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An
invincible aura exudes through his graceful face lines as his profound
voice passionately articulates issues & concerns of our times. As
passionately as he plays his favourite computer games & listens
to Beatles. A person of Precise Passion, Tomas Mann might have termed
him. One of the foremost intelligentsia of Indian civil society,
he has an unparallel academic & professional record. PhD in Nuclear
Physics in USA of 1950s, teaching stint at Harvard, pioneer of Sustainable
Development, member of several commissions across the globe, Dr
Ashok Khosla is a listener's delight.
What
makes him a committed intellectual is his honesty. Despite all his
achievements visible so clearly to the world, he accepts his inability
to bring the BIG transformation, he wanted. Certain non negotiables,
his ideological foundations of end can not justify the means, thwarted
him to achieve his desired goals. A lesser mortal would easily pass
the buck on the system. But not he, as he relentlessly searches
for perfection.
No
wonder, his brainchild Development Alternatives completes splendid
twenty five years. IndianNGOs.com spoke to him on the occasion to
track his & DA's journey. Read on his insightful views, drawn from
his rich public life.
Before
coming to 25 years of Development Alternatives (DA), I begin with
an observation. Within a short span of first few years of twenty
first century, quite a few genuine and big NGOs of the country complete
their twenty five years of sustained research, innovation and advocacy.
Amongst these we have remarkable institutions including Centre of
Science and Environment, PRIA, Narmada Bachao Andolan, TERI and
of course DA.
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All
of these have their roots in late 1970s or early 1980s. What was
so special in the air of late 1970s, which sprang up this marvelous
batch?
That's
a pretty good insight. There were indeed many NGOs such as the ones
you mentioned that came into being in the late 70s and early 80s.
Others of equal eminence included PRADAN, Gram Vikas, Deccan Development
Society and Myrada.
These
emerged during a period of fundamental transformation, both in India
and globally. 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 centralization and particularly
the Emergency were in need of radical change and alternative voices
such as those of J P Narayan had relevance 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. The 1970s started with the Stockholm Conference, out
of which many of these concepts emerged on the larger political
agenda.
As
a result, all the way into the mid 1980s, there emerged a whole
cadre of young people who questioned the way our nation's future
was being determined - and even defined. In the meantime, the new
institutes of technology and schools of management had begun to
produce outstanding young professionals, some of whom were at the
forefront of this questioning. Around the same time, NDDB, IRMA
and other initiatives produced additional young professionals willing
to break new ground. This young generation was not satisfied with
the way India was moving forward. Many of us felt the capital intensive,
large scale, heavy technology, highly centralised approach was not
adequate to address a large part of India's problems, particularly
those of its poor and its environmental resource base.
All
these factors led to a widespread desire to strengthen civil society.
Each of us had different ways of doing that - voluntary grassroots
action, research, thinktanks, community based organizations, NGOs
covering varied issues such as poverty, environment, technology,
participatory democracy - but all of us were a necessary piece of
the jigsaw puzzle.
At
the same time, I should add that while DA is very much a part of
civil society, it was in some radical ways quite different from
all the NGOs you mentioned: 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
initiative and self-reliance rather than waiting endlessly for dependency
creating government hand-outs.
In
my case, I was intending to set up DA much earlier, in fact as far
back as the early 1970s, when I first came back after studying overseas.
But I got sidetracked into taking a job with government and then
with the UN; and it was after a delay of more than ten years, in
1983, that I was able to get to DA.
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Was
this sudden emergence of voluntary sector in some sense a fallout
of disillusionment with Nehruvian model of growth? After three decades
of independence, we were still registering that notorious Hindu
growth rate of mere 2-3%.
Well,
I did have an issue with economic policy. It was a public sector
driven, highly centralized, planned model of development. Planners
may be very intelligent people, but they cannot know everything.
In particular, their actions may not always be in the interest of
the people.
