Visions for India: public participation, debate and the S&T community

This article is an exploration into the nature, width and scope of science and technology visioning exercises in India, particularly in the context of how these narratives are presented and discussed in Current Science, one of India's premier science journals. We categorize these visions into two broad categories - one is a vision that is more individual and/or domain-specific; the other is the institutionalized vision that has a larger mandate and canvas and that creates imaginaries of the future and/or provides horizons for society and S&T to move towards. Prominent examples of the latter are India's Technology Vision 2020 and the most recent, Technology Vision 2035. We observe that visioning exercises in the country have been and continue to be taken up quite prominently, but narratives and debates around them are present only marginally in Current Science. We discuss possible reasons for this and conclude with the hope that more attention will be paid to such exercises and documents on the accounts of investments that are made in them, on the implications these visions have and the importance of imaginaries of the future they create for society, country and for S&T.