Social Innovation is not possible without Social Harmony: Vice President
Social Innovation is not
possible without Social Harmony: Vice President
Inaugurates 3rd National Seminar on Social Innovation
Inaugurates 3rd National Seminar on Social Innovation
The Vice President
of India, Shri M. Hamid Ansari has said that Social Innovation is not possible
without Social Harmony. He was addressing the inaugural session of 3rd National
Seminar on Social Innovation in Pune today, organized by the Pune International
Centre (PIC) which was attended by the Governor of Maharashtra, Shri C.
Vidyasagar Rao, Guardian Minister for Pune, Government of Maharashtra, Shri
Girish Bapat, President of PIC, Dr. R.A. Mashelkar and other dignitaries.
Defining Social
Innovation as “new solutions to social challenges that have the intent and
effect of equality, justice and empowerment”, the Vice President said that
while economic progress is essential for survival and well being, it is neither
a substitute nor the panacea for the social challenges that confront us. Every
society, including ours, requires its constituent parts to work in harmony, he
added.
The Vice President
said that it was necessary to delineate the societal backdrop essential for
optimal creativity in a society seeking to maximize its innovative genius and
also to make sure that a social consensus around equality, justice and
empowerment exists, more so because there is reason today for concern about
this consensus and about the emergence of a propensity for intolerance of
diversity and dissent.
The Vice President
expressed concern that despite India’s long tradition of innovation and a
string of recent innovations, India was lagging behind its peers on the Global
Innovation Index. The Vice President referred to various schemes and programmes
that the Government of India had activated to encourage innovation in India and
stressed the importance of re-orienting our education system for providing an
environment that nurtured innovation.
Following is the
text of the Vice President's speech:
“A learned person
once drew a distinction between a meadow, a park and a garden and observed that while
in a meadow all is profusion and randomness, a park is generally regulated and
a garden is more inwardly turned and aims for the sublime.
I venture to hope
that the Pune International Centre is mix of the three, a place that allows
sufficient space for diversity, even eccentricity.
I thank you for
your invitation to be here today to address the Centre’s 3rd conference
on Social Innovation.
Our theme today is social innovation,
not mere innovation that may rightly be in the realm of technology and focus on
making manufacturing more efficient and or developing new products and services
for the consumer. Our vision, instead, is wider and emanates from a desire to
address the gaps in the developmental chain. It can best be defined as “new
Solutions to social challenges that have the intent and effect of equality,
justice and empowerment”. In other words,
· It
must be new;
· It
must address a social challenge;
· Its
intent must be to create equality, justice and empowerment;
· It’s
the end result must be equality, justice and empowerment.
It should thus
cover technological, institutional, cultural, educational and social
innovations. This is all the more relevant as the country has embarked on a
decade of innovation to reflect the best of what an aspiring generation
needs.
II
Any discussion on
Social innovation and social transformation is premised on the understanding
that it takes place in a society where people have come together for a common
purpose as a result of which there exists a modicum of social consensus and
social cohesion for such transformations to take place. Consequently, it must
be socially useful and must not be destructive or disruptive of social
cohesion.
Thus social
innovation is inseparable from the cultural, ecological, economic, political
and spiritual environment in which it takes place. It cannot be pursued in
isolation.
Social innovation
therefore gets linked to the levels of harmony, freedom, stability and security
prevailing in a society; by the same token, its promotion requires an
orientation of values, objectives and priorities towards the well-being of all,
and to this end purposeful strengthening and promotion of institutions,
policies and practices.
Equality, equity,
empowerment and social justice constitute the fundamental values of just and
democratic societies. The promotion and protection of these values provides
legitimacy to all institutions and all exercises of authority aimed at creating
an environment in which human beings are at the centre of concern for
sustainable development.
While economic
progress is essential for survival and well being, it is neither a substitute
nor the panacea for the social challenges that confront us. Every society,
including ours, requires its constituent parts to work in harmony.
