Ladakh Towards Sustainable Development

An international development conference with a difference was held in Leh, Ladakh last fall. It was so deliberately low-key that it went wholly unnoticed elsewhere in the Himalaya. While ten nations outside India were represented, there was no international agency or national aid bureau present. Also unique was that the foreign parti¬cipants, ranging from a Swedish Member of Parliament to an ecologist from the University of California, and a Nepali major-general-turned-environmentalist paid their own travel expenses to and from Leh.

In course, eating was a secondary concern, the primary focus being on "ecology and principles for "sustainable development" – the subject of the three-day conference. The whole affair had bees sponsored by the Ladakh Ecological Development Group (LEDeG) and the Ladakh Project, two organisations founded in the late seventies by Swedish linguist Helena Norberg-Hodgc out of her concern that conventional development was threatening a centuries-old, socially and environmentally harmonious way of life.
LEDeG is locally based, while the Ladakh Project conducts international educational programmes on development issues and provides technical and financial support for LEDeg.