Effective philanthropy in India: a case study for contributing to the strengthening of the foundations of a developing nation
Abstract
Our aim is to identify the most important of those problems of the developing world that can be alleviated by philanthropic assistance from nations, organizations and individuals of significant wealth in the developed world. We start with a brief historical study of philanthropy. This leads naturally to the question whether in today's information age, the usual avenues of philanthropy, like poverty alleviation, peace-keeping, universal elementary education and prevention of diseases, are sufficient to equip the developing countries to effectively deal with their problems in the future. To answer this question, we trace the evolution of a consensus that a knowledge-based global economy would be the pre-dominant developmental theme underlying the 21st century. This quickly leads us to deduce that, from the perspective of philanthropy, the most important of the factors that would enable a developing nation to participate in the 21st century's knowledge-based economy is the establishment of a widely spread scientific knowledge-base.
For the purpose of clarity, we focus solely on India, as a case study. We first try to convey an appreciation that the analysis of the Indian context is a genuinely hard problem. The results of most previous attempts have varied widely between misinformation, exaggeration and discouragement when implemented in real life. To overcome this problem in our particular situation, we devise a new technique of viewing Indian society through the prism of six legacies from its past. The power of this technique is illustrated by explaining the major upheavals of the last half-century in terms of these legacies. This illustration also demonstrates the reliability of this technique as a general tool for studying the foundations of Indian society. We then show that our technique makes it possible to identify those aspects of science and mathematics in which India lags behind the West the most, and the reasons for India's under-performance in those aspects.
Next, we devise a novel method for transferring scientific knowledge from the research communities in the developed nations directly to the talent pool in India in a cost-effective manner on a scale commensurate with the knowledge-based economy. Finally, we discuss how, with appropriate care, the analytic approach applied to India in this report can be extended to all developing nations.
For the purpose of clarity, we focus solely on India, as a case study. We first try to convey an appreciation that the analysis of the Indian context is a genuinely hard problem. The results of most previous attempts have varied widely between misinformation, exaggeration and discouragement when implemented in real life. To overcome this problem in our particular situation, we devise a new technique of viewing Indian society through the prism of six legacies from its past. The power of this technique is illustrated by explaining the major upheavals of the last half-century in terms of these legacies. This illustration also demonstrates the reliability of this technique as a general tool for studying the foundations of Indian society. We then show that our technique makes it possible to identify those aspects of science and mathematics in which India lags behind the West the most, and the reasons for India's under-performance in those aspects.
Next, we devise a novel method for transferring scientific knowledge from the research communities in the developed nations directly to the talent pool in India in a cost-effective manner on a scale commensurate with the knowledge-based economy. Finally, we discuss how, with appropriate care, the analytic approach applied to India in this report can be extended to all developing nations.
Introduction
This report deals with some issues of philanthropy that are relevant for nations, organizations and individuals of significant wealth in the developed world. Our aim is to study how such entities can contribute effectively towards aiding the development of the poor countries of the third world. For this purpose, we start with a brief historical study of philanthropy. This study shows that while the stated aim has often been to strengthen the foundations of the developing nations, the ever-changing nature of the world poses the question whether the usual approach to philanthropy does in fact weaken the foundations, by under-utilizing the opportunities of this information age, so as to make the developing countries perennially dependent on external assistance.
To further investigate the situation, we trace the evolution of a consensus that a knowledge-based global economy is the pre-dominant developmental theme underlying the 21st century. We explain that in such an economy, traditional handicaps of a third-world country, the lack of infrastructure for instance, are far less relevant -- telecommunication and information technology are the great equalizers. This also indicates that whereas the usual avenues of philanthropy have focused on poverty alleviation, peace-keeping, universal elementary education and prevention of diseases, these same avenues are necessary but not sufficient. It is in the development of scientific knowledge that the developing nations have the most hope for participating in the knowledge-based economy as equals along with the developed nations.
Next, as a case study, we restrict ourselves completely to India. We first try to convey an appreciation that Indian society is one of the most complicated phenomena one would ever encounter, that understanding its roots and forecasting its functioning is a genuinely hard problem. In recent times, the most worthy attempt on this problem, from a sociological perspective, has been the travel writings of Sir V. S. Naipaul, the 2001 Nobel laureate in literature. The title of one of his books conveys the immensity of the context quite well, “India: a million mutinies now”. Lesser mortals who number in the millions have had to make every day choices and decisions, for economic, social and political reasons, based on their understanding of India. This understanding which is shaped by the media, the history, the religions, the land and the culture has shown extremely wide variations. For example, the popular slogans of the Indian political elections have fluctuated vastly from ‘Garibi hatao’ to ‘India shining’.
