IndiaPost.com - Providing survival skills to poor

India Post News Service

Ashok Khosla is one of the world's leading experts on environment and sustainable development. A former director of the United Nations Environment Programme, he was awarded the 2002 Sasakawa Environment Prize - "the Nobel Prize of the environment world" - and has been named in the UNEP's Global 500 Roll of Honour.

Born in Kashmir in 1940, the son of a university professor and a college lecturer, Khosla gained a masters degree in natural sciences from Cambridge University before going on to do a PhD in experimental physics at Harvard.

After a period of teaching in the United States - he was part of the team that designed and taught Harvard's inaugural undergraduate course on the environment - he returned to his native India where he became the founding director of the Indian government's Office of Environmental Planning and Co-Ordination, the first such agency in a developing country.

In 1976 he was appointed director of the UNEP, where he designed and launched Infoterra, the global environmental information exchange. He remained with the UNEP until 1982 when he left to found Development Alternatives, a Delhi-based Non-Governmental Organization devoted to promoting commercially viable, environmentally friendly technologies.

He has been a board member of numerous global environmental organizations - including the Club of Rome, the World Conservation Union and the International Institute for Sustainable Development - and served as an adviser to, among others, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme and the Indian government.

In 1983, he set up Development Alternatives (DA) group, a network of organizations in India working on various aspects of sustainable development. Established in 1983, DA is an umbrella to groups that work for transparency in governance, make sustainable technologies and renewable energy available to poor people, and provide Internet access to promote education and provide basic life and survival skills.

These organizations boast achievements that include: the construction of low-cost housing and creation of more than 300,000 sustainable jobs across India; the reclamation of some 5,000 hectares of degraded land with innovative reforestation, watershed management and ground water recharge; the development of a fully operational Global Information System (GIS) facility and innovative products for regional planning; and the installation of several decentralized power stations based on renewable biomass.

The flagship is Development Alternatives itself, which is a think tank. It's a design organization concerned with the three fundamental issues of sustainability. The first is the relationship between people and machines. Their technology development division designs new technologies for very poor people so they can manufacture and market the basic livelihood products they need-housing, or water, or sanitation, or energy.

The second division is environmental. They work on a variety of issues, like industrial environmental problems, pollution and develop resource management systems so that people can live with nature, getting the maximum benefits without destroying it.

They also have an institutions and policy division, which works primarily on the people-people issues: how you design institutional frameworks that work better, institutions of governance, and decision-making, economic policies and so on.

There targets are basically small enterprises and villages; sometimes households, housewives who want a more efficient woodstove. That includes looms for weavers, water-testing equipment and water filters, which can be bought by communities or households. Also a large variety of low-cost housing materials, and machines to manufacture these materials.

They sell the machines to small enterprises, then they make and sell materials to the local market. On the environment end, DA works mainly with small, community-based NGOs who need technical support and information on the issues, legal issues and so on.

Their recent enterprise, TARA-Haat, is a massive Internet portal. It's very graphic and user-friendly, and it's in the local languages. It supplies villagers with all the information they need-on crops, they can do their e-commerce, they can complain to government when they don't have water or whatever, they can get healthcare, medical attention, they can get railway bookings, whatever they want.

In villages, there's a great desire to improve their knowledge but there are not enough schools or facilities, so cyber kiosks can teach them all kinds of things, like language, or computer skills, livelihood skills-anything. Ashok Khosla is a long-time advocate for environmentalism, sustainability, and poverty reduction in India.

He was the recipient of the UN Environment Programme's Sasakawa Environment Prize in 2002 for creating sustainable livelihoods to empower people who subsist below the poverty line.

He believes strongly in working in cooperation with government institutions to achieve sustainable development and practices, and in 1972 became the founding director of India's Office of Environmental Planning and Coordination, the first national environmental agency in a developing country.

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