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Fourteen Years in the
Jungle
the quest for
a development that is sustainable
Ashok Khosla
Diwali – the festival of lights. A time of renewal
and hope. Celebrating the homecoming of Lord Rama and Sita after 14
years of exile, of wandering in the forests of
India. Also the day that commemorates Lakshmi, the goddess of
wealth. A day that has become special throughout India, for people
of all classes, regions and religions, providing one of the more
tangible symbols of national unity.
Diwali is also a special day for Development
Alternatives: it is the anniversary of the birth of our organisation.
And a symbol of our own aspirations, to create wealth and well-being
for all the people of our country.
This year, Diwali is doubly special for us.
Today we, too, complete 14 years of operations — our own 14 years
of wandering through the jungle that constitutes the field of
development in our country, in search of the essence of a better
future for all. Our self-imposed exile from the mainstream of
development thinking has also given us insights and strength to
continue our journey forward.
The main difference, of course, is that our
homecoming is yet a distant dream, an elusive goal that seems still
so far away. Our search for the woods of equity and social justice,
environmental harmony, participative governance and sustainable
livelihoods continues despite the obscuring shadows of the trees of
megaprojects, five year plans, government schemes, perverse
subsidies, liberalisation and globalisation.
Development Alternatives was set up in 1983, the
first organisation specifically and formally dedicated to the
pursuit of sustainable development. We quickly found that, being a
dynamic process, development was about evolving inter-relationships
involving many social and environmental factors, but particularly
the interactions among nature, machines, institutions and people.
To drive it in the right direction, and with greater speed, we
needed planning and action very different from that which had been
foisted on us, mostly by economists – an unusually blinkered
profession — over the preceding three or four decades.
We started with machines. Our technology
innovation division very soon came up with radically new designs for
a variety of products needed to make the lives of poor people a
little bit better: more productive and less tedious. Among the
first of these were the usual suspects — solar water heaters, solar
cookers, chulhas (woodburning cookstoves), and other renewable
energy devices – and also less familiar ones like handlooms,
mudblock presses and pottery tools. The chulhas were quickly
adopted and widely pirated by local manufacturers in India and
overseas. The solar devices ran foul of the government’s subsidy
system which was intended to facilitate their widespread
dissemination but ended up by destroying the market for them. The
handlooms and mudblock presses gradually built up a significant
clientele.
History has shown that machines can destroy the
natural resource base just as easily as they can improve human
life. Right from the beginning, therefore, we also established our
environment branch which over the years built up a major league
facility not only to provide inhouse advice to the technology
development units on the limits set by nature, but also for
delivering top quality environmental management products to outside
customers. In a few years, we were able to build up a full
repertoire of innovative tools and techniques to service clients in
industry, government and the international community. These
included participatory research, satellite imagery interpretation
and geographical information systems, energy and resource surveys,
public hearings, together with the analytical methods to draw
meaningful conclusions. As a result, the environment branch was
able to carry out pioneering studies in such diverse areas as common
property resources, energy use patterns, diffusion of innovation,
land use plans, infrastructure development and industrial
pollution.
In the meantime, the technology systems branch
continued its innovation work and made major breakthroughs in the
design of small industrial systems, including production units for
handmade recycled paper, roofing tiles, cement-based products and
energy systems. Working closely with our commercial wing, TARA, we
were able to design new machines and delivery systems that have
already begun to demonstrate the commercial viability of appropriate
technologies for the day-to-day needs of poor people in the villages
and towns of India.
As one of the few major “think tanks” in the
third world, we have found it necessary to establish small but
effective units to work on various global issues, including climate
change, biodiversity and stratospheric ozone. We are now in a
position to present, to our own government and in international
forums, independent and in-depth inputs on these issues and to
strengthen the position of developing countries in the international
negotiations.
To reach a wider public, we set up an active
communications unit. This newsletter was its first product,
followed by a weekly environment programme, “The Green Show”, on
national television. Conferences, workshops and exhibitions are
some of the activities through which we have learnt to share our
experiences with others, and to subject them to the review and input
of peers outside.
About half way through our exile, our work in the
field and the laboratory brought us to the realisation that the
basis of a better future, and the prime need of our people, is
jobs. Jobs that provide a decent income and give meaning and
dignity to life. Jobs that produce goods and services for the
local market and that do not destroy the environment or the resource
base. Jobs that bring the poor and the downtrodden, the women and
the marginalised, into the mainstream. Sustainable livelihoods.
This became the prime mission of Development Alternatives and its
sister organisations.
The concept of sustainable livelihoods is, of
course, deceptively simple. The prerequisites to create such
livelihoods in the very large numbers needed – more than 15 million
each year in India – are quite complex and varied. Energy and
electricity, revival of water systems, forests and soils, food,
drinking water and sanitation, and many, many other things. To
generate all these, we need to establish sustainable enterprises –
small, local businesses – in very large numbers. And these have
their own prerequisites: technology and training, management and
marketing, and resources and finance. Perhaps the most important
prerequisite for creating sustainable livelihoods, and indeed for
achieving sustainable development, is good and accessible
government.
