, which had not existed in the 70-year history of CSIR.
In spite of the acceptance of his model among scientific scholars, the CSIR did not permit VA Shiva to deploy his model, as VA Shiva comments that doing so “would mean they would have to demonstrate more transparency, openness, and meritocracy within a fundamentally feudal organization.” Meanwhile, VA Shiva’s own boss was under investigation for potentially embezzling 35 million dollars. During this investigation in July of 2009, half of the CSIR central headquarters sustained a major fire in which a bookkeeper who would have been an important witness in the investigation was also killed.
For more http://vashiva.com/vashiva-innovation-demands-freedom/
