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SCIENCE STUDIES EVENTS
HOW THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY CAN CHANGE OUR VIEW OF
U.S. FOREIGN RELATIONS: THE COLD WAR, INTERNATIONAL
TECHNICAL COOPERATION, AND THE INDIAN INSTITUTES OF
TECHNOLOGY AS 'MIT-TYPE' INSTITUTIONS
Ross Bassett
Department of History
North Carolina State University
November 11, 2004
Thursday, 12:30pm
Sumwalt College, Room 102
Traditional histories of US-India foreign affairs stress Cold War tensions
between the two nations, but the history of the Indian Institutes of
Technology suggests a reframing of the relations between the two countries.
Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, was a firm believer in
using science and technology as tools for lifting India out of poverty.
Shortly after independence, India began to establish what would by 1965 be
five "MIT-type" institutes of higher technical training. Four of these
institutes received help from specific nations (the United States, the
Soviet Union, West Germany, and the United Kingdom). After providing an
overview of the development of the IITs, this talk will focus on the case
of IIT-Kanpur, where an MIT-led consortium of US universities developed a
state of the (American) art technical institution, which in the short run
led to IIT-Kanpur being more successful in providing Indian engineers for
work in the United States than in addressing Indian technical problems.
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