A cabinet committee on science and technology is a strategic imperative today

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. India’s government must set up a Cabinet Committee on Science and Technology (CCST) to make India a global power of this century. Chaired by the Prime Minister, it should include the ministers for home affairs, finance, external affairs, defence, electronics and information technology, commerce and education.

In this information age, technology is a core element of national power, the primary agent of economic transformation and an important aspect of the day-to-day life of citizens. Individual departments and states must still be responsible for governing the technological aspects of their domains in a decentralized manner, as they do now. But there is a case for a higher-level mechanism to set the overall policy direction, coordinate between ministries and oversee strategic plans in various science and technology domains.

A cabinet committee is an appropriate structure in our governmental system. There are four major reasons. First, we are in an era where world politics is by technology, of technology and for technology.

While technology has been a source of power throughout history, it is central to global politics today. The Biden administration’s moves to throttle China’s semiconductor and artificial intelligence (AI) industry development implicate the rest of the world. Donald Trump’s principal backers are tech leaders determined to promote their commercial interests in the US and abroad.

If the US has adopted its tech industry’s interests as its national interests, China has been doing so from the other direction. For Beijing, its tech industry is a tool to further the interests of the Communist Party of China at home and abroad. Geopolitical considerations alone recommend that