WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR A DEMOCRACY to entrust its citizens with the duty to cultivate “scientific temper”—even as it offers them little say in how science is governed?
This quiet paradox lies buried in the folds of the Indian Constitution. There is no grand clause on public access to knowledge, no procedural guarantee for civic participation in scientific decisions, no constitutional architecture that invites the public into the making of science. Buried deep within the aspirational grammar of Part IV and the lexicon of Part IVA lies a set of powerful commitments.
These commitments, especially Articles 51A(h), 19(1)(a), and parts of Schedule VII, signal the Constitution’s implicit vision of science not merely as an instrument of national development but as a democratic ethic. This essay follows those traces. It asks: what kind of science does our democracy enable? Whose voices does it exclude? And what would it mean to imagine science as a constitutional practice shaped in the crucible of democratic life?
The Indian Constitution envisions science as a normative practice. It is a vision tied intimately and securely to public life: something to be fostered, protected, and critiqued within democratic institutions through civic participation. Yet, this vision remains fragmented, proceduralised, and vulnerable to distortion when filtered through the realities of state power, regulatory systems, and political crises.
