Digital swadeshi and 3D printing intellectual property in India: The multi-level perspective, causal layered analysis and backcasting

Highlights

• Offers a vision of how 3D printing will manifest in India’s future through expert foresight.

• Actions a novel approach to foresight drawing on multiple established frameworks.

• Ties deep cultural roots in India to social and economic realities that support 3D printing as a potentially ubiquitous innovation.

• Backcasts key milestones drawn from inferences in the past and present.

Abstract

3D printing is a disruptive technology that has potential to democratize manufacturing, in particular for economies of the global South such as India. In India, this transformation could create opportunities for self-sufficiency, thereby connecting it to the political and economic agenda of historical leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, as well as the contemporary call to ‘Make in India’. The precise mechanics of 3D printing is not nearly as important as the mechanics of the social, legal and economic infrastructures that would have to be in place to make this a democratizing move. Through a combination of established and progressive foresight techniques, this paper establishes links between the democratization movement witnessed in the spread of 3D printing and the social movements that underpinned India’s Independence from Empire in the mid-twentieth century, namely, swadeshi.

Introduction

Reader: It is a good point or bad one that all you are saying will be printed through machinery?

Editor: … As it expires, the machinery, as it were, says to us: “Beware and avoid me. You will derive not benefit from me, and the benefit that may accrue from printing will avail only those who are infected with the machinery-craze.” (Gandhi, 1921)

In a thought-piece for the major newspaper The Indian Express writer and former aide to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Sudheendra Kulkarni, describes his idea of ‘digital swadeshi’ wherein the “Internet will validate Gandhi’s vision”. For Kulkarni, specifically three-dimensional (3D) printing symbolizes this link between swadeshi and India’s place in the pending new industrial revolution. “Factories of the future will have a ‘human scale’, just as Gandhi had desired”, namely, one grounded in decentralized production, local economic growth, and job-creation (Kulkarni, 2012: no pagination). Kulkarni goes on to link 3D printing and digital swadeshi to increasing connections in communities, energy independence and the creation of products for local markets utilizing globally sourced Intellectual Property (IP) from the Internet. It is to this last facet that we attend in this paper.

As the introductory epigraph from Indian political leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s biography shows, technologies emerge to play a role in political and cultural movements, which envisage radical transitions from the status quo and affect the economy, industry and ways of constructing scientific knowledge. A key provocation for writing this paper is the claim that progress in the development of digital technologies relies on democratization as much as the compulsion for profit, particularly in the sharing of knowledge. Decentralized production was a core feature of Gandhi’s satyagraha campaigns: a “tactic of civil disobedience, passive resistance, and non-cooperation” culminating in the ‘Quit India Campaign’ demanding the end of British rule of the country (Riches & Palmowski, 2019).

The scope of the foresight presented here details and expands on data from a workshop held in Roorkee India that was part of a global series of expert workshops for a project on 3D printing and IP futures funded by the UK Government Intellectual Property Office (Birtchnell, Daly, Rayna, & Striukova, 2018). Here we show how combining backcasting (Holmberg & Robert, 2000; Vergragt & Quist, 2011) with a multi-level perspective (MLP) framework (Geels, 2002; Smith, Voß, & Grin, 2010) offers new insight into the socio-legal and regional-cultural makeup of 3D printing innovation in India. In part, our methodology seeks to specify how fringe innovations are crucial elements in the assemblage of ‘dimensions’ of the social-technical system. At the same time, we employ aspects of Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) in the project design to elicit deeper critical and cultural insights from the regional data. These combine to foreground findings of deep if not entirely specified links for 3D printing and the swadeshi movement—that is, a component of satyagraha—which historically opposed colonial economic structures in India. Originally, swadeshi promoted citizenry to manufacture commodities made in India through radical individual actions and ‘norm-busting’ of Imperial trade commodities (Birtchnell, 2012). At the same time, Gandhi’s rejection of technological rationalism and the “flawed materialism” through civil action (Heredia, 1999) can be seen reflected in indigenously expressed futures of 3D printing in India, including its relationship with IP ideas and norms.

This paper offers a set of ideas inspired by data from a foresight workshop in India. The workshop was an exercise in foresight to pose plausible future evolutions of 3D printing innovation in India and this paper draws on ideas contributed by the participants of the workshop. The organization of the paper is as follows. In the next section we provide a background to swadeshi and specify the concepts, technologies, and constraints to our work. In section three we consider the history of relevant socio-legal dimensions of IP regulation relevant to 3D printing in India as these reflect a major factor influencing how 3D printing innovations will materialize in the sub-continent. In the fourth section, we outline the methods used to gather data in Roorkee, India. In the remainder of the paper, we attend to the findings via a coarse-grain backcasted vision of 3D printing’s potential for ubiquity in India.