However,
I was dissatisfied not so much with the Nehruvian policies, as with
the neo classical model of economic development, which did not respect
the needs of people and had extremely mechanistic solutions to the
economic problems of the country. Our policies didn't really address
the issues of distribution, poverty and environment. I would not
say Nehru was responsible for all these shortcomings, though of
course Nehru was at the helm of affairs. Yet, it was not dissatisfaction
with Nehru but with the simplistic economic model that was generally
accepted by our policy makers at the time that really worried me
at the time.
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Tell
us the circumstances, which made you dissatisfied with development
policies of that era.
By
the 1980s, it had become pretty obvious that while many of us were
able to access the benefits of industrial society, some 500-600
million people of our country were extremely poor and lived the
same kind of life, they had been living for thousands of years.
It was more shocking to see that those of us, who were living well,
were really living well because we were able to reap the benefits
of a highly inequitable pattern of distribution and consumption
- in effect at the expense of the poor.
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Your
notion of sustainable development hold very complex matrix. It comprises
of economic efficiency, social justice, environmental harmony, resource
conservation and self reliance. How did it emerge?
It
seemed pretty obvious to me right from the beginning that all these
things go together. I suppose I had not had the benefit of working
in a bureaucracy, I did not realize you could take a simplistic
mono-dimensional view of things - and human development always seemed
to me to involve complex interacting systems and, therefore, difficult
trade-offs. The most difficult trade-off is that those who get the
benefits are seldom the same as those who pay the costs. Throughout
my studies, already at high school and even more so in college and
graduate school, I was dominated - obsessed? - by the injustice
that is poverty and by the callousness that is destruction of nature.
In 1964, while I was doing my doctoral research, I got a chance
to help the great scientist Professor Roger Revelle (who was the
first to discover the changes occurring in the atmosphere that were
later shown to be responsible for global climate change) teach a
course on the environment. It was, in fact, the first university
course ever, and it was entitled "Population, Resources and the
Environment", already reflecting the linkages we saw among these
great issues of our time.
Preparing
for the course, it became increasingly clear that both affluence
and poverty are great destroyers of natural resources. The rich,
largely out of greed and narrowly conceived self-interest tend to
destroy what are called non-renewable resources (fossil fuels, minerals,
etc), and the poor, out of the exigencies of survival, tend to exhaust
what are called renewable resources. It was evident that oil and
minerals were finite resources. Continued growth, widely accepted
by the economics profession as a highly desirable, permanent feature
of the world economy just couldn't go on forever. Many of us realized
that by having such disparity in the world, having so many poor
and a few extremely rich people would not be sustainable. And this
was not just for moral or ethical reasons that wide disparity was
not justifiable, or for social and political ones, it was not feasible
on purely ecological ones.
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You
identified the issue of sustainable development in 1960s! Very few
persons on the planet even heard about it then.
In
1967 I co-edited with Professor Revelle a book called the "Survival
Equation". Although we did not yet use the precise phrase "sustainable
development", the whole purpose of the book was to show that for
any development to last, it had to cater to at least the basic needs
of all people, respect the limits of the environment and build the
basis of a more secure future - which are now considered the main
ingredients of sustainable development. The book presented articles
from leading thinkers in the fields of environment and development,
covering the whole spectrum of contemporary thought on these issues.
It contained papers ranging from how the planet was about to be
destroyed by the impending population bomb to how it would be saved
by the "ultimate resource" that is human being. In between these
two extreme viewpoints, it emphasized population and resources in
the environment were inextricably linked.
For
the next decade, I worked on many of these issues, going from teaching
and academic research to government policy making (in India) to
international institution building (for the United Nations Environment
Programme). In the late 1970s, I was one of the contributing authors
of the World Conservation Strategy, which made extensive use of
the word Sustainable Development for, I believe, the first time.
It was produced by the World Conservation Union in collaboration
with the United Nation Environment Programme and WWF. WCS was liberally
sprinkled throughout with the concept of sustainable development.
It was launched "simultaneously" in major cities of the world as
the sun came up to 10.00 am at each of them, starting with New Delhi
on 5 March 1980.
