Some randomly chosen pieces from my work

1. “In India, as in many other countries, the key strategy to achieving sustainable development must be through the creation of jobs that produce, at a minimum, the goods and services required to fulfil everyone’s basic needs. By providing people with some degree of financial security through creating small, local, eco-efficient businesses- sustainable enterprises; we can empower them within their communities and make development a far more inclusive process.”

DANL October 2006 - TARAhaat and ICT

2. “Most governments drive into the future with only the rear view mirror to guide them. Despite growing scientific evidence that our present patterns of consumption and production are leading to massive disruption of the planet’s life support systems - particularly its climate and living resources – the momentum of our economies seems only to grow.  International treaties have been negotiated to slow this headlong race to self-destruction, but the foot on the accelerator pedal continues to press harder than the one on the brake; the biggest polluters are still the biggest defaulters”. UNEP's Our Planet, November2005- More is Less: Raising Energy Services to Reduce Carbon Emissions

3. “The world has for so long been run by those who have usurped the power to run it, and in the manner that is to their best advantage, we frequently forget that they have no more right to do so than anyone else”. 

DANL- April 2006 -The Truth of the Matter

4. “Development that takes families, communities and nations to higher levels of peace and prosperity is a dream we would like to make a reality. The sad truth is that after years of unbridled industrialization, this is a dream that still remains unfulfilled for nearly half of the world’s population”. DANL – February 2007-  Technologies with a purpose ....

5. “Bringing about substantial social and economic change in India ’s most deprived communities is not a short haul endeavour. Ingrained systems of oppression that have been working for hundreds, thousands, of years cannot be wiped away in a few moments. CSOs, and the donor agencies that support them, have to work with singleness of purpose and commitment in India’s most backward districts until the transformation needed takes place – hopefully not centuries, but certainly decades”.

DANL May 2007 - Enabling the poor to do what they want to do

  6. “By mindlessly mining our resources and by cavalierly dumping our wastes and pollutants into the environment around us, we not only harm the lives of the poor and the productivity of our natural heritage and patrimony, we also undermine the ability of future generations to sustain themselves in the manner they should be entitled to”. DANL August 2007 - New Institutions for a New Era

7. “We now need to adopt radically new ways to deal with our future, new technologies, new systems of managing our resources, new institutions of governance. If we are to get these approaches right and be able to cope with the changes taking place, then those affected the most – the women, the farmers, the marginalised – must be integrally involved in designing them”. DANL – March 2008 - Women in a Changing Climate.