Civilisational Renaissance and India's Preparedness for Long-Future
We must achieve the civilizational goals set for 2047, known as Amrit Kaal. We could then become accustomed to setting and achieving targets for 2072, the 125th anniversary, and 2097, the 150th anniversary of Independence Day.
Independent India never stopped the struggle to find the best models suitable for its progress. After securing independence in 1947, India has been grappling with ideological vicissitudes. There have been some who championed the execution of national policies based on indigenous necessities. Some were enamoured by the anti-colonial line of policymaking, which did not fit our native requirements. Then some sought bliss in continuing with colonial-era policies, rationalising that the colonial policymaking mechanisms, including the legal structures, had been in place for nearly a century. For them, it made sense to continue with these mechanisms. Some have toyed with all three sensibilities in various permutations and combinations.
Bharat is an ancient civilisation that can think over long periods lasting centuries. But after independence, we somehow lost the ability to think over longer durations. Independent India began aping the communist nations and began planning for no more than a 5-year horizon. Fortunately, we have moved past the aberration, and now, 25-year planning has become possible, five times longer than the typical planning horizon. The Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav has inspired Bharat to plan and execute initiatives for the next 25 years, culminating in the celebration of the Azadi ka Shatak Mahotsav in 2047.
When the Narendra Modi administration took charge in 2014, its first significant policy change was to reorganise and rename the Planning Commission of India as the National Institution for Transforming India Aayog, better known as NITI Aayog. The renaming demonstrated the willingness to break the low ceiling created by short-duration 5-year planning and widen it. Although NITI never informed what planning durations it was looking for. Executing any project requires meticulous planning, monitoring, and attaining targets. Often, such marks are to be achieved at regular intervals, and 5-year planning makes sense if microscopic execution is to be undertaken. However, India was unable to efficiently execute the targets set within the 5-year plans. India somehow did not realise that the significance of planning over longer durations is necessary to achieve those microscopic goals within 5-year periods. India desperately needed to plan on a larger scale and over longer time horizons – at least a quarter or half a century – and ensure that several microscopic executions eventually led to the larger plan.
A 25-year plan and execution horizon attributed to Amrit Kaal (2022-2047) is an auspicious event for India. Firstly, it bodes very well for projects with long gestational periods. Cutting-edge science is one of them. From Deep Ocean Mission to Indian Human Space Flight Programme; from International Thermonuclear Energy Reactor to LIGO India; from International Solar Alliance to Earth BioGenome Project; from achieving Net Zero Emissions, Circular Economy, the execution of the 10-trillion-dollar economy mark will all depend on how India dreams, plans, executes and attains its targets during the Amrit Kaal. Twenty-five years from now, the habit of considering longer time horizons will become so ingrained in the minds of our executives, scientists, and planners that India will no longer return to the era of short-sightedness. Indeed, Indians would never denigrate short-term achievements, but would develop a penchant for accumulating them to attain bigger ambitions.
I would like to provide an example from my own professional experience. I was 22 when I got selected to do my Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany. My Ph.D. project, which eventually was also the title of my thesis, was titled “The Organic Composition of a Cometary Nucleus, the COSAC Experiment on Philae.” The project was quite remarkable. I was tasked with working on a ground-reference model, a laboratory-based prototype of the COSAC payload, which would fly on the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. When I joined in 2011, the spacecraft was three years away from reaching the target comet. The spacecraft had begun its journey seven years earlier, in 2004. The instruments that flew on Rosetta have been designed roughly since 1995, whereas ESA began conceptualising the mission around 1986. The end-of-mission happened in 2016. So, what did I, and many like me who learned from the mission, experience? We have experience with long-range planning and execution in the real world. The mission lasted – from concept to final closure – precisely for 30 years. The beauty of Rosetta was that three generations worked on them diligently, tirelessly, and with utmost efficiency. Landing on a 4-km-wide comet with technology from the 1990s was no mean feat. It asked for 20 years of preparation, and it got it.
There’s a difference between projects that get delayed excruciatingly and projects that demand excruciating diligence and commitments. To avoid delays in any project and to work tirelessly on long-gestation projects requires meticulous short-term planning. Therefore, this article does not dismiss short-duration planning. But imagine what if those conceptualising Rosetta had given themselves only 5 years? The mission certainly would not have flown at all.
