| Abstract: | How do prevailing socio-cultural structures mediate the innovation, adoption, and application of diagnostic technologies, and how do these technologies simultaneously reconfigure social norms, healthcare delivery, and gender relations? These questions lie at the heart of this paper, which critically interrogates the reciprocal and contested relationship between diagnostic technology and society in contemporary India. Authored from an interdisciplinary position bridging science and technology studies, gender studies, and innovation policy, the paper employs the Social Shaping of Technology (SST) framework alongside a mixed-methods approach incorporating healthcare professional interviews, regulatory policy analysis to argue that innovation trajectories in diagnostic technology are neither socially neutral nor policy-independent. The paper contends that cultural imperatives, economic constraints, and weak regulatory enforcement collectively mediate how diagnostic innovations including ultrasound imaging, rapid diagnostic tests are developed, diffused, and appropriated across diverse social contexts. Crucially, while these technologies have expanded healthcare access and reduced diagnostic delays in rural and resource-constrained settings, they have simultaneously been captured by patriarchal social structures to perpetuate gender-discriminatory practices, most critically sex-selective abortion. This represents a fundamental policy failure at the intersection of innovation governance and gender justice. |
