Sustainability and Social Equity in the Rural Agriculture and Handicrafts Sectors in India through Design Research and Action in India

YOUR VIEWS

The concept of sustainability is usually understood in the West as a call for environmental balance and ecological considerations in the creation and management of systems and services for human consumption. However, economists have recorded a rapid shift in nations endowed with substantial wealth and those with increasing deficits and the gap is growing alarmingly. The same situation appears in the disparities that are surfacing in the urban-rural divide. The process of globalization and development seems to be leaving the disadvantaged groups in an ever greater bind than ever before. A large number of farmer suicides in several parts of the country as well as the desperate migration of demoralized rural folks to the rapidly expanding urban slums are another visible indicator of this inexorable shift in India. This is an exodus that had already started many years ago but of late the desperation seems to have peaked with an increased evidence of violence in many parts of the country that needs to be looked at in all seriousness. This is not just to be seen as a local law and order problem that can be suppressed as easily as in the past by the use of a counterforce in the form of State sponsored violence --- a phenomenon seen in the recent incidents at Nandigram and Singhur where such violence was the outcome of the land acquisition exercise by the State Government to promote new SEZ initiatives in partne...