India's diversified and sophisticated manufacturing base contrasts strongly with the near complete absence of visible innovative capabilities. This article examines the Indian "National System of Innovation" in order to address the question of the evident distinction between the ability to make...

In the course of the first 45 years of India’s post Independence development, the focus of scientific activity was changed: from that of a science of raw material extraction, oblivious of any industrial imperative, to a science of material production, aimed at inducing technological awareness...

The resignation of T T Krishnamachari from the finance ministership in early 1958 was the culmination of three developments evolving concurrently. The first was the M C Chagla Commission of Enquiry Report, which ultimately led to Jawaharlal Nehru accepting Krishnamachari’s resignation. The...

The paper argues that the Indian Managing Agencies that controlled most industrial firms and their associated enterprises were themselves embodiments of pre-industrial forms of capital, accumulated through trading and moneylending. This militated against technological dynamism within the...

As it was in Europe, secularism in India is an intrinsic part of the process of the emergence of a modern identity of the people of a multi-language and multi-ethnic society, the necessity for which is being continuously generated by industrialisation and urbanisation.The emergence of this...

Flat-footed entry into globalisation and the terrible events in Gujarat have perhaps jolted the Indian bourgeoisie into a new phase in their quest for modernity

The industrial revolution was defined by the phenomenon of the application of systematically acquired knowledge (of thermodynamics) to the improvement of production methods(the steam engine). The implications of this lay, decisively, in opening the area of knowledge of production methods, in...

The establishment of the Government Industrial Institute in Madras in 1919 coincided with the development of chemical engineering as a distinct discipline at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It would thus be unhistorical to expect that ready made chemical engineering expertise would...

Although the structural reforms, initiated in 1991, did not lead to any appreciable increase in either the efficiency or the export orientation of Indian manufacturing firms, unexpectedly, there has been a visible improvement in manufacturing design capabilities in certain segments, for...