It was in November 2018 that Anurag Srivastava, the engineer-turned-diplomat Ambassador of India to Ethiopia, took me to Dr. Getahun Mekuria, the engineer-turned-Minister of Innovation and Technology, Ethiopia. Riding in a Land Rover from the Indian Embassy to the Ministry with the Indian flag on the bonnet fluttering in the cold breeze of Addis Ababa, situated at an elevation of around 8000 feet, was surreal and most gratifying.

Dr. Mekuria briefed us as to why Ethiopia had renamed their Ministry of Science and Technology as Ministry of Innovation and Technology. Ethiopia, the biggest country in Africa with a population of more than 100 million, needed innovative and indigenous solutions to solve the problems of its people, thus avoiding imports, for which they had no money. He shared with us the idea of celebrating the Innovation Festival every year and inviting a country to showcase their technology, starting with China. Naturally, we suggested starting with India, and Dr. Mekuria most graciously agreed.

In February 2019, Dr. Getahun came to Hyderabad and signed the papers for the launch of the India-Ethiopia Innovation, Science and Technology Commercialization Programme, in the presence of Dr. Harsh Vardhan, our physician-turned-Union Minister of Science & Technology, Earth Sciences and Environment, Forests & Climate Change, from the platform of the sixth DST-FICCI Global R&D Summit. I was seated in the audience, applauding with the others at the gala event.

It is a great feeling to see India being wooed by Africa for science and technology. I had completed my higher education at the G.B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology, an institution modelled on the land-grant model of the University of Illinois. Equipment and books tagged with USAID were everywhere. Most of the faculty had been to US Universities. When a food crisis hit the country in the mid 1970s, American agronomist Norman Borlaug (1914—2009) became a household name in India for his high-yield wheat variety.

All bright students from IITs and other scientific institutions would, by default, go to the USA for higher studies and eventually settle there. Name any senior scientist at any Indian institution of today and he would have been to an American or European University for education or research. Then came computers and the ICT revolution and Indians were everywhere. Vinod Khosla (b. 1955) co-founded Sun Microsytems. Arun Sarin (b. 1954) became the CEO of Vodafone, Rajeev Suri (b. 1967) became the CEO of Nokia. As of now, Satya Nadella (b. 1967) is the CEO of Microsoft, Sundar Pichai (b. 1972) is the CEO of Google and Ajaypal ‘Ajay’ Singh Banga (b. 1960) is the President and CEO of Mastercard.

India took up innovation in a serious manner. APJ Abdul Kalam (1931–2015) and Raghunath Mashelkar (b. 1943) nurtured hundreds of affordable world-class products in India. A.V. Rama Rao (b. 1935) pioneered the development of affordable pharmaceuticals. T. Ramasamy (b. 1948) revolutionized leather-processing technology. A. Mohan Rao (b. 1945) produced automobile grade biogas from sugar mill waste. At no other place in the world would these developments have taken place, as they concerned the needs of the poor and not the markets. We have the MedTech Innovation Centre at IIIT, Hyderabad, where Ramesh Loganathan and Radha Rangarajan are developing medical products based on cutting-edge technology. Rajeev Varshney at ICRISAT is one of the world’s top-notch seed genetic scientists.

So I rejoice at the launch of the India-Ethiopia Innovation, Science and Technology Commercialization Programme at Addis Ababa on May 24, 2019, by Ambassador Srivastava, a zealous champion of India in Africa. Thanks to a very large number of Indians who made a great mark in science and technology at the global level, India has done well in creating a robust system of innovation through our councils of medical research, industrial research and agricultural research. We had a grand party indeed, thanks to a generation of scientists who were protégés of people sitting in global labs who shook their trees to yield fruits, whenever needed. It is time to give a return gift as a token of recognition and appreciation of the same.

Few years ago, Indians were offered ‘free’ connectivity to the Internet. Suddenly, everyone had the opportunity to be ‘online’ – children were not interested in playing outdoors anymore and started playing video games instead, drivers waiting in the parking lots for their bosses to return in the evening, started watching movies, sitting in the comfort of the car, people living in apartments sharing a lift forgot the basic etiquette of saying good morning and started using that little time to browse the messages they were unable to do in the presence of their spouses, desperately waiting for the freedom. Porn reached everyone from hormone-gushed adolescents to the sexually frustrated middle-aged… all for free!

We chose to forget the basic principle that nothing is free in this world from the time when Adam and Eve plucked the apple and received the admonition of God that nothing would hereafter be free to the creature of clay and in 1942 an American political journalist Paul Allen declared: there is no free lunch. We went into a denial mode, ignoring that our minds were being hacked through free connectivity. People are now openly lured to consume – buy this, buy that, come here, go there, buy this new experience, etc. Coffee turned into Starbucks with free Wi-Fi, shopping malls turned into the new meeting places… once you come, you would buy something for sure! If nothing, at least pay the parking fee and buy a bottle of water at double the price.

Once on a Sunday afternoon in a mall in Hyderabad, I was astonished to see hundreds of young people assemble in a flash and start dancing to loudly played music in the atrium of the mall. They disappeared as if into thin air after about 15 minutes. My son told me it was a ‘Flash mob’ created by a social media group, mostly formed by the students of a prestigious computer science institute in Hyderabad  in that case. Sometime back, I had attended ‘Jeevan Vidya’ workshops organized there to introduce computer science students to a value-based lifestyle. This, however, seemed to be an entirely different outcome!