The great euphoria in the Indian diaspora regarding India's shining future in the 21st century is an attitude that has been steadily gaining grounds, despite recent setbacks, ever since the days of liberalization in the early nineties. We recognize that this attitude has a healthy basis in economic reality, fuelled regularly, as it is, by mini-revolutions like IT, BPO, Outsourcing, Cell phones, Broadband, Biotech, etc. However, we point out that this India shining attitude has been a recurrent theme for India in the last two centuries. Even at the time of independence, many eminent thinkers wrote about various reforms that would make India break out of the shackles of its historical misfortunes and arrive as one of the greatest nations of the world. But the post-independence experience quickly showed that those views were too optimistic. We ask if we are going to be misled once again by a mirage.
To overcome the unreliability of widely varying assessments of the Indian context, we propose a new approach aimed at analyzing the fundamental issues of Indian society in a systematic and tractable manner, for our particular purpose of effective philanthropy. In this new approach, we view the Indian society through the prism of six legacies from its past -- the Vedic (Brahminical/Buddhist/Jainist) legacy, the Islamic (Mughlai) legacy, the Colonial (British) legacy, the Swadeshi (freedom-struggle, Gandhian) legacy, the post-independence legacy and the native (mystical, pastoral) legacy. The power of this perspective is demonstrated by showing that the major upheavals in India of the last half-century can be seen as the expressions, at various times, of these six legacies, sometimes in simultaneous outbursts. In a subsequent section, we explain how these legacies make India especially suited for the knowledge-based economy. On the other hand, we also stress the enormous costs that India pays for carrying the widely divergent world-views propounded by its six legacies.
This is in contrast to the success of the developed nations in the West which is mainly due to their homogeneous, convergent world-view, a world-view that is quite amenable to scientific thought. We list the main foundations of the Western society -- the philosophical traditions of ancient Greece, the political traditions of the Roman empire, the contribution of monotheism to the separation of religion and the natural sciences, the Christian tradition of promoting universal education, the fostering of universities during the middle ages by the Catholic Church, the Newtonian tradition of investigating the natural sciences through mathematical principles (Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica), the re-emergence of democracy during the Renaissance humanism, the secular-Jewish tradition of pursuing science with a sense of scholarly equanimity without recourse to religious or political allegiances.
In the Western society, each of these traditions reinforces the others to provide a unified scientific world-view, whereas India's six legacies are frequently working at cross purposes. Often the resurgence of just one or two of India’s legacies in a particular period of time has been mistaken for a bright future or a discouraging present for the country. Clearly, the interplay of the six legacies provides a much more robust explanation for the Indian context, and using this approach one can readily see why visions of India’s future have turned out to be quite misguided time and again.
We develop this viewpoint further by reviewing the potential of each of the six legacies to contribute to science and technology, the key factors determining the performance of a country in the knowledge-based economy. In a subsequent section, we identify the divergence and mutual contradictions of the six legacies of India as the main stumbling block to a shining performance by India in these areas. On the positive side, we now examine how the six legacies are suited for the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century, and we come away with a strong sense of optimism.
First, we point out the similarities between the knowledge-based global economy of today and the ancient Vedic society. The modern knowledge-based global economy is driven by specialization of skills among its classes. The professorial class, the business class, the governing class, the working class each devotes a lifetime of effort towards success in their chosen field of specialization. Much in a similar fashion, the ancient Vedic society divided itself as castes on the basis of professional activity. The role of the professorial class, for example, was played by the Brahmin caste in the ancient Vedic society. As a society, ancient India was as prepared and optimized as the modern western nations are focused, towards the pursuit of knowledge. Adam Smith's “The Wealth of Nations” emphasizes division of labor as the most important reason for the creation of wealth in an industrialized nation. In modern times, we may specify that a society dividing its labor and further, optimizing its division with the aim of pursuing knowledge, is the most advanced society in the knowledge-based economy. This is exactly the situation in the ancient Vedic society, thus demonstrating that its Vedic legacy prepares India very strongly to compete in the knowledge-based global economy of the 21st century.
