Public and expert consultation ‘Town hall Meet’ for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (STIP) 2020 to be launched

STIP 2020 Town Hall Meet, the Track-I public & expert consultation process for the formulation of Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (STIP) 2020 will be launched by the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India Professor K Vijay Raghavan and Secretary, DST Professor Ashutosh Sharma on June 12, 2020.

The Track I consultation process involves an extensive public and expert consultations through Science Policy Forum, a dedicated platform for soliciting inputs from larger public and expert pool, to make the formulation of STIP 2020 decentralized, bottom-up, and inclusive. The Head of STIP 2020 Secretariat & Adviser DST Dr. Akhilesh Gupta will also be present at the launch of the consultation.

The Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India (Office of PSA) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) have started a consultative process for the formulation of a new national Science Technology and Innovation Policy (STIP 2020) reaching out to a wide range of stakeholders.

The engagements in Track I will include public dialogue series with thought leaders & policy scholars, a thematic panel discussion with public engagement, targeted survey instruments, print media articles and channels for written inputs, community podcasts for last-mile connectivity.

The STIP 2020 formulation process is organised into 4 highly interlinked tracks, which will reach out to around 15000 stakeholders for consultation in the policy formulation. Track I involves an extensive public and expert consultation process through Science Policy Forum – a dedicated platform for soliciting inputs from larger public and expert pool during and after the policy drafting process. Track II comprises experts-driven thematic consultations to feed evidence-informed recommendations into the policy drafting process. Twenty-one (21) focused thematic groups have been constituted for this purpose. Track III involves consultations with Ministries and States, while Track IV constitutes apex level multi-stakeholder consultation.

The consultation processes on different tracks have already started and are running in parallel. The Track-II thematic group (TG) consultation started with a series of information sessions, and the Track-I will be launched to collect inputs from experts as well as from public.

A Secretariat with in-house policy knowledge and data support unit, built with a cadre of DST-STI Policy fellows, has been set up at DST (Technology Bhavan) to coordinate the complete process.