From anti-feudalism to sustainable development: The Kerala Peoples Science Movement

Abstract

People's science movements (PSMs) have become an important but little studied recent phenomenon in India. Originating in anticaste thinking of the 1950s, PSMs attempt to popularize nonmystical, scientific thinking, especially among India's rural poor. Many PSMs have evolved into significant centers of activism against social inequality and for environmental protection. The original and largest PSM in India is Kerala's KSSP, with more than 50,000 members. KSSP's history illustrates the changing focus of PSMs and shows that the organization has been able to influence many developments in Kerala over the past 30 years, including protection of the species-rich Silent Valley, improving the schools, promoting discussion of alternative plans for agriculture, industry, and electrical power, campaigning against unsafe drugs, fostering total literacy, installing high-efficiency cooking stoves, and conducting an innovative people's resource mapping campaign. When the 1996 Left Democratic Front Ministry decided to launch a people's campaign for local-level development planning, KSSP became a major mobilizing force for the campaign.

In recent years, India has witnessed the rise of a number of people's science movements. These movements attempt to popularize science among ordinary people, especially in India's thousands of villages, through lectures, street drama, children's science magazines, and other mechanisms. People's science activists attempt to spread secular attitudes that undermine religious and communal passions such as those that erupted in 1992 with the right-wing Hindu destruction of the Ayodhya Mosque. Toward that end they encourage the adoption of Gandhian-based ideas of Indian self-reliance, independence from major power blocks, and local development initiatives.

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Notes on contributors

M. P. Parameswaran

The early parts of this essay are adapted from T. M. Thomas Isaac and B. Ekbal, Science for Social Revolution: The Experience of Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishat (Trichur: KSSP, 1988). Materials on the New Democratic Initiatives (p.43 ff.) derive from published accounts as noted and from interviews and observations in Kerala in 1992-1993 and 1996-97. The sections below entitled “Science for Social Revolution” (p. 36) and “People's Plan” (p. 44), and some additional materials were drafted in December 1996 by KSSP executive committee member M. P. Parameswaran. Additional information and a sometimes different perspective on KSSP appear in Mathew Zachariah and R. Soorya-moorihy, Science in Participatory Development: The Achievements and Dilemmas of a Development Movement: The Case of Kerala (London and Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books, 1994).

Notes

Recent figures indicate over 25,000 members of the West Bengal Paschim Banga Vigyan Mancha, 12,000 in the Andhra Pradesh Jan Vigyan Vedika, 5,000 in Karnataka State's Karnataka Rajya Vigyan Parishad, 16,000 in the Tamil Nadu Science Forum, and a few thousand each in organizations in Tripura, Hyderabad, New Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bombay, Chandigarh, and in other Indian cities and states. These figures come from recent issues of Network, the newsletter of the All-India People's Science Network, published in New Delhi.

All-India People's Science Network, For Redeeming Our Indebted Future (New Delhi: All-India People's Science Network, 1992).