This principle,
universal in nature, was expressed succinctly some years back by the former UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan. We must recognize, he said, “that stable
societies are built on three pillars. Security, development, and respect for
human rights and the rule of law. There can be no long term
security without development and there can be no development without security.” No
society can long remain prosperous or secure without due respect for human
rights and the rule of law.
The operative
assumption here is that respect for human rights unavoidably includes
acceptance of diversity, not merely tolerance of it. This transition from
tolerance to acceptance, in actual day to day practice rather than as a mantra in
political discourse, is critical for making a society fully inclusive rather
than selectively so.
Consequently, and
given that most societies are not homogenous, “If democracy is not
receptive to various identities in a plural society, then it remains only a
majoritarian democracy that under-privileges minorities.” It is for this
reason that the Indian Constitution has provisions for the protection of
minority rights “as well as balancing group rights with individual
rights”.
These preliminary
observations are necessary to delineate the societal backdrop
essential for optimal creativity in a society seeking to maximize its
innovative genius and also to make sure that a social consensus around
equality, justice and empowerment exists, more so because there is reason today
for concern about this consensus and about the emergence of a propensity for
intolerance of diversity and dissent.
III
Infosys founder,
Shri N.R. Narayana Murthy, addressing the graduating students at the Indian
Institute of Science (IISc), recently asked a pertinent question. To paraphrase
him- Why has there been no earth-shaking invention or technology from India
over the last 60 years? Some have argued that Murthy was being too IT-centric,
but the question calls for some serious soul-searching.
India has a long
tradition of innovation and since Independence there have been a series of
empowering social innovations in India. The innovation to use buffalo milk in
place of cow’s milk to produce milk powder laid the foundation for the Anand
cooperative dairy model- ushering in the white revolution in India. The
introduction of cooked mid-day meals in schools was an innovation that has had
a multilayered impact on the society. The Aravind Eye Care Hospital provides a
vivid illustration. Since its founding in 1976 as an 11-bed hospital in
Madurai, Aravind today runs six hospitals that perform more than 300,000 eye
surgeries annually. This productivity is based on deep competencies, which
result in cost savings that enable treating two-thirds of the poorest patients
free. Yet Aravind still earns sufficient income to enable expansion.
There are a number
of other Indian innovation stories: the low cost qualitative hearing aid; the
digital twin spark ignition motorcycle engine; the mitti-cool fridge; the super
30 education programme from Patna that selects and trains promising young
students from socio-economically weaker sections for entrance examinations to
top technical institutions and hundreds of other innovative products and
services that are using the internet or the mobile phone technology to deliver
choices to a growing number of people.
Have these
innovations, social or technical; become a main-stream phenomenon? Have they
gathered enough momentum to make India an innovative society? What is the
Indian score card on innovation? What can be done to improve it?
Aarthi Rao, in her
2012 article, “What's the Matter with India?” called India a
powerhouse of social innovation struggling to take the next step, pointing out
that the up-scaling or conversion of the innovative starts to socially
transformative levels was not sufficiently wide-spread.
The honest truth
is that we lag behind many others, including our peers. The Global Innovation
Index 2015 ranks us as 81st out of 141 countries, below Brazil
at 70, South Africa at 60, Russia at 48 and China at 29.
The Index
identified three areas of weakness: SMEs, intellectual property rights, and
higher education. Asserting that ‘an economy is as innovative as its SMEs’, it
suggests fiscal and tax guidelines to infuse a culture of innovation and
R&D in SMEs along with incentivizing innovation-driven start-ups as well as
improvement in ease of business environment and infrastructure development.
In a recent
article, Baba Prasad, author of the book ‘Nimble’, listed some of
the reasons why India has failed to provide the budding entrepreneur or
innovator the ecosystem, the resources or the infrastructure that Silicon
Valley provides its potential entrepreneurs;
- Our educational system is
steeped in training implementers, not thinkers;
- There is a significant
lack of appetite for taking risks and both Indian families and educational
institutions have a ‘play-safe’ attitude;
- There is a lack of
start-up funding environment; and
- The slow pace and
inefficiencies of the Indian legal system are a deterrent to innovative
spirit.
