RC Passage-18

Passage: It is difficult to compare countriesbecause various factors such as size,culture, history, geography, naturalendowments, geopolitics and internalpolity comes into play. There are somegoals which can be achieved by smallercountries; but sometimes smallercountries find it difficult to embarkupon certain big technological planseven if they have the funds, becausethe size of the domestic market is toosmall. Ifwe consider the bigger countries,the closest comparison to Indiais China, though there are many crucialdifferences. The Chinese vision is to preparethe county for entry into the ranks ofmid-level developed nations by themiddle of the twenty-first century. Accelerationof the nation’s economicgrowth and social development by relyingon advances in science and technologyis pivotal in this. Documents describing the Chinesevision state that science and technology If constitute premier productive forcesand represent a great revolutionarypower that can propel economic andsocial development. It is interesting tonote that the main lessons the Chinesehave drawn from their past performanceis their failure to promote scienceand technology as strategic toolsfor empowerment. They also point tothe absence of mechanisms and motivationsin their economic activity topromote dependence on science andtechnology. Similarly: they hold thattheir scientific and technological effortswere not oriented towards economicgrowth. As a consequence, they conclude,a large number of scientific andtechnological achievements were notconverted into productive forces asthey were too far removed from China’simmediate economic and socialneeds. The Chinese vision is thereforeaimed at exploiting state-of-art scienceand technology to enhance the nation’soverall power and strength, to improvethe people’s living standards, to focuson resolving problems encountered inlarge-scale industrial and agriculturalproduction and to effectively controland alleviate pressures brought on bypopulation, resources and the environment.By the year 2000, China hadaimed at bringing the main industrialsectors upto the technological levelsachieved by the developed countriesin the 1970s or 80s and by 2020 tothe level they would have attained bythe early twenty-first century. The aimis to bridge the overall gap with theadvanced world. There is a specialemphasis on research and developmentof high technologies that would find defense applications. Some of thesetechnologies are critical for improvingthe features of key conventional weapons.Some technologies are meant forenhancing future military capabilities.Other efforts are aimed at maintainingthe momentum to develop capabilities for cutting-edge defense technologies.They call for unremitting efforts in thisregard with the aim of maintaining effectiveself-defense and nuclear deterrentcapabilities and to enable parityin defense, science and technology withthe advanced world.