How to imagine and work towards a future

How to imagine and work towards a future

It is an uncertain world and the threats that emerge nowadays seem to be entirely unforeseen. First, there was the Covid pandemic, then the war in Europe. What can a society do to ensure its well-being in such uncertain times? Fortunately, humans have the ability to imagine a future and plan for it.

A future for society is the product of its collective imagination. It is generated through large numbers of people sharing ideas over long periods. It is, therefore, a matter of some wonderment that in India there is so little public discussion on what might be the shape of our future. Isn’t it important that we foster an ability to imagine possible futures for our country?

Imagining different futures also means planning for them. We cannot know precisely what crises are in store for us. But we can certainly strengthen knowledge resources and develop the ability to mine those resources for possible solutions as and when the need arises.

As things stand, building up knowledge capital is a task that, even today, is seen in India as a costly exercise that doesn’t bring immediate profit. For some decades now, there have been two perverse attitudes that obstruct the creation and expansion of knowledge. One is the extreme belief, nurtured by those educated in modern institutions, that there is a political angle to all knowledge. The other is an obstinate commitment to demanding immediate, visible profit from everything. Both attitudes are harmful to any creation or dissemination of knowledge.

An obsession with immediate returns has consequences for everything; from public policy to technology development to social development and economic growth. It is one reason why India, despite a large presence in IT services, has had little to show by way of independent innovation. Even something as basic as creating a system for online payment of GST and income tax has been fairly difficult for Indians to develop.

It is unreasonable to expect individuals to plan several decades ahead for a collective goal. That is the mandate of social institutions. Institutions in India seem to work on a limited-time horizon. Recently, a vice-chancellor from one of the top Indian universities presented a five-year plan in a talk at Cambridge University. The university told the official that they were used to plans looking 30 years ahead. A short-term approach at the institutional level has serious social costs.

It was a series of short-term actions that led to the coal crisis some years ago. In 2014, when the Supreme Court cancelled the allotment of 204 blocks, which had been allotted since 1993, on the grounds of non-transparent processes, there was a major crisis. The coal ministry devised a transparent online bidding procedure for auctioning the blocks rather successfully. The auctions not only met the demands of industry but also generated revenue for the government. The point is that well-structured rules and regulations are needed all the time not only for the regular business of government but across sectors. Devising those rules and regulations in a fair manner after considering the views of all stakeholders, is a sunk cost. Revising rules regularly to match changed realities is also a sunk cost. Following proper scientific methods, whether in science labs or in business or in government is a sunk cost. Yet social investment in good rules and regulations, documentation, building up knowledge capital, remains very low in India.

The ability to imagine a future means a degree of comfort with sunk costs. Most of the technologies that we depend on today, whether the internet, mobile phone, electric cars, batteries or penicillin, took decades to develop; even centuries. A model of the electric car, for instance, was developed even before the petrol engine, but it wasn’t practical to use. What is practicable at what point in time depends entirely on circumstances.

For societies to refuse to invest in innovation for the future would be self-defeating. Such societies would have nothing to fall back upon in moments of crisis.