Revision summary
COVID-19 was organised by labs, states, and inequalities, not by gadgets alone. Merton’s science norms met vaccine nationalism. Apps and WFH extended bureaucratic control; gig riders took exposure. Digital divide and reverse migration split the experience. Beck’s risk and dependency of patents mark the politics of S&T.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
COVID-19 was a biological event organised by science, the state, and everyday inequality. Robert Merton’s sociology of science, Ulrich Beck’s risk society, and Michel Foucault’s biopolitics are better guides than a hymn to gadgets. Technology saved lives and rationed them.
Body
Science as institution
- Merton’s CUDOS norms (communism of knowledge, universalism, disinterestedness, organised scepticism) were strained by vaccine nationalism and preprint noise.
- Laboratories, trials, and the WHO made a global fact. Dependency theory notes who owned patents and who waited.
Technology of control and care
- Testing, sequencing, oxygen plants, and mRNA and other vaccine platforms were productive forces in Marx’s sense, suddenly politicised.
- Apps, lists, and work-from-home dashboards extended Weber’s iron cage into the phone. Surveillance mixed with relief.
- Gig delivery and platform ratings kept urban middle-class consumption alive while riders faced exposure.
Unequal experience
- Digital divide: online school and telemedicine for some; informal workers without data, documents, or a Census-stable address.
- Reverse migration was a low-tech fact of walking bodies beside a high-tech media of infection curves.
- Gendered unpaid care absorbed hospital overflow at home.
Risk, trust, and the public
- Beck’s risk society: manufactured uncertainty, expert disagreement, and blame.
- Durkheim: anomie when rules of gathering, work, and funeral broke; new rituals online.
- Civil controversy over lockdown science showed that “follow the science” is also a political sentence.
Democratisation question
- Inclusive development needs shared vaccines, open data, and occupational safety, not only a national app.
- Informal labour remained outside most techno-fixes.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD ST[Science and technology] --> VAC[Vaccines tests oxygen] ST --> APP[Apps WFH surveillance] ST --> UNQ[Patents digital divide] COVID[COVID-19] --> ST MIG[Reverse migrants] --> LOW[Low-tech walk] PROF[Salaried] --> APP
Conclusion
Science and technology shaped COVID-19 as vaccines, files, apps, and WFH, and as patent and digital inequality. Merton, Beck, Weber, and Frank’s hierarchy explain the split. The migrant walk and the laptop office were one pandemic, two technological worlds.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Is humanity at the mercy of Nature, Science and Technology ? Comment in the light of pandemic situation.
Next question on this syllabus topic (2020 · Q4(a)). View answer →
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Did technology cause the migrant crisis?
No. Informal work and a sudden halt did. Technology then counted cases more easily than it counted walkers.
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Is an app a public health system?
It can support tracing. Without testing, care, and food it is a file, not a hospital.
Same topic · past papers
UPSC has asked this before
These previous-year questions sit on the same topic. Open one to practise the earlier ask.
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2020 · Q4(a) · Sociology GS 1 · 20 marks
Is humanity at the mercy of Nature, Science and Technology ? Comment in the light of pandemic situation.
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