Moreover, Vedic knowledge and Greek philosophy were similar in that both of these disciplines were scholarly enquiries into the way a human should lead his or her life. We emphasize that in the ancient world, Vedic knowledge had an equally pre-eminent status as Greek philosophy. The ancient universities of Nalanda and Taxila were centers of active scholarship and learning which attracted thousands of scholars from throughout Asia. Perhaps the only centers of higher education of comparable reputation at that time were the Greek academies. An important common ground between the Vedic society and the Greek culture has been the omnipresence of mathematics in nearly every aspect of their lifestyle. It is noted that the two traditions had explored many aspects of human activity deeply and in an enduring fashion –- for example, philosophy, arts, literature, politics, sociology, medicine, laws and mathematics. However, it is their forays into laws, medicine and mathematics that are most relevant to today's knowledge-based economy. A philanthropic source based in the West could do very little about the system of laws of a developing nation. As far as medicine is concerned, the Hippocratic tradition has largely been subsumed by modern medical practices and the ayurvedic tradition is not as widely practiced as allopathic medicine in India. Hence we infer that it is the mathematical tradition of the ancient societies of India and Greece that are most relevant for the purposes of studying the Vedic legacy with the aim of devising an effective program of philanthropy.
Throughout the ages, the Vedic legacy has produced first-rate mathematicians like Aryabhatta, Bhaskaracharya, Srinivasan Ramanujan. It is also noted that, historically, the pre-dominant strengths of Indian mathematicians lie in algebra and number theory, whereas, Western mathematics has emphasized the development of geometry ever since Plato’s time. For example, Euclid's books on geometry, along with Latin grammar and Homer's epic poems, have formed the basis of a school education throughout the western world all these centuries. Another difference between the two traditions has been the emphasis on experimental verifications in Greek philosophy starting from the works of Aristotle, which has led to the modern scientist's empirical explorations of the natural world. This is in contrast to the Vedic tradition which tended to focus more on the theoretical aspects of knowledge. We will see later, when we consider the Swadeshi and post-independence legacy, how this historical stress on theoretical topics to the exclusion of experimental investigations and the neglect of geometry has been an obstacle for the progress of physics, chemistry, biology and medicine in India.
Next, we analyze the potential of the Islamic legacy in India to contribute to the knowledge-based economy. The epitome of the Islamic legacy in India has been the rule of the Mughals in the middle ages. There were many other smaller rulers like the Deccan sultanates, the Delhi sultanates, and several destructive invaders like Timur the lame, Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori. In addition to these outside influences, for various reasons, a significant percentage of indigenous people have converted to Islam. Though the aggregate contribution of all these elements to the Islamic legacy in India is enormous, its influence has been to a disproportionate extent on such humanistic topics as arts, architecture, literature, music, language, food rather than on scientific topics. However, the Unani system of medicine is one area where the Islamic influence can contribute to the development of scientific knowledge in India. We must also mention here that the first exhibition of the Swadeshi legacy was in resisting the oncoming of the Islamic legacy during the middle ages. The main proponents of the Swadeshi legacy in this period have been the Marathas, Rajputs and Sikhs, and this period has thrown-up quite a few folk heroes like Prithviraj Chauhan, Chatrapathi Shivaji, Ranjith Singh for their role as defenders of the faith. Perhaps the expense of vast energies in warfare at the meeting of the two legacies may be the reason why there is relatively little contribution to India's scientific potential from the Islamic legacy.
Next, we turn to the Colonial legacy. The colonial legacy of the British in India has largely been in the establishment of the basic infrastructure that is required for a nation to be an industrial economy. The British followed a conscious policy of equipping India with the then modern facilities just to the extent that the Indian economy can function productively, so that tax revenues can be maximized and raw materials for the industries in Britain can be produced in vast quantities and procured at cheap rates. Even so, the long term impact of the British rule in India is truly overwhelming -- civil services, railways, judiciary courts, police, defense, the Westminster system of government, tax code, highways, schools, universities, etc. To the British we owe the creation of an educated, English-speaking workforce. In ancient India, there was no elementary education to speak of. Vocational studies simply amounted to hereditary transfer of professional skills. The gurukul system fostered the practices of higher learning to a portion of the upper castes. The decisive shift away from this fragmented scenario in ancient India to a comprehensive program of universal education in the schools and colleges of modern India came under the single-handed influence of the British legacy.
To further investigate the situation, we trace the evolution of a consensus that a knowledge-based global economy is the pre-dominant developmental theme underlying the 21st century. We explain that in such an economy, traditional handicaps of a third-world country, the lack of infrastructure for instance, are far less relevant -- telecommunication and information technology are the great equalizers. This also indicates that whereas the usual avenues of philanthropy have focused on poverty alleviation, peace-keeping, universal elementary education and prevention of diseases, these same avenues are necessary but not sufficient. It is in the development of scientific knowledge that the developing nations have the most hope for participating in the knowledge-based economy as equals along with the developed nations.
