In a country of a billion people, all aspiring towards a first world lifestyle, the impossibility of the situation is striking. Not only are there not enough resources to go around, the very basis of the development module followed by the west is discriminatory, and it would come crashing down way before everybody could reap the benefits.
That is not in any way to say that the standard of living and prosperity of the common man can not be vastly improved. It just requires a sea change in the way the ideals of development are envisaged and the benchmarks for progress are set.
Rather than aspire to burn fossil fuels at the rate an american does or deplete ocean resources like the Japanese, one should treasure our sustainable lifestyle and strive to enhance it from within.
The average Indian uses far less natural resources than any first world citizen. Be it fossil fuels, water, productive land or ocean. Instead of trying to indescriminately increase the amount of resources consumed one should be trying to maximise the standard of living through a participatory and bottom up technical revolution.
We send our children to schools and colleges in order that they may get educated and have a better life than us their agrarian or woking class parents. When will we realise that we are creating an army of diguised slackers who sit in government jobs and produce precious little. Even say the child does do well and fein a direction in life and make a good living, he is still working up a path made by colonial powers, a path of discrimination and inequality. A path which is simply not designed to be inclusive or for that matter relevant to the context of our country.
The child thus grows up to be a disllusioned youth, unemployed or finding himself reduced to 'menial labour' after the promise of a white collar job and an assured income. Should we not stop weaning our youth away from a plethora of indigenous knowledge and life systems in order that he may ape the west and turn out a lost baseless adult without a clue as to where he fits in?
