Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

4 SUMI KRISHNA
and aspirations for the future. Development is not about catching up with
other people. But it is about an enlarged range and quality of choices, of
lifestyles, of occupations. It encompasses better nutrition, health, education
and freedom from oppression and poverty. The process of development
involves structural transformations in the organisation of society
and the economy. Such a process cannot take place without altering
relationships of dominance and subordination, or affecting the interests
of different groups within society. Therefore, questions regarding the
character, direction and pace of development are fundamentally political
questions. (Krishna 1996a: 8)
Prior to independence and more so in the 1960s, there was considerable
public debate on alternative developmental paths that would be in the
best interests of all Indian people. The social and environmental dimensions
of development were also recognised in Indian planning: the need
to maintain the health of the soil, to safeguard people’s livelihoods and to
establish institutional mechanisms for a more participatory, decentralised
development. Despite this awareness, the environmental and natural resources
(upon which people depended for their livelihoods) were being
increasingly undermined. Severe droughts and a food crisis in the 1960s,
rising unemployment in the 1970s and the persistence of oppression
and poverty led to questioning conventional ‘trickle-down’ theories of
development and to a shift in emphasis to meeting the ‘basic needs’
of people.
The political questions of development became more sharply etched
with the emergence of popular environmental struggles in the 1970s,
which focused attention on how different groups of people use and abuse
natural resources. In the 1980s, the concept of ecologically and environmentally
sustainable development emerged, apparently bridging over
conflicts between the environment and development. The publication of
Our Common Future, the Report of the World Commission on Environment
and Development (WCED 1990), gave an impetus to sustainable
development, defined as ‘meeting the needs of the present without compromising
the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Even
as this became a buzzword in the development debate, it was also widely
critiqued (see Krishna 1996a: 252–53).
The more recent concept of sustainable livelihoods is being projected
as an advance over sustainable development. For many NGOs and