1987 was the year of whole new
beginning where a new era of Sustainable Development was conceived. Yes it was
the Brundtland commission’s report titled “ our common future” which was the
first of its kind to bring into
existence the concept of sustainable development. NO one then knew what precisely the
SUSTAINABLE development contained..surprisingly no one does that even today. We
have international summits, where the much hyped and self proclaimed think
tanks of environment and sustainable development gather just to ponder upon
issues which are draped in new avatars,
but loaded with same old attitudes in mind, with no aggression to change.
A classic example of this is the
world biggest ever blackout that happened last week in our country. Today when
science & technology have touched the sky and reached the space, did anyone ever imagined , one day human
driven crisis can be so overpowering that it would leave half of the nation
BLACK and DARK..!!! To add to this national shame, the very next day our power
minister was promoted as union minister. A true “Powerfool”. On one side we have human driven climate change,
where like fools we have been trying to pretend the governance on nature. Today
we are trying to prove our victory on humankind as a whole. Behind the
pepperazzi of the word “Sustainable development”, incidences like these leave
us with a question in mind, what does development mean to us? May be we are
just moving ahead with a blindfold , with absolute lack of vision required to
actually “DEVELOP “.
Then what is development? Is it
the increased rate of resource crunch that cities are facing and our governing bodies turning a
blind eye to it?? Or is it the increasing vulnerabilities to global issue like
climate change where plethora of research and issues are in hand but with a
bleak solution to tackle it. Or is it exponentially increasing urban population
with no power, no water and no appropriate infrastructure to sustain. Are we
really SUSTAIN – able? Can we really?
Groping into answers for these would
require a transformation. The fact that our development is lopsided, we need to
think from a point of view, where humans are at the centre of decision making
and not just development. Well i wish it was as simple as the picture below... !!!