Resources and Development
Planning and conserving resources
Explain how India plans and conserves its resources.
Why India must plan. Resources are spread unevenly:
- Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh have plenty of coal and minerals;
- Arunachal Pradesh has plenty of water but few roads and power lines;
- Rajasthan has lots of sun and wind but little water;
- Ladakh, a cold desert, has a rich culture but lacks water, infrastructure and some minerals.
So planning is needed at every level: national, state, regional and local.
The three steps of resource planning.
- Find and list the resources: survey, map, and measure how much there is and how good it is.
- Build the set-up to develop them: the right technology, skills and institutions.
- Match these plans with the country's overall development plans.
India has worked at this since the First Five Year Plan, which began soon after Independence.
Having resources is not enough. Some regions are rich in resources but still poor, and some have few resources but are developed. Colonial history shows why: foreign rulers came for the colonies' riches, and their better technology let them take those resources. Resources help a region only when technology, skilled people and good institutions come with them.
Why conserve? Using resources too fast causes social, economic and environmental problems. Gandhiji said: 'There is enough for everybody's need and not for anybody's greed.' He blamed greedy people and exploitative technology, and wanted production by the masses in place of mass production.
A timeline worth learning.
- 1968: the Club of Rome first argued for conservation in a planned way.
- 1974: Schumacher's book Small is Beautiful brought back Gandhian ideas.
- 1987: the Brundtland Commission Report introduced the idea of