Technology Policy Making As A Social And Political Process: Liberalizing India's Software Policy

This paper investigates the policy-making process i n a high-technology Indian industry—software—that epitomizes the liberalizing, export-oriented India of the 1980s. Although policy making is a political process, with different groups in both state and industry lobbying for different measures, there are, nevertheless, dominant forces. Within industry, the very large companies have favoured limited liberalization of policy. Within the state, Finance Ministry bureaucrats do not oppose liberalization per se, but their interests are such that they have tended to oppose most liberalization measures. Overlain on this static picture is a dynamic one, in which the balance of power between the various coalitions of interest groups has changed over time. After the early 1980s) liberalization came to be part of the political agenda through the rise to power of policy makers committed to this ideology. However, other interest groups gained in strength and by early 1987 the liberalization process had become piecemeal and in many areas was prevented from progressing further, From this it can be seen that in order to understand the making of a technology policy and its consequent impact, one must understand the underlying social and political forces that constrain and determine these processes.