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.