New York, Nov 20: Rejecting the current methods for eradicating poverty, renowned Indian environmentalist Ashok Khosla has mooted a new concept of "sustainable livelihood" aimed at providing jobs and dignity to the poor and producing goods and services for their needs. Sustainable livelihood cannot be created by "narrowly conceived" interventions and "certainly not by the kinds of highly subsidised, give away approaches common in many so called 'poverty alleviation' programmes," Khosla said last night after accepting the 200,000-dollar prestigious Sasakawa environmental award.
"In some instances, economies of scale do imply large-scale production but for most of the things people need, local, decentralised, environmentally-friendly production is far more sustainable," he said.
Sustainable development, in which the environmental protection and empowerment of the people go hand-in-hand, cannot be achieved by economic policies that only nurture big, centralised, transportation-intensive, energy guzzling, resource-wasting production systems, he added.
Criticising the current environmental negotiations on climate change and conservation of biodiversity, he said, almost every nation was acting in narrow self-interest to perpetrate existing disparities regardless of the serious consequences of such acts to the planet.
Referring to the targets set by United Nations millennium summit, Khosla said by setting the goal in terms of halving the proportion of hungry or without drinking water – instead of halving the actual number of people that are poor - they were only endorsing the status quo. Bureau Report