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Agric Hum Values (2010) 27:377378 DOI 10.1007/s10460-010-9276-8
Ian Scoones: Science, agriculture and the politics of policy: the age of biotechnology in India
Orient Longman Private Limited, New Delhi, India, 2006, 417 pp, ISBN 81-250-2944-3
Bishnu C. Barik
Accepted: 20 April 2010 / Published online: 7 July 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
The book under review is a part of a larger project involving collaboration with India, China and Southern Africa. The insights narrated are gathered through three hundred semi-structured interviews with a diverse range of informants, carried out during numerous visits to India between 2000 and 2002. Through the narratives Scoones provides a detailed examination of the development of biotechnology in India, with a focus on agriculture. Bio-technology as a science, as a business, as politics, as symbol and as narrative is investigated to gauge the vision of development and the discourse on the policy framework.
The authors remark on the context of India stands correct. He notes that India has been a land of extreme contrast where overall poverty has declined but inequality has grown, particularly between the urban areas that have proted from new economic activities such as Information Technologies (IT) and the rural areas where the agricultural economy has stagnated. In the case of Karnataka State, the author further magnies his argument by stating that the State has vast areas of dry rural hinterlands along with its fast growing hitech Bangalorethe capital of the State; no other city and State better exemplify the contrast, contradiction and challenges of modern India than Bangalore. The author further emphasizes that Bangalore being known as an IT hub not only in Asia, let...