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Planning for science and technology was a global phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century. A few countries drew up comprehensive five-year plans adapting from the Soviet model: China and India were two new developing countries to do so. In this paper we examine the early efforts at national planning for science and technology as seen in the Chinese twelve-year science and technology and the five-year science and technology plan of India . These are two historically distinct moments globally and two separate attempts specifically. What tie them together are the goals both sought to accomplish: of science and technology led industrialisation and development, many a times in comparison and sometimes in competition with each other. We show that these two incomplete exercises show us the complex histories of institutions and processes that confirm state-led faith in and engagement with science and technology.

Histories of science in India are revisitations of the colonial question. Science is ideology to be unraveled and exposed--as modernity and progress making or violence and oppression making--depending on where you stand on the interpretive spectrum. It has been seen as ideologically driven practice, as a mode of knowledge production whose history is inseparable from the social and political uses to which it is tethered. In the colonial as well as the postcolonial context, science and technology have been seen as the "ideology of empire," "tools of empire," "tentacles of progress," and "reasons of state." Yet science and technology are practices and bodies of knowledge that inhabitants of the subcontinent have engaged with enthusiasm, that they have used to invent themselves in their global, national, and individual lives. We know remarkably little about the histories of these complex engagements. A departure from current historiographical preoccupations is called for to map and explain the lives, institutions, practices, and stories of science on the subcontinent as they connect with, and where they break away from, the world at large.

blogs.lse.ac.uk /southasia/2016/02/12/the-aakash-tablet-and-technological-imaginaries-of-mass-education-incontemporary-india/ In a new paper published this month Jahnavi Phalkey and Sumandro Chattapadhyay explore public initiatives in technological solutions for educating the poor and the disadvantaged in independent India. Here, the authors offer an edited excerpt, tracing the recent history of technological solutions for mass education and unpacking the narrative of 'failure' that is associated with the Aakash experiment.In 2010, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) of the Government of India launched a set of prototype devices of an affordable tablet computer, the development and production of which were to be supported by the Ministry as part of its larger ICTs for education project. This device later came to be known as the "Aakash" tablet, and the project went through several iterations, between 2010 and 2014, of not only technological re-designs, but also institutional arrangements to design, develop, manufacture, test, and procure the devices.

Abstract. How might one tell the histories of China and India -two countries that have come to be seen as twenty-first-century giants? How might one tell of how they look to the world and to each other? In this issue we juxtapose, connect and compare the two. Ours is an attempt at a historiography of twentieth-century modernity in China and India beyond the encouragement of Euro-American historiography. We seize this opportunity provided by the contemporary engagement and concern with the two countries to reinterpret the narratives of their twentieth-century transformation, which are far from settled at the moment. We bring historical knowledge to speak usefully to the excitement, anxiety and aspiration around science and technology in China and India. We bring the same to speak meaningfully to the cynicism, admonition and expectations that the world has of them. We use China and India as a method of exploring new historiographical questions of science. We are invested in extending the relevance of studying China and India to the world at large through connections, references and juxtaposition, and by raising questions that, on the one hand, expose the limits of the EuroAmerican experience and, on the other, open up the intellectual and historiographical space for narratives and theoretical frameworks that are not tied to geopolitical significance. This paper sets out these issues and introduces the papers of the collection.Not very long ago, Jack Goody, the anthropologist, posed a question: 'How is it that China and India, apparently without the development of "capitalism", which was Western, are now challenging the West for supremacy in so many fields?' 1