Later
I worked with Brundtland Commission. It adopted this phrase as the
central message of its report, and helped to make it globally accepted.
From there it became the theme of the 1992 Johannesburg Summit.
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You
are amongst the pioneers of this idea.
The
idea of sustainable development wasn't, at first, an easy sell.
But over the years, it has attained pretty much universal acceptance
- partly because of its ambiguity (because of which it can mean
everything to everybody) and partly because of its inherent "motherhood"
qualities. And now, there is the usual swing of the pendulum, with
a growing number of persons in the field, some of them very thoughtful,
who question its correctness, particularly because of its other
inherent self-contradiction - how can development, they ask, go
on for ever on a finite resource base? The bridge between these
schools of thought lies, of course, in getting clearer definitions
of the words "development" and "sustainable".
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How
and when was TARA established? Was it from the beginning an integral
wing of DA?
It
was set up the same day as DA. In fact, all three -- DA, TARA and
People First -- were formed together. They were 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 doing that often do not have a great
sense of business, so we put together a separate organization, Technology
and Action for Rural Advancement (TARA), to implement what the DA
geniuses had concocted. It was not enough to just design solutions
to problems, we felt it necessary to demonstrate them, working,
on the ground. TARA is, of course, the body - the hands, arms and
legs - of the DA Group.
Hence,
TARA and DA were essential to each other from day one. TARA has
the same objectives as that of DA - but different strategies and
jobs. While DA acts in the laboratory, TARA performs in the field.
The job of DA is to innovate solutions to the problems of people
and nature; the job of TARA is to multiply these solutions. The
two are twins. It wasn't possible to do what we wanted to do with
only one organization.
People
First was the third entity. If DA was the brains, TARA was the hands
and arms; PF was heart, soul and conscience. People First is an
advocacy organization. Its first client is the public, creating
awareness about the responsibilities of the citizen towards making
India a sustainable nation. Its second client is the corporation,
again to be more responsible towards the interests of all its stakeholders,
not just those who own shares in it. And the third client is the
government, whose policies need change, sometimes fundamental change,
if the future citizens of our nation are to lead happy, healthy
and secure lives. And the fourth client is the DA Group itself,
for whom People First acts as the conscience of the organization,
to make sure that what we do is always in the interest of the nation.
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Did
you have any idea that twenty five years down the line, DA would
emerge into a huge entity?
The
original dream was much more huge than where we are now. The thing
that drove us into this enterprise was very big.
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What
was that big thing?
First
of all, to create a country where everybody has the opportunity
of living a fulfilling life. It included eliminating poverty and
hunger; bringing back to full health the resource base, the environment;
creating an ambience where people of all castes, religions, groups,
and regions feel it's their country and they have equal rights over
it. These were all a part of our ambition. Clearly we have not achieved
those goals. In fact, we have a long way to go yet.
Secondly,
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. We still have a long way to go on the first
part before we get to the second.
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What
hurdles prohibited you from realizing your dream?
Only
one. Our own inadequacies, inabilities and incompetence. That's
the only thing that prevented us from getting there. There was nobody
to stop us. Our country doesn't make things easy, of course, but
we always considered the overcoming of hurdles as a part of the
problem we had set out to solve, not as an excuse for non-achievement.
We could have circumvented the hurdles or cut corners but chose
not to, because most of them belonged to the domain of "non-negotiables"
which we were not prepared to sacrifice.
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For
instance?
For
instance, we would not do anything we knew to be contrary to the
interests of the country. If somebody asked us to pay bribe, for
example, we could not do that. If anything violated the laws of
the land or the principles of good social behaviour, we were not
in a position to do them, even if they offered a short cut to something
of great value to society. As Gandhiji said the ends cannot justify
the means. These were the hurdles - too numerous to relate -- but
we never saw them as barriers to achieve our goals. They were integral
parts of the problems we had to resolve. I wouldn't say there was
really any external factor that limited our options or stopped us
from doing something because if we couldn't convince them otherwise,
it was our shortcoming. If you have a good idea, yet no one supports
you, the problem lies more in your inability to convince them than
in their inability to understand how good your idea is.
