Transforming social science

ITS IMPORTANCE IS RISING FOR GOVERNANCE AND THE EVOLVING VIBRANT MARKET SPACE IN A SOCIETY LIKE INDIA

- BADRI NARAYAN Vice chancellor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai

THE NEOLIBERAL ECONOMY has changed the nature of the State and market drastically. In this era, both need to be closer to the public for their own good. The State needs to engage with the public for delivering development and acquiring legitimacy on that yardstick, while the market needs to do so for evolving a vibrant consumer space.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ascent in 2014 made the Indian State more impressive and ambitious in terms of delivering development and deepening democracy. It tried to reorient the State to being relatively more sensitive towards the people in this regard. With the transformation of the State and markets, the role of knowledge becomes crucial because both need to research the people and society to forge coherent linkages. In this context, knowledge becomes very important and valuable for both the transformative actors. PM Modi has described the importance of social research and researchers in various deliberations in the past decade. The New Education Policy, 2020, also accords considerable importance to teaching and researching social science in its conceptualisation and execution.

However, within the western education and research systems, social science is being marginalised day by day. In the past decades, one can easily observe the decline of social science research in top universities like Chicago and Harvard in the US and Oxford and Cambridge in the UK. The University of Chicago recently announced $100 million budget cuts in social science and humanity research and education. The US Department of Defence has also discouraged its social science research vertical in the recent past. It shows a growing crisis within the educational universe of the western world.