Gandhiji Was Talking Sustainable Development

Every Five Year Plan since Indian independence has focussed on eliminating poverty. Yet, 40 years later, about half of the population still lives below the poverty line. The poor are caught in a vicious downward spiral – poverty leading to impoverishment of resources, which in turn leads to increased poverty. Clearly, the interests of the poor can only be safe-guarded if development planning takes into account the inter-relationship between poverty, land use policies and environmental concerns.

Jawaharlal Nehru dreamt of modern India in terms of industrialisation, steel and fertiliser plants, dams and hydroelectric power, modern agriculture, and the introduction of a scientific temper in the country. Today, India can boast of a broad-based scientific and industrial infrastructure. However, its contribution to the well being of the people, especially the rural poor, is in considerable doubt. Professor C.N.R. Rao, Chairman of the powerful Science Advisory Committee to the Prime Minister, in a recent report pointed to the failure of science and technology in the economic and social development of the country.

Decades ago, Gandhiji asked, "Why must India become industrial in the Western sense? The Western civilisation is urban. Small countries like England and Italy may afford to urbanise their systems. A big country like America with very sparse population cannot do otherwise. But one would think that a big country with a teeming population with an ancient rural tradition, which has hitherto answered its purposes, need not, must not, copy the Western model."

If India is to attain true freedom, said Gandhiji, then sooner or later it will have to be realised that the people will have to live in villages not towns, and in huts, not palaces. The India of his dreams was a federation of small village republics providing essential needs of the community, without large scale industrialisation. Such an ideology ensured sustainable development without over-exploitation of natural resources. As he said, the earth has enough for everyone's needs but not for everyone's greed.

Today, ecologists everywhere seems to be coming around to Gandhiji's view, that the world is moving in the wrong direction and in the process of destroying itself like a moth around a flame. They question the industrial way of life and say that if the biosphere is to survive, then industrialism in its present form must end.

Although Nehru's intention was to move speedily towards modernisation and to raise everyone above poverty, the strategy has intensified poverty, instead. The intensive pursuit of large industries has led to large scale environmental degradation. Industrial pollution has hurt agricultural lands, lakes, rivers and seas, and tainted drinking water. Open cast mining has degraded large areas of land. The Narmada and Tehri dams have been justified in terms of development needs for electricity generation and industrial development, even though, thousands of hectares of forests would be submerged and untold numbers of tribal people and others would be displaced with little hope of rehabilitation.

Even otherwise, there seems enough evidence against large dams. For instance, Prof. Ramalingaswamy, former chief of the Indian Council of Medical Research, notes that a crippling bone disease, "knock knees," has begun to appear in the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam area. He also warns that the incidence of malaria and other mosquito borne diseases would increase, in and around, artificial reservoirs. In Egypt, it was found that many of the prevalent diseases could be traced to the Aswan Dam. But we do not wish to learn from history.

As the economist Ivan Illich says, development has not eliminated poverty, it has merely modernised it. The basic question is 'what does progress mean?' Is the tribal person of Nagaland or Mizoram less well off than the slum dweller of Calcutta? The gross national product (GNP), as a measure of economic progress, is a funny thing. "You can double a country's GNP," suggests Edward Goldsmith, Editor of the British magazine The Ecologist, "by the simple expedient of getting every woman to cease looking after her own children for nothing, and look after her neighbour's children instead – for a salary." Perhaps, economics needs to be re-written to take into account social, environmental and cultural concerns and the differing assumptions of a different world view. The basic assumptions of "western" economics are not shared by the older Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and tribal cultures.

Modernisation, industrialisation, big dams, nuclear energy and other such large scale projects can create an illusion of progress. The "limits to growth" would depend on the limits of renewable natural resources and would vary from country to country depending on population, land, water, oil and other natural resources. What is feasible in the United States may not be feasible for India.

If the world is to be saved from doom, development must be in harmony with and not at the expense of nature. Gandhiji believed in the innate "relatedness" of things. Tribal people have always held those beliefs and many modern thinkers and ecologists are beginning to understand that philosophy. There is growing realisation that poverty, environment and development are inter-related; that economic and environmental concerns cannot be separated from ethical concerns.

Gandhiji propounded the moral principle of development, of helping the poorest of the poor. He believed that if India became heavily industrialised, beyond the sustaining capacity of its natural resources, it would inevitably be driven to exploitation and become a "curse for other nations, a menace to the world." The tendency to overproduction is inherent in the industrial mass production system itself. God forbid, (exclaimed Gandhiji) that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single, tiny island kingdom, is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire population of 300 million (now 800 million) took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.

Kamala Chowdhry is recently retired Chairman of India's Wastelands Development Board.  This column is adapted from her paper to the 1989 International Development Conference in Washington, D.C.