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Editorial
Tunneling out of the poverty-population Ashok Khosla Nothing is
more important for the All thinking people recognize this, yet most have accepted the massive destruction of our environment and unabated rise of the population with helpless resignation. We seem to assume that this is somebody else’s problem and that natural factors will somehow make it go away on its own. Despite the extraordinary progress made by India since independence in such varied fields of human endeavour as food, production, energy, industry and science, a very large number of our people are caught on a never ending treadmill of continuing poverty and deprivation. There is , however, enough evidence to suggest that our political leaders, the scientific community, the voluntary sector and the public could, working together, remedy this aberration in our nation’s history. The first and most immediate threat to the security, and indeed to the very unity and survival, of our nation is the continuing growth of poverty and rapid deterioration of the nation’s resources, in part created by the careless choice of our development priorities, and in part by the continued and rapid growth of our population. The signs of an impending and general breakdown of the resource and environment systems which support us are already here, unmistakable and visible for all to see:
The demands on our infrastructure and resources have become unbearable: in the next dozen years, we will have to build as many schools, hospitals and power stations as were built during the entire prior history of India. Undoubtedly, other measures - many of them equally urgent - will also have to be taken, particularly by the more affluent members of our society: to limit unnecessary consumption, to reduce waste, to change lifestyle to be in harmony with nature. But it is massive resource degradation and runaway population growth which we believe to be the spectre which, if unchecked, will haunt the world of our children. And if we do not change directions on these by conscious choice, nature will inevitably make the choice for us. The commitment to a better environment, and no less, the demographic behaviour of any section of society, such as the patterns of births, deaths and migration, is inextricably linked with the level of participation of that group in national development and in how much of the fruits of this development its members can share. To slow down the massive destruction of our environmental resource base, and of the growth of our population, we propose that all political parties agree to adopt a simple seven point programme that is given the highest priority in their work. We believe that, from now, all development action must be designed above all other priorities, and directly to:
Until environmental restoration and the demographic transition is well under way and the requisite social conscience has been built up, any activity which does not meet these criteria is largely short-sighted and peripheral to the interests of our country as a whole. These issues need a new social contract between political leaders, government, voluntary agencies, private sector and peoples’ organisations and cannot now be left to any one constituency alone to deal with. More important, the responsibility must be placed in the hands of the people, above any parochial consideration of caste, colour or creed - and outside the arena of electoral politics. q
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