'Technology should complement, not replace, human judgement.' Discuss this in the context of early debates on computerisation in developing countries like India.

Addressing the Hyderabad chapter of the Computer Society of India in September 1976, Prof. A.S. Douglas of the London School of Economics saw a "considerable future" for computers in developing countries, yet stressed an organised programme for training personnel [1]. That pairing captures the early Indian view: machines extend human capacity, they do not substitute for judgement.

Computers entered India as aids to planning, not as decision-makers

• The HEC-2M, India's first computer, installed at the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta (1956), solved computational problems referred by government departments and scientific institutions such as IIT Kharagpur and TIFR [2] — it computed, while planners chose.
• Douglas located computers in both routine and "highly sophisticated" scientific calculation, leaving the balance between men and machines to be struck deliberately [1].

The institutional design itself was an act of human judgement

• The Bhabha Committee (1963) led to the Department of Electronics (1970) and the Electronics Commission (1971) [5].
• ECIL, founded in 1967 under the Department of Atomic Energy, built the TDC-12 (1969), India's first digital computer, supplying about 20 systems by 1971, besides India's first general-purpose operating system and FORTRAN/COBOL compilers [3]. Self-reliance was a value choice, whose cost was slow supply and ageing machines [5].

Complementarity fails without human capability

• With few machines available, computing skills stayed confined to elite institutes [2][5], vindicating Douglas's warning on training [1].
• The New Computer Policy (1984) and Software Policy (1986) permitted software development and export over data-communication links, so Indian expertise could be used from India instead of engineers travelling abroad [4] — technology amplifying人 human talent already present.

The early Indian experience shows that computerisation delivered most where it strengthened planners, scientists and engineers, and least where institutions outran trained people. India should carry this forward into artificial intelligence and algorithmic governance: invest in skilling and keep accountable human authority over consequential decisions, so that technology remains an instrument of, and not a substitute for, reasoned public judgement.