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Social Sciences:

Social science is a systematic study of social groups incorporating human ecology in a broader sense. Social Science as a mega-discipline includes economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, public administration, policy analysis, communication studies, international relations, cultural studies, statistics, demography, environmental/ecological/ natural resource studies, human geography, history, linguistics, media studies, psychology and, social work. Social sciences helps to understand and analyse the nature as well as changes in the domain of human ecology.

 Technology’s advances in leaps and bounds and no looking back at our society is one of the main reasons for growing inequality in our country. By studying about our societies and growing knowledgeable of the established power structures and populist cultures youth could effectively attempt at achieving the higher and equitable level of human development.  To address our nations critical challenge of growing inequality and passive citizenship, young talented people needs to plunge in and attempt at realizing the dreams of our nations founding fathers in building a functioning democracy while transforming themselves into engaged and well-informed citizens.

Why Social Sciences:

Social sciences have always remained key sources for understanding the society, polity, economy, and socio-cultural issues of any society across the world. The enormous developments in production and communication technologies that marked the onset of 20th century, demands huge skilled manpower in science and technology but more than that, a huge talent to analyse the rapid changes in the humanity at large. India has large supply of manpower both in natural and social sciences and particularly, the prospects of manpower in science and technology will always maintain at the required pace. However, the major concern is about the well-established trend of ‘the best talent’ getting attracted towards technical and other commercial fields. An eventual externality of this overflow of talents in one direction will cause social sciences in India to confront increasing dearth of bright minds in years to come. That may not be very conducive in the development scenario of the country.

The dearth of social scientists not only will deeply impact the quality of policy making and planning at the country level, but also may jeopardise the understanding of the socio-economic, political and cultural problems we face and finding solutions for such problems. It is widely agreed that not all the problems could find technical/ science oriented solutions but many of these need to be handled with the soft gloves of social sciences, if we need to embark up on the development process of the society. Our concerns are and must always be for striking a right balance between natural, physical and human sciences for overall development, recognizing their amicable roles and interactions.

It is quite visible that though the natures of technologies are the same, but societies across the world are not. Therefore, the situation demands economists, sociologists and other social scientists to serve important role through analyzing existing or possible interactions of the changes on socio-economic, politico, environmental, cultural and psychological set up of any society. This would certainly help in understanding the social stresses and tensions that many societies are facing and offer inputs at policy levels. Foreseeing the dearth of talented people following a sort of influx into the fields of sciences like medicine, engineering, bio- technology, pharmacy and so on., we are concerned about India falling dangerously behind in the generation of social science knowledge both in academia and in research.

ISEC