Renewing Our Commitment
to People and the Environment

Sixty years of independence have brought our country much progress on many fronts. Our food production has multiplied three fold, our industries manufacture growing numbers of cars, televisions and appliances, our companies have become world leaders in producing steel, cement pharmaceuticals, and every year, our real estate developers build whole new towns with high class buildings. As many new telephone subscribers are added every year as had phones in the entire country fifteen years ago. Today, we have a growing middle class whose every need or desire can be met. Certainly, there are many more people alive today with amenities and physical well being their parents and grandparents could not have dreamt of. In such achievements we can be justifiably proud.

Yet, there are also twice as many poor people in our country today as there were in 1947. Twice as many illiterate, hungry and marginalised people, barely existing, entirely excluded from the mainstream economy. Worse, the number of women living under such conditions has grown three-fold. Our children get less protein and fewer calories than their grandparents did at the same age. And, despite the most valiant efforts by different governments over the decades, few of these numbers are declining as fast as they should in a modern and vibrant economy like ours.

The truth is that all the economic progress, all the benefits of so-called national development over the past fifty years has been hijacked by a small, a tiny minority of our people. They, numbering no more than a few tens of millions, can now boast of having lifestyles that are better than those of most people living in Europe, North America or Japan. In our rapidly globalising economy, they are able to hold their own in every way: income, standard of living and consumption of resources. The vast majority of our fellow citizens, however, must survive and subsist at levels that are no better, and probably quite a bit worse, than existed in our country at the time of independence.

All the studies, statistics, indices of economic and social well-being that are published by international bodies like the World Bank, United Nations and others show our poor, beleaguered nation near the bottom of every list of desirable achievements. Whether it is income, jobs, nutrition, health, status of women, or freedom from corruption, India seems to be competing for last place. What has happened to the brilliant future that independence promised? What has happened to our age-old traditions and virtues that we regularly extol to others? And what has happened to the qualities of caring and sacrifice our leaders so amply demonstrated on the route to independence. And what can we do to put our country back on its rightful track?

By mindlessly mining our resources and by cavalierly dumping our wastes and pollutants into the environment around us, we not only harm the lives of the poor and the productivity of our natural heritage and patrimony. We also undermine the ability of future generations to sustain themselves in the manner they should be entitled to. The technologies we have chosen - or rather, mindlessly copied from the West - the resource management methods we have adopted and the institutions of governance we have evolved seem now to be largely inappropriate to our needs. Our whole economic system is based on a hit and run attitude that has already started to rebound on us in the successive disasters we face, not only in our social framework and life support mechanisms, but also in our body politic with increasing frequency.

Although recent efforts to liberalise the economy may well bring back some of the control people would like over their own lives, such control should not be confined to the middle class. It needs to be universalised and that can only happen with liberalisation of the polity. Democracy meant that power flows upwards from the communities and villages of our country, as they do in genuine democracies elsewhere. Our village level institutions now need to be empowered to ensure social justice and equity. All we need to do is to replace our colonial institutions by a true people’s democracy.

The Development Alternatives Group is nearly three decades old. The time has come to rejuvenate our commitment and efforts, both as a nation and as an organisation. This will to bring the benefits of the nation’s manifest progress into the life of towards our social responsibility. q

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