IV
Participating in a
‘digital dialogue’ on 5th of July this year, the Prime Minister promised to
give ‘absolute support’ to make enterprise and innovation easier so that India
emerges as an innovation hub and keeps pace with the fast changing world. He
said “The world is changing quicker than ever before and we cannot
remain oblivious to that. If we don’t innovate, if we don’t come up with
cutting edge products, there will be stagnation.”
The Global
Innovation Index Report 2015, in its chapter on India has also identified
certain strengths such as the size and sharp growth of India’s economy, the
presence of centres of excellence in top Indian universities, the 66% increase
in output of scientific publications and the leap-forging in areas of
technological infrastructure including the high penetration rate of mobile
network. The report recommends that there is a need to;
(i) Increase
the number of higher education institutions as well as university-industry
collaboration,
(ii) Encourage
innovations in the SMEs,
(iii) Incentivize
the development of an entrepreneurial eco-system,
(iv) Improve
the ease of doing business,
(v) Develop
the physical infrastructure, and
(vi) Improve
the Intellectual Property Regime (IPR).
The President of
India declared the year 2010 to be the start of the Decade of Innovation with a
specific focus on addressing issues of poverty. To further this national
agenda, and administer governmental activity in support of innovation through
assistance in human, financial, social and intellectual capital, the National
Innovation Council was created to develop a ‘National Roadmap for Innovation’
over the next decade.
Alongside, a
National Innovation Foundation – India, was set up as an autonomous body of the
Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. The Foundation has
sought to incentivized pursuit of innovation through the Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam
IGNITE competition at school level. The results are modest, given the size of
our school-going population.
A recent report of
an expert’s committee headed by Dr. Tarun Khanna, constituted by the Niti
Aayog, for determining the contours of new Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), which
is a successor mechanism to the National Innovation Council, notes that “Bringing
about innovation has never been as important as today, as the global economy
shifts away from the industrial economy towards the innovation economy….What is
heartening is that recent economic theory suggests that government investment
in R&D, knowledge-creation, and technological progress does have a role to
play in fuelling innovation, productivity, capital creation, and therefore
growth.”
The report
recommends setting up the Innovation Mission with a three tiered approach and
dovetailing it with the National Skill Development Programmes. The committee
has proposed a short term incentive based approach to redress some immediate
issues; an intermediate approach to correct imbalances in education, skilling
initiatives, infrastructure and business environment; and a long term approach
to create the ‘culture and attitudes’ needed to foster innovation and
entrepreneurship.
In this context,
we need to take note of what the President of India said on March 7 this year
at an innovation award function:
“Midway through
this Decade (2010-2020) of Innovations, we perhaps need to assess and if
necessary, recalibrate our approach towards harnessing the creativity of our
grass-root innovators and student. Increasing the scalability of grass-root
innovations necessitates a strong linkage between the invaluable knowledge bank
prevalent in our society and the formal education system. To use our innovation
potential for the greater good, the nodal governmental agencies must play an
enabling role.”
The Governor of
Reserve Bank of India, in a recent talk at IIT Delhi, listed out some ways for
a nation “to keep the idea factory open”. He suggested that
the first essential is to “foster competition in the market place for
ideas” by “encouraging challenge to all authority and
tradition, even while acknowledging that the only way of dismissing any view is
through empirical tests.” Imposition of a particular view of ideology
is ruled out and all ideas are subject to critical examination. The second
essential, was “Protection, not of specific ideas and traditions, but
the right to question and challenge, the right to behave differently so long as
it does not hurt others seriously. In this protection lies societal
self-interest, for it is by encouraging the challenge of innovative rebels that
society develops.”
Each of the above
necessitates a scientific temper and a social ambiance conducive for it.
I wish you success
in your deliberation.
Jai Hind.”
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