1) " STS studies in India have found their impetus and site in social movements rather than in the academe and science policy centres. Our official scientists were eloquent about our nuclear power and our need for greater investment in science. But it is the movements that have provided the great critiques of science"
2) "How do we give voice to the defeat of a scientific and technological project? Is the tribal voice to be limited to the quixotic ethnoscience of a forest or is it going to provide an alternative model of sustainability that Brundtland and her cohorts may not have dreamt of? And finally, how does STS help adjudicate controversies where the idea of scientific closure may have to acknowledge the death of a society? How does one capture this within the contours of the enlightenment discourse we claim STS to be?
3) " The annual floods in Bihar and Assam are erasing villages from memory and media does not even provide a roll call of these names. Villages disappear like victims of an Argentinean dictatorship and there is no documentary record of it. The tidal wave in Orissa in 1999 devastated 1.5 million people and there is little information on what is happening. At most, the Indian answer to a disaster is a disaster institute. The media seems to fail in the aftermath of a disaster and with it comes the failure of STS to link disasters – famines, flood, drought, cyclones, industrial accidents – to a wider theory of knowledge and democracy"
4) "The democracy one is celebrating is a narrow market-oriented version, where democracy to win approval mimics the market. What we face today is not so much an explosion of the democratic imagination but its impoverishment. The current visions of democracy have been reduced to elections, citizenship to consumerism, governance to expertise. In all this science and science studies function as a reason of state or market. The old paradigms of policy survive by throwing out epicycles or by hyphenating old metaphors"
