Editorial
Reaching out of you 

The affluence of today is unparalleled in Indian history. We grow more food and generate more energy: we produce a greater variety of industrial goods and have access to a wider range of social and commercial services than we could reasonably have imagined at Independence. There are more rich people in our country now than ever before, many with a material standard of life comparable to that of the well-to-do anywhere in the world.

Yet, is is an acknowledged fact that there are more poor people in the country than ever before. More than a third of our people live in unacceptable conditions of poverty.

They are without remunerative jobs, are under-nourished and shabbily clothed. More than half of our people are illiterate: they live with inadequate shelter, drinking water or sanitation. they have access to virtually no products or technologies resulting from modern science other than a few products like bicycles, torches, batteries, transistor radios and kerosene lamps.

What’s more, the resources we and our ancestors depended upon for millennia-the soils, forests, waters and minerals of a richly endowed land -have been precipitately and massively degraded.

Over the years, many organisations have come into being in India to address the issues of environment and development, often on their own and sometimes in collaboration with government. Their specific concerns range over a variety of issues - women, youth, the child, labour, religion, employment, shelter, technology, peace and human rights - all important facets of equitable and sustainable development.

Their approaches vary : some provide social services, other technical support: still others financial and other inputs to development projects. Their functions range from research to grassroot participation and to activism. Many consider themselves as voluntary, others as professional, and yet others as non-profit corporate bodies. All such agencies constitute what one broadly calls the "independent sector", each working in its own way - (most often) separately and (occasionally) together - for a national development that is equitable, just and sustainable.

Any viable contributing to such development must clearly be locally accessible. Self-reliant and replicable. And its successes and failures must be visible for others to understand, analyse and learn from. For this reason, many workers in the independent sector have expressed the need for additional channels of communication through which a regular exchange of experience, knowledge and ideas can be facilitated among them.

This newsletter is an attempt to fill this gap. While its primary purpose is to make more widely available the information generated through the efforts of our own non-profit body - Development Alternatives - we hope that it will also become an active forum for the exchange of ideas on sustainable development among the wider network of independent groups, academics, research workers, decision makers and citizens concerned with these issues.


by Ashok Khosla

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