Come home to India; had Homi Bhabha not conceptualised a Three-Stage Nuclear Programme, we would not have a thorium-based reactor today. Had Nambi Narayanan not had a passion for liquid-fueled rocket engines in the 1960s and his love channelised by Vikram Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan, India would not have had its VIKAS engines, nor would India have flown to the Moon in 2008.
Thinking science, planning science, doing science, and reaping comprehensive benefits from the achieved science is a time-consuming process. Any country or an international grouping that is habitual to successfully culminating such long-gestation projects, do take it from me, they are bound to acquire high geopolitical resilience, they can endure the strongest of economic
turbulences, and they cultivate far-sighted and deep-rooted cultures. Overall, these are the attributes of a superpower.
Amrit Kaal is an era of Tapasya for India. Regardless of external disturbances, internal turmoil, disasters, or wars, India will need to work diligently on its scientific endeavours. During the Amrit Kaal, the Indian policymakers must ensure that the financial, regulatory, and resource support for science and technology, regardless of its antecedents - government, commercial or military labs – does not diminish. The Indian policymakers will have to ensure that delays are minimised and patient support is offered to projects that inherently require time.
There is a genuine interest in understanding what ongoing scientific projects will continue in the next 25 years and what new projects India will initiate during this period. Let’s start with astronomy; during the Amrit Kaal, India would have fully established and gained operational experience with its leadership and partnerships, including the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii, LIGO India in Maharashtra, ITER in France, and the Square Kilometre Array in Africa and Australia. Many of these projects would cultivate cutting-edge capabilities in optics, optoelectronics, metamaterials, artificial intelligence, and big data. By then, with the help of biological sciences, India would have accomplished the large citizen-science megaproject, “MANAV Human Biology Atlas,” initiated in 2019. In the next twenty-five years, the Atlas would generate voluminous data, thanks to the world’s largest and most diverse national population, of great significance to global endeavours of raising healthy humanity. Given the current emphasis on Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, Homoeopathy, and other forms of traditional medicine, India is likely to emerge as the global capital for preventive and holistic health over the next twenty-five years.
In the field of chemical sciences, India is expected to achieve a substantial portion of its net-zero emissions goal by 2070, a target it has set for itself. India would accomplish this goal by promoting a circular economy, recycling, reusing, refurbishing, and recirculating chemical and physical processes. India would have evolved into the largest operator of clean fuel vehicles, primarily hydrogen and hydrogen-blended compressed natural gas. It would have substantially decarbonised its domestic rail and air travel. The cultural renaissance that has already begun in India will emphasise the use of ecologically friendly construction materials, packaging materials, dyes, paints, and other chemicals. India will also likely monetise the waste recycling industry, perhaps leading to a nationwide plastic hunt that would accumulate littered plastics and convert them into valuable and cleaner materials.
On the energy front, India, during the Amrit Kaal, would have made tremendous strides with its partners in the International Solar Alliance towards the Green Grid Initiative. This initiative, operating towards the goal of “One Sun, One World, One Grid,” aims to generate a whopping 2600 gigawatts of solar and wind power by 2050. The Green Grid Initiative would stimulate tremendous innovation in making solar and wind power generation more efficient than today’s standards.
By 2047, India would operate commercial and civilian space stations in Earth’s orbit, have sent probes to nearly all the planets of our Solar System, and the first Indians would have set foot on the Moon during the Amrit Kaal. India, by then, would have launched several space-based astronomy observatories that would be successors of the James Webb Space Telescope and India’s very own ASTROSAT.
The Amrit Kaal will bring tremendous opportunities and challenges for India. The promising prospects are outlined in the priority projects mentioned above. The challenge is to execute them effectively in both domestic and global arenas. However, the possibilities should not create a sense of complacency, nor should the challenges deter us from our goals. Those who remember India’s 50th Independence Day celebration would know that back then, India was attempting to achieve a lot by the year 2020. The year 2020 has become a milestone for our numerous undertakings. However, the domestic political chaos led us astray, and we lost interest in achieving our targets. That does not mean that India did not progress, but we achieved it at a slower pace than if we had set our sights on the target. We must put our eyes on 2047 as Arjuna would set on the fish’s eye. By doing so, our nation would develop a great convention of thinking and act strategically.
The original piece was published in the August 2022 edition of Science India.