In the last few months, mobile phones have been rampantly used as the new and most preferred tool of electioneering. You get up in the morning to see your phone flooded with video clips venerating or lampooning leaders. Now the cost of ‘free’ service has started showing up. It was a medium to engineer your souls to consumerism; to create segmentation in society so that it can be targeted to sell products and services—to feed businesses like Swiggy, Zomato—and discourage cooking at homes; Uber, to fire your undisciplined and always–asking-for-small-loans driver; Urban Clap, to make plumbers, electricians and carpenters in the neighbourhood disappear and metamorphose into corporate service providers; and get a ‘happy hours’ (another beer free if you buy one) notification delivered at 10 a.m. itself, lest you make other plans for the evening.

All good! India is developing! But what is also developing is the stress of the people of the Middle class whose income is only little better than the poor people, but who has to show up as belonging to the rich segment of society. In the early twentieth century, Benito Mussolini (1883—1945), the tyrant ruler of Italy, summoned philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875—1944) to present his idea of a totalitarian state as a spiritual principle of Fascism. Later, when Russian writer Maxim Gorky (1868—1936) returned from Italy, the iron-fisted ruler of Russia, Joseph Stalin (1878—1953) hosted a grand welcome party to welcome him as the engineer of the souls! Gorky would later write to clothe Stalin rule in the philosophy of socialist realism.

Indian civilization has been based on the value system that treated human life as a debt towards parents and ancestors, education as a debt to the teachers and wealth as a debt towards the society. We have already seen how the new wealth that came with the so-called IT revolution broke the Indian family system and created nuclear families that created further employments for babysitters and businesses of playschools and crèches. Now, the Online revolution is going to further break the nuclear families into free electrons of consumers who would not only spend every Rupee they earn on their own consumption, but also accumulate credit to be repaid for the rest of their lives to buy a week’s vacation in Bangkok, Phuket, or Macao.

The elections are on; all news on television is breaking news, and social media is abuzz with forwarded messages. Indians celebrate elections as the festival of democracy. It has indeed become a carnival now – turncoat politicians, stale rhetoric, cliché slogans and debates about allegedly important issues which have surprisingly managed to survive seven decades of politics! I waited throughout the election campaign for good vision from some politicians, but all that was talked about were threats to national security, social inequality, loan waivers and anti-poverty payments to millions of people. No leader, I repeat, no leader, spoke about the serious threat of energy dependence to the future of the Indian economy. Poverty, social inequality and the biggest threat to national security all revolve around India’s dependence on oil imports and expensive diesel generators, and the resulting shortage of grid electricity to power small industries 24×7.

I watched the enthusiasm of young voters on Facebook with amusement. Do they really know how politics works, or how election donations are made? Major firms lobby their business interests through elected representatives. They do not post a ‘like’ on any Facebook pages, but buy ‘electoral bonds’ and place them well on pieces of their choice on the chessboard of Indian politics. They craft coalitions to decide which laws are to be blocked and which are to be passed. They do not voice their interests on Twitter or in chat rooms, but during meetings in five-star hotels and in their board rooms.  

The most opaque of all Indian businesses is the business of Energy. Who really owns Indian oil companies? Who decides the rates of petrol and diesel? Why are they still not covered under GST? Why is the law of getting 10% of your electricity from renewable sources not enforced? Why is shale gas not pursued as an energy source? Why are planned nuclear power projects not taking off? Who is blocking them? And why are Indian companies dragging their feet in the African energy market, instead of grabbing it with both hands? At the root of all these issues, is the single question – why are our politicians not raising these questions?

In 2012, American author and energy expert, Daniel Yergin (b. 1947) published a very thoughtful book, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World. Dr APJ Abdul Kalam mooted the idea of Energy Independence by 2030. We covered it in our book, Squaring the Circle (2013). Dr Kalam’s idea of Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas (PURA) spoke about providing energy to the village industry at the turn of the new millennium. The biggest reason for poverty in India is our energy poverty. The business of energy is, after all, a global business, affecting every single local business. We are paying close to USD 100 billion to buy petroleum every year. Our supplies from Iran are not in our control. China holds sway over most of the African oil market. We can’t afford the old-fashioned way of importing oil. We need to generate our own energy – solar, wind, nuclear, whatever. If India wants to be big, it has to be big in big things. And Energy is one of those big things.

The worst part of our democracy has been our inability to make big decisions and rally around them. Let the next Prime Minister of India show the authority to forge an integrated national energy system from the patchwork we have now. Let the next Prime Minister display the artistry to weave together the interests of the millions of poor Indians who face the real consequences of rising Energy costs and the havoc they play with their livelihoods. Let the next Prime minister cut through the legacies of big energy businesses, shut off all the pleading special interests, find a way through the great Indian bureaucratic maze, and create a top-down order of energy pricing, regulations and standards, above all not succumbing to the pressure of sponsored TV debates, fake news and corporate lobbying. Let the swearing in of the new government in May 2019 see the emergence of a Ministry of Energy Independence.

The Indian economy is indeed under the siege of oil imports. The nation can’t assert itself on the global stage without having energy independence. It is time that electoral politics gives space to developmental politics and some long-term strategic decisions are taken by the Parliament that go beyond which party is in power and which is in the opposition.