Next, as a case study, we restrict ourselves completely to India. We first try to convey an appreciation that Indian society is one of the most complicated phenomena one would ever encounter, that understanding its roots and forecasting its functioning is a genuinely hard problem. In recent times, the most worthy attempt on this problem, from a sociological perspective, has been the travel writings of Sir V. S. Naipaul, the 2001 Nobel laureate in literature. The title of one of his books conveys the immensity of the context quite well, “India: a million mutinies now”. Lesser mortals who number in the millions have had to make every day choices and decisions, for economic, social and political reasons, based on their understanding of India. This understanding which is shaped by the media, the history, the religions, the land and the culture has shown extremely wide variations. For example, the popular slogans of the Indian political elections have fluctuated vastly from ‘Garibi hatao’ to ‘India shining’.
The great euphoria in the Indian diaspora regarding India's shining future in the 21st century is an attitude that has been steadily gaining grounds, despite recent setbacks, ever since the days of liberalization in the early nineties. We recognize that this attitude has a healthy basis in economic reality, fuelled regularly, as it is, by mini-revolutions like IT, BPO, Outsourcing, Cell phones, Broadband, Biotech, etc. However, we point out that this India shining attitude has been a recurrent theme for India in the last two centuries. Even at the time of independence, many eminent thinkers wrote about various reforms that would make India break out of the shackles of its historical misfortunes and arrive as one of the greatest nations of the world. But the post-independence experience quickly showed that those views were too optimistic. We ask if we are going to be misled once again by a mirage.
To overcome the unreliability of widely varying assessments of the Indian context, we propose a new approach aimed at analyzing the fundamental issues of Indian society in a systematic and tractable manner, for our particular purpose of effective philanthropy. In this new approach, we view the Indian society through the prism of six legacies from its past -- the Vedic (Brahminical/Buddhist/Jainist) legacy, the Islamic (Mughlai) legacy, the Colonial (British) legacy, the Swadeshi (freedom-struggle, Gandhian) legacy, the post-independence legacy and the native (mystical, pastoral) legacy. The power of this perspective is demonstrated by showing that the major upheavals in India of the last half-century can be seen as the expressions, at various times, of these six legacies, sometimes in simultaneous outbursts. In a subsequent section, we explain how these legacies make India especially suited for the knowledge-based economy. On the other hand, we also stress the enormous costs that India pays for carrying the widely divergent world-views propounded by its six legacies.
This is in contrast to the success of the developed nations in the West which is mainly due to their homogeneous, convergent world-view, a world-view that is quite amenable to scientific thought. We list the main foundations of the Western society -- the philosophical traditions of ancient Greece, the political traditions of the Roman empire, the contribution of monotheism to the separation of religion and the natural sciences, the Christian tradition of promoting universal education, the fostering of universities during the middle ages by the Catholic Church, the Newtonian tradition of investigating the natural sciences through mathematical principles (Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica), the re-emergence of democracy during the Renaissance humanism, the secular-Jewish tradition of pursuing science with a sense of scholarly equanimity without recourse to religious or political allegiances.
In the Western society, each of these traditions reinforces the others to provide a unified scientific world-view, whereas India's six legacies are frequently working at cross purposes. Often the resurgence of just one or two of India’s legacies in a particular period of time has been mistaken for a bright future or a discouraging present for the country. Clearly, the interplay of the six legacies provides a much more robust explanation for the Indian context, and using this approach one can readily see why visions of India’s future have turned out to be quite misguided time and again.
We develop this viewpoint further by reviewing the potential of each of the six legacies to contribute to science and technology, the key factors determining the performance of a country in the knowledge-based economy. In a subsequent section, we identify the divergence and mutual contradictions of the six legacies of India as the main stumbling block to a shining performance by India in these areas. On the positive side, we now examine how the six legacies are suited for the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century, and we come away with a strong sense of optimism.
First, we point out the similarities between the knowledge-based global economy of today and the ancient Vedic society. The modern knowledge-based global economy is driven by specialization of skills among its classes. The professorial class, the business class, the governing class, the working class each devotes a lifetime of effort towards success in their chosen field of specialization. Much in a similar fashion, the ancient Vedic society divided itself as castes on the basis of professional activity. The role of the professorial class, for example, was played by the Brahmin caste in the ancient Vedic society. As a society, ancient India was as prepared and optimized as the modern western nations are focused, towards the pursuit of knowledge. Adam Smith's “The Wealth of Nations” emphasizes division of labor as the most important reason for the creation of wealth in an industrialized nation. In modern times, we may specify that a society dividing its labor and further, optimizing its division with the aim of pursuing knowledge, is the most advanced society in the knowledge-based economy. This is exactly the situation in the ancient Vedic society, thus demonstrating that its Vedic legacy prepares India very strongly to compete in the knowledge-based global economy of the 21st century.
