VICE President Mr. Venkaiah Naidu floated a truly great idea when he called for a national movement for promoting innovation as a way of life. This suggestion connotes a change in the overall current atmosphere in India where different ideas are being pushed to the forefront of social thought and action. Appreciating Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi, the Vice President has said categorically that the Prime Minister could be described as a great transformer for giving the nation a new slogan ‘transform, perform, and transform’. Very rightly, Mr. Naidu treats the slogan as a trigger for innovation.
Innovation has often been an integral part of human progress for ages and across the world. India also has had its own history of innovation. Yet, the Vice President has insisted upon a fresh impetus to that habit through a nationwide movement by way of which a specific emphasis would be laid on innovative thought and action. Innovation, thus, could act as a growth engine for the Indian society, Mr. Naidu has meant to state. Even though India has had its own contribution to innovation, the overall style of the society is rather conformist, generally unwelcoming new ideas and innovative approaches to issues and problems. This is one social reality that stops innovative thinking in the larger Indian society. Mr.Venkaiah Naidu has felt strongly that only a national innovation movement could offset the cultural habit of conformism. This is a potent thought.
If India is to promote a national innovation movement, as suggested by Mr. Naidu, then the society will have to swear by non-conformism and and break down all dogma -- social, cultural, religious, political, technological, and scientific. It will have to build a premium on innovation and willingness to fail and ability to absorb the failure as a natural outcome of an innovative approach to solving problems or adding value to existing ideas and look at those from an absolutely novel angle. In other words, India needs a massive social overall in favour of newer ideas, newer ways of doing things, and newer way of looking at problems and issues. In still other words, India needs a new cultural paradigm that will promote an absolutely outside-the-box thinking about everything. India needs to build a culture that would encourage questioning as a basic educational tool for everybody.
In this pursuit, the Indian society will adopt a watch-phrase “scientific temper”. The most important core value of science is seeking to know more by rejecting existing ideas and raising questions on everything -- from old theories to newest inclusions in the overall thought-process. “Scientific temper” also means enhancing the ability to reject ideas, accept new ones, assimilate, absorb the essence of all human mental processes. Once that process of questioning everything begins, innovation follows close on its heels. Mr. Naidu means all this and more as integral to what he called “national innovation movement”. Of course, the process of innovation is often chaotic and confusing to most conformists.
For, when an innovation floats out of somebody’s thinking, it seeks to bust old ideas and push a new thought. Once the nation and its leaders start thinking about a national innovation movement, the first to explode on the scene would be a little chaos, a little confusion, a little raising of eyebrows of most people. But then everything will fall in its respective place and a smoother flow of ideas will follow. In India, there is a very interesting social term for innovation -- Jugad, meaning making things work somehow. This jugad culture can be used as a foundation for the national innovation movement which the Vice President is talking about. For, that is one thing that is ingrained in the Indian thought-process.