Project Lab

Center for Science and Environment

“Whether we believed that development and sustainability are compatible with economic growth and if development and sustainability are actually trade-offs or mutually reinforcing?” asked Sucharita Sen, Associate Professor, Centre for Studies for Rural Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

She brought to our attention the social science perspective, one that is easily overlooked by the many fields involved in both development and in sustainability. Her question has made me think and if you ask me this same question now, when the course is almost over, my answer might be different from the one I am in the process of formulating this evening.

India suffers from a lack of cohesion between the various government departments and institutions – as does the rest of the world. Politicians and government departments follow different agendas than the Non- Government Organisations and other concerned organisations and individuals, with developers being synonymous with economic growth and in many countries, developers are synonymous with economic greed.

These problems are common in both developing countries and the west and I feel that development and sustainability cannot be defined in few words. Thus people, communities and investors, all speak to a different tune with one person’s ideas being foreign to another’s, keeping development, sustainability and environmental issues as separate issues.

Issues of globalisation are ensuring that the mineral rich states are home to the poorest local communities the world over. This is not the first time that globalisation has been spoken about during this course. The ‘resource curse’ was brought to our attention on the first day by Aditya Batra, Program Director, Board & Funding, the Centre for Science And Environment, in his lecture called ‘Environment and Development debate in contemporary India’.

Sen mentioned that development is that includes reduction of poverty – a definition I have never come across before. Why is this not put into practice the world over? If this was, world would be socially rich, it will be economically developed and the concept of sustaining our resources may not be so hard to achieve.