To accelerate the creation of sustainable
livelihoods (which is the mission of Development Alternatives), we
have therefore set up a number of organisations with specific goals
aimed at providing these prerequisites. Each one is a
not-for-profit, but operates as a self-financing business.
TARA is the primary enterprise of the Development
Alternatives group. Its factories make both the technologies (the
Balram Earth Block Press, the TARA Flying Shuttle Loom, the
TARAcrete Tile equipment, the Paper Recycling Unit, etc.) and the
products (compressed earth blocks, roofing tiles, handmade recycled
paper, textiles and garments). These technologies and products are
sold, both in the domestic and export markets by the marketing
division of TARA.
DESI Power is an independent rural power producer
that establishes small electricity utilities in joint venture with
village communities. Relying exclusively on local, renewable energy
sources, and using local personnel and distribution systems, it is
in a position to supply electrical power to domestic, commercial and
small industrial users at prices that are competitive with the grid.
TARA Nirman Kendra (TNK) operates the building
centres of Development Alternatives at South Delhi and Orchha, near
Jhansi. These building centres act as supermarkets for the
construction technologies and building materials of TARA. They also
provide training, technical support and design and construction
services to clients who wish to use our shelter-related
innovations.
TARA-BKF Rural Technologies Pvt Ltd (TBRT) is the
franchising arm of TARA. A collaboration with the Holland based
Bureau of Knowledge and Finance, TBRT has initiated a focussed
programme to set up franchises based on TARA and other technologies
in selected areas of India.
TARA Leasing and Finance is working closely with
the newly established India Micro Enterprise Development Fund (IMEDF)
to set up financing systems to enable small entrepreneurs to set up
local businesses based on TARA technologies.
People First is the advocacy organisation of the
group, currently involved in a major effort to introduce the
institutions of genuine democracy into India. Based on Gandhian
principles, People First has shown that the current systems of
governance, including planning, fiscal authority and decision-making
need to originate from the local community and be devolved upwards
instead of the current system, which is the exact opposite. To
achieve such decentralisation in the face of stiff opposition from
the entrenched interests, People First is campaigning for a
referendum and is preparing a public interest suit for this purpose.
DAINET, the Development Alternatives information
network, now provides quick access, through both conventional and
electronic communications, to the best available information on
issues of sustainable development. The network is growing rapidly
to connect users to the many databases of ENVIS, as well as
independent organisations throughout India. Governmental and
non-governmental clients can also use DAINET to connect with the
world wide resources of Internet.
To achieve sustainable development in the long
run, the next generation will have to act much more responsibly than
the present one. CLEAN, the Community-led Environment Action
Network has been set up by Development Alternatives to work with
school children to monitor, analyse and advocate a better living
environment in our towns and villages. Armed with the JalTARA water
testing kit and the PawanTARA air sampling kit, children can
investigate the environmental conditions in their neighbourhood and
send in their data to CLEAN headquarters, where these are mapped and
made available back to the children as well as to government and the
media.
Over the 14 years of our operations, Development
Alternatives and its sister organisations can claim some successes
and many failures. As an independent institution which had largely
to bootstrap itself financially and intellectually, it has been able
to achieve as much as most NGOs, and indeed most businesses that
start with zero front-end capital. Whatever success we have had is
because of the remarkable group of young people who joined us over
the years and dedicated their professional careers towards making
India a better place to live. They helped to define the work of the
organisation and design the work environment to attract more such
talent in the future.
In part, the success of Development Alternatives
lies also in the range of its activities, which provide much mutual
reinforcement among the different units. Our work extends from
policy to research to action, giving every staff member an
opportunity to get the right mix of thinking and doing. Much of our
work is at the micro-level, dealing with households, communities and
factories. Some of our projects take us to the state and national
level, and others have an international and global reach. Something
to satisfy everyone.
Our staff, now nearing 500 spread all over the
country, ranges from PhDs in science, anthropology and engineering
to skilled weavers, masons and paper makers. They come from all
states and speak many languages, providing a microcosm of Indian
life that enriches our professional work and our personal knowledge.
Over the years, we have learnt the value of
self-reliance, not only for our nation as a whole, but for our
organisation too. Being outside the mainstream, not many agencies
are willing to provide the kind of financial support needed to keep
an operation of our size going. As a consequence, we found it
necessary to make a virtue out of necessity and evolve methods by
which the earnings from our work would largely support our
activities. Even so, we have had generous support, particularly for
our research and design work, from agencies such as the Department
of Science and Technology, Building Materials and Technology
Promotion Council, ENVIS (Ministry of Environment and Forests), the
Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation, the International
Development Research Centre of Canada and various foundations
including MacArthur and Ford.
The exile is not yet over. But the search for the light at the end
of the forest goes on. And when we get there, some of the
alternatives will surely be more widely accepted.
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