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Was
it your fault or the shortcoming of the system?
It
would be totally contrary to our way of thinking to blame somebody
else for our failures. We have a basic motto in the organization
- "No Alibis". We do not encourage our colleagues to find excuses
for non-performance: isn't it better to go out their and "just do
it"?
When
we found that the government was not able to help us, or worse,
that it would make our work more difficult for whatever reason,
we simply changed our strategy and way of our working. In fact from
the earliest days of DA, we designed most of our programs to come
in below the radar. They couldn't stop us because they couldn't
see us. From the beginning, for example, DA worked on solutions
that involved small scale industries and technologies that nobody
in the big government or corporate sectors was interested in; which
did not look threatening to anybody. We designed our systems so
they would be difficult to detect by the powers that be.
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What
was your business model?
We
never asked for very much. For the first four-five years, we never
took any money from overseas. We were really very true to the first
principle of our message: being truly indigenous and self-reliant.
We wanted to have only or at least primarily Indian support. But
it wasn't enough for our requirements: R&D is expensive, and so
is really creative staff. This was why we designed the DA Group
as a whole to generate money through earning rather than through
fund-raising and seeking donations. We developed a business model
to pay for our operations and cover our costs.
We
did get project support from a variety of organizations to develop
effective solutions through research and development. We then handed
these to TARA, which sold these products and technologies and made
money out of it. That was reasonably successful. TARA pays licence
fees to DA for the technologies it makes and sells. We were, in
fact, the pioneers in developing what is now called Social Enterprise.
Nothing like that was actually witnessed for another fifteen or
twenty years after we started.
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Does
this business model meet all the needs of DA?
Actually,
we are trying to overcome a fundamental dichotomy. The prices we
pay, the costs we incur are determined by the global economy. We
are doing very sophisticated work; we need good people, who actually
can get jobs in the global economy anyway. We are competing for
people who can get huge salaries in the marketplace. Our costs for
machines, computers, rents, utilities, travel and staff are determined
by the high-end economy, which can easily cover these costs because
of the huge revenues it can generate, partly because of monopolistic
pricing and partly because its clients are willing to pay high prices.
But
our revenue is determined by clients who earn less than one or two
dollars a day. This is why there emerges a huge gap in this market
in terms of the revenue it can generate and the costs it incurs.
TARA is able to take this challenge because the rural market may
be dispersed but it has huge numbers. If we can make a small profit
from each client and deliver to a very large number of clients,
the profits add up. It's a form of economies of scale - but a more
benign one than the usual one, which gains its profits from passing
off the costs to the public or to nature. Actually this is the economies
that come from of scaling out and not scaling up. It means manufacturing
and delivering our products and services in a decentralized manner
to everybody. We have shown that this works on the ground, but in
small numbers, the revenues are not sufficient to cover all our
costs. The only thing that remains to be done now is to actually
take it from the lakhs to the crores. We are currently in the lakhs;
to get to the crores and tens of crores, we obviously have to set
up a much more elaborate marketing system.
The
people we have with us are not there because we pay them competitive
salaries but because they are determined to work on the issues of
sustainable development and making money is not the only goal that
drives them. Unfortunately, there are not many such persons are
around.
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How
far you have been successful in spreading your technology solutions
to the needy of this country?
We
have still a long way to go to get our solutions implemented in
every village. However, we have got a model that works. Now we do
need some capital for expansion. We are trying to get it from various
investors. The kind of money we are looking for is very small compared
with the amount our country wastes in all kinds of ways. But it
seems to be too large for investors who would like to support socially
oriented businesses.
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Looking
back today, what do you consider as three milestones of twenty five
years of DA?
I
think the first milestone was the recognition that technology and
marketing systems could be designed in a way to make them applicable
to rural India and environmental issues. It took us about three
or four years to satisfy ourselves that our basic premise was right.
