Making India Work - Excerpt from Introduction

No one understood the real challenges of India better than Gandhi. And no one offered better solutions to those problems than Gandhi. The 'official' legacy of Gandhi as the leader of the freedom struggle tends to downplay his ideas about governance and sustainable development. Of course, he played a vital role in India's struggle for Independence. But I believe his greatness is in anticipating the problems that India (and the world) would face in the twenty-first century and in the solutions he proposed . There is no monopoly on interpreting Gandhi. He himself famously refused to lend finality to his thoughts. The Gandhi have understood, however, offers three guiding principles of organizing society, politics and economics.

The first is sustainable living. Need, and not greed, has to be the basis of all consumption. He was against mindless procurement of goods and services that served little actual purpose. His life personified this Spartan sensibility.

The second principle is of appropriately scaled institutions. Gandhi's plan for economic development and political empowering was rooted in a profound skepticism of the centralized state., an institution too distant from the lives of most Indians. He conducted his most successful politics in protest of the colonial rule, the core purpose of Gandhian mass politics was to make people powerful through direct actions. It has been fashionable to talk of Gandhian 'village republics' and the Panchayati Raj institutions. When we follow Gandhi closely, we find in his writings and speeches a constant effort to make people realize the importance of decentralized, local, scaled institutions that are accessible to people. This creates a democracy driven by real and constant participation of people and is hence more responsive to their needs.

The third principle was a caution: do not mindlessly ape the West. In December 1928, Gandhi wrote in Young India: 'God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. In the twenty-first century, the world's environment is increasingly stressed by teh addition of millions of new consumers aspiring to ape Western levels of consumption. Many see Gandhi as a dated, parochial leader who espoused a kind of medieval idea of economic organization. Though some of his specific solutions were rooted in the technology and prevailing economic situation of his times, I have tried to look at these solutions using the benefits of present day technology and modern management practices.