Researchers' priorities for improving science in India should include a commitment to assess the social impacts of new technologies in the Indian context (see Nature 521, 151–155; 2015).

Big dams and atomic-energy programmes offered solutions to many of India's problems after independence in 1947; the green revolution and biotechnology followed. Stem-cell therapy, nanotechnology, synthetic biology and pharmacogenomics are all now taking off.

India sometimes seems prepared to overlook the potential societal consequences of such technologies in the name of development and progress. Its Land Acquisition Bill 2015, for example, seeks to exempt some important projects on defence, infrastructure and industrial regions from social assessment.

The impact of new technologies on India's sizeable poor and vulnerable population should be analysed before such innovations are introduced (see D. Greenbaum Nature Biotechnol. 33, 425–426; 2015). Analysis would need to include investigation of their affordability and equitability (S. S. Tiwari and S. Raman New Genet. Soc. 33, 413–433; 2014).