It was then that we started making some money out of our operations
in TARA. We were quite successful and reassured that something could
be done on the ground. Civil society organisations are often not
very comfortable with finding solutions that involve technology,
hard core science or engineering. We proved that a civil society
organisation can comfortably do these things as well as the private
or government sectors, perhaps better. By the time we had been around
ten years or so, we had more innovations in the field for the rural
market than the entire government had.
The
second milestone was the realization that civil society organization
does not mean being sloppy in management. We introduced pretty solid
management systems and built up a strong capacity throughout the
organization for good decision making. We set up strategic business
units; every unit was made responsible for their income and expenditure.
And the attitude was deeply held in the organization, staff at all
levels understand that this organization belongs to everybody and
not just to few managers.
The
third milestone was when they realized they didn't need me any more.
I suppose that was the most important one. I was moved upstairs
as the Chairman and now I don't have any work to do except talking
to nice persons like you. It was important because we wanted to
set up an organization, which has a life of its own, which thinks
for itself and moves with the times, is not stuck with some nostalgic
ideas like the ones we had in 1982 when we started.
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 power of machines now doubles every eighteen months.
This is going to bring about a deep, total change in the world.
The DA Group does not want to be an organization working with nineteenth
century methods dealing with twenty first century problems. We are
one of the few organizations, which is ready for taking on these
challenges because my colleagues are really driving into the future.
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What
changes do you foresee in future? How does DA look forward to deal
with these?
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 what kind
of priority we have.
Further,
the current communication revolution is not the same as the ones
in previous decades or centuries. The excluded and the marginalized
people of our country - more than half of the population -- can
not be treated in the same way as we have treated them for centuries.
Our children are going to live in a country, which would question
that kind of disparity.
Second,
our children are going to live in a world, where there will be virtually
no petroleum based energy left. Hopefully, we will find substitutes,
but in the next decades, life without our numerous energy slaves
is going to be extremely tough.
We
are going to have a huge housing problem. It will be far more difficult
to make houses for everybody in the years to come. This is not just
because of lack of space, which is already a major constraint for
those who do not own land in our country, but also because that
much cement, bricks, steel and other materials to construct the
houses will become increasingly difficult.
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, are already happening very suddenly.
What
DA looks forward to is to be an anchor, an intellectual anchor,
to provide much needed thinking and create preemptive designs of
the systems needed to meet future requirements.
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How
far governance, governance of India, of Corporate, of NGOs is going
to be an important tool to deal with problems of future?
Governance
does not mean having some dictator to decide the overall course.
Governance for the country will work when the local community --
the Gram Sabha and the PRIs - becomes a real mechanism of governance
and the village community takes charge of its resources. This involves
democratizing India as soon as possible.
Governance
in the institutional sense is also just as crucial. There isn't
a great tradition in India in this regard, but we are trying to
build it up. It indicates the mechanisms that ensure the integrity
and commitment to the established goals of the organization. There
are different ways to do this. You have the normal, formal, Board
with the ultimate fiduciary responsibility, accountable to the law
and to society as a whole. But I personally believe real governance
is about good management. Good organizations are not run by Boards
but by top management, who have internalized the imperatives of
good citizenship and instituted the mechanisms to encourage good
"corporate" behaviour, whether in communities, in civil society
organizations or in businesses.
Real
governance does not have much to do other than ensuring transparency,
integrity on the one hand and liberating, facilitating everyone
in the organization to work at the highest productivity. DA tries
to achieve precisely this. Much of our governance is within the
organization. We have Boards, and we rely on them particularly for
overall policy and direction, but the bulk of our decision making
and monitoring takes place inside each organisaton.
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What
is DA model of governance?
The
DA Group believes in putting people in charge of their own lives
and including everybody's views in decision making process. It applies
this belief to its own organizational structures and systems. It
ensures that all people in the organisation know what constitutes
good citizenship and what does not. It's about nurturing the creativity
of our people and constructing a workplace which brings out the
best in people. It internalizes the thinking processes among its
people to enable them take good decisions.
-
Ashutosh Bhardwaj
IndianNGOs.com
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