Within a short span of the first few years of the twenty first century, quite a few genuine and big NGOs of the country complete their 25 years of sustained research, innovation and advocacy. Amongst these we have remarkable institutions including the Centre of Science and Environment, PRIA, Narmada Bachao Andolan, TERI and, of course, Development Alternatives. These organisations emerged during a period of fundamental transformation. Within the country there was a growing perception that 30 years of planned development had served only to create greater disparity and more poverty. Political centralisation, particularly the Emergency was in need of radical change and alternative voices were relevant to India’s future. Internationally, the limits of the local environment, of the planet’s finite resources, and of the current development pattern were beginning to manifest themselves with adversa effects.

As a result, into the mid 1980s, there emerged an entire cadre of young people who questioned the way our nation’s future was being determined – and even defined. This young generation was not satisfied with the way India was moving forward. Many of us felt that a capital-intensive, large-scale, heavy technology, highly centralised approach was alone inadequate to address a large part of India’s problems, particularly those of its poor as well as its environmental resource base.

These factors led to a widespread desire to strengthen the civil society. While DA is very much a part of civil society, it was oriented more towards entrepreneurial approaches than voluntary ones, more towards technology and innovation than social service delivery, more towards using the market as an ally for development rather than an enemy, and more towards community initiatives and self-reliance rather than waiting endlessly for dependency created by government schemes.

DA and TARA were together a part of a bigger, more coherent strategy than any one of them alone could execute. DA is the brain, mandated to innovate and design – to come up with new things, concepts, systems. Its job is to bring together creative, dynamic, iconoclastic people who can move away from traditional thinking patterns and venture into something completely different. But people who are good at innovating along these lines often do not have a great sense of business. We put together a separate organisation, Technology and Action for Rural Advancement (TARA), to implement what the DA genius had concocted. It was not enough to just design solutions to problems; we felt it necessary to demonstrate them in real life conditions.

TARA and DA were essential to each other from day one. While DA acts in the laboratory, TARA performs in the field. DA’s job is to innovate solutions to the problems of people and nature; that of TARA is to multiply these solutions. If DA is the brains, TARA is the hands and arms, the soul and conscience.
After improving the material life of our people and ensuring that everybody has his or her basic needs fulfilled, we have to go onto the higher aspirations of human beings – their aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual life. The DA Group believes in putting people in charge of their own lives and including everybody’s views in decision-making processes. It applies this belief to its own organisational structures and systems. It is about nurturing the creativity of our people and constructing a workplace which brings out the best in everyone. We have still a long way to go to get our solutions implemented in every village. On the brighter side, we do have a model that works.

In seven or eight years from now, machines will have become distinctly more intelligent than human beings. They are already on the threshold of overtaking us in thinking ability, though of course not yet in the ability to feel emotions or attain higher states of consciousness. The processing speed of machines now doubles every eighteen months. This is going to bring about a deep, total change in the world. The awareness generated by modern communications is enormous. Lots of people in India watch TV. There are more televisions in India than toilets. Incidentally, we have 70-80 million TV sets, while there are only 40 million toilets in India. It clearly tells us of our priorities. If we do not change our path, we will find the carpet being taken from under our feet because these things are going to happen very suddenly. In fact, changes are already taking place. All we have to do is take them on.

In our efforts to take on the future, it is the value of ecosystem services that will provide the strongest rationale for investing in conservation. One of the most valuable ecosystem services is the knowledge accumulated over billions of years by nature – the basis of technologies that serve human needs without destroying the environment: Biomimicry. For our conservation efforts to be in the right direction and to be sustained, they must be driven by the highest ethical considerations and a deep respect for all living things. Given its importance to planetary survival, the practice of conservation today is among the highest callings a professional can aspire to. It must, therefore, set the highest benchmarks for personal, scientific and ethical commitment and integrity.

On completing 25 years of working towards developing alternatives for sustainable development, and on the threshold of commencing on the next 25 years, DA promises to never do anything that undermines the integrity of our country. We will do our utmost to set examples of excellence in the quality of life of the poor and work towards sustainable development on all fronts. q

Ashok Khosla
akhosla@devalt.org

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