Moreover, Vedic knowledge and Greek philosophy were similar in that both of these disciplines were scholarly enquiries into the way a human should lead his or her life. We emphasize that in the ancient world, Vedic knowledge had an equally pre-eminent status as Greek philosophy. The ancient universities of Nalanda and Taxila were centers of active scholarship and learning which attracted thousands of scholars from throughout Asia. Perhaps the only centers of higher education of comparable reputation at that time were the Greek academies. An important common ground between the Vedic society and the Greek culture has been the omnipresence of mathematics in nearly every aspect of their lifestyle. It is noted that the two traditions had explored many aspects of human activity deeply and in an enduring fashion –- for example, philosophy, arts, literature, politics, sociology, medicine, laws and mathematics. However, it is their forays into laws, medicine and mathematics that are most relevant to today's knowledge-based economy. A philanthropic source based in the West could do very little about the system of laws of a developing nation. As far as medicine is concerned, the Hippocratic tradition has largely been subsumed by modern medical practices and the ayurvedic tradition is not as widely practiced as allopathic medicine in India. Hence we infer that it is the mathematical tradition of the ancient societies of India and Greece that are most relevant for the purposes of studying the Vedic legacy with the aim of devising an effective program of philanthropy.
Throughout the ages, the Vedic legacy has produced first-rate mathematicians like Aryabhatta, Bhaskaracharya, Srinivasan Ramanujan. It is also noted that, historically, the pre-dominant strengths of Indian mathematicians lie in algebra and number theory, whereas, Western mathematics has emphasized the development of geometry ever since Plato’s time. For example, Euclid's books on geometry, along with Latin grammar and Homer's epic poems, have formed the basis of a school education throughout the western world all these centuries. Another difference between the two traditions has been the emphasis on experimental verifications in Greek philosophy starting from the works of Aristotle, which has led to the modern scientist's empirical explorations of the natural world. This is in contrast to the Vedic tradition which tended to focus more on the theoretical aspects of knowledge. We will see later, when we consider the Swadeshi and post-independence legacy, how this historical stress on theoretical topics to the exclusion of experimental investigations and the neglect of geometry has been an obstacle for the progress of physics, chemistry, biology and medicine in India.
Next, we analyze the potential of the Islamic legacy in India to contribute to the knowledge-based economy. The epitome of the Islamic legacy in India has been the rule of the Mughals in the middle ages. There were many other smaller rulers like the Deccan sultanates, the Delhi sultanates, and several destructive invaders like Timur the lame, Mahmud of Ghazni, Muhammad Ghori. In addition to these outside influences, for various reasons, a significant percentage of indigenous people have converted to Islam. Though the aggregate contribution of all these elements to the Islamic legacy in India is enormous, its influence has been to a disproportionate extent on such humanistic topics as arts, architecture, literature, music, language, food rather than on scientific topics. However, the Unani system of medicine is one area where the Islamic influence can contribute to the development of scientific knowledge in India. We must also mention here that the first exhibition of the Swadeshi legacy was in resisting the oncoming of the Islamic legacy during the middle ages. The main proponents of the Swadeshi legacy in this period have been the Marathas, Rajputs and Sikhs, and this period has thrown-up quite a few folk heroes like Prithviraj Chauhan, Chatrapathi Shivaji, Ranjith Singh for their role as defenders of the faith. Perhaps the expense of vast energies in warfare at the meeting of the two legacies may be the reason why there is relatively little contribution to India's scientific potential from the Islamic legacy.
Next, we turn to the Colonial legacy. The colonial legacy of the British in India has largely been in the establishment of the basic infrastructure that is required for a nation to be an industrial economy. The British followed a conscious policy of equipping India with the then modern facilities just to the extent that the Indian economy can function productively, so that tax revenues can be maximized and raw materials for the industries in Britain can be produced in vast quantities and procured at cheap rates. Even so, the long term impact of the British rule in India is truly overwhelming -- civil services, railways, judiciary courts, police, defense, the Westminster system of government, tax code, highways, schools, universities, etc. To the British we owe the creation of an educated, English-speaking workforce. In ancient India, there was no elementary education to speak of. Vocational studies simply amounted to hereditary transfer of professional skills. The gurukul system fostered the practices of higher learning to a portion of the upper castes. The decisive shift away from this fragmented scenario in ancient India to a comprehensive program of universal education in the schools and colleges of modern India came under the single-handed influence of the British legacy.
T. V. Selvakumaran
(To be continued …)
