Development, Environment and Human Rights: Towards Sustainability and Equity (Public Lecture as a part of Changing India Series delivered on 30 October 2018)

The growth-led-development witnessed by India has been simultaneously promoting economic prosperity as well as increasing inequality, violating human rights, depriving millions from their basic needs, and causing a global ecological crisis that threatens to undermine our progress. Are there alternative frameworks to this growth-led development to achieve a truly sustainable and equitable future? Do elements of such frameworks already exist in concept and in practice, and if so, what principles can be derived from them? This talk will focus on one such alternative framework, Radical Ecological Democracy, or eco-swaraj which arises from the myriad grassroots initiatives at meeting basic needs through practical and rights-based approaches, and achieving alternative modes of governance, production, distribution, and consumption. This framework focuses on meeting human needs and aspirations of well-being through direct or radical democracy, localized economies embedded in ecological and cultural landscapes and free of centralized monetary monopolies, notions of human well-being that relate to actual needs of people and to qualitative values like satisfaction and social security, democratic knowledge and technology generation, and sustaining cultural diversity and exchange. It proposes a mix of localization and globalization, the former providing communities essential control over means of production and consumption, and the latter affording possibilities of intercultural exchange and mutual learning. It stresses that the locus of all such activity be neither in the state nor in corporations, but in local communities, self-defined in various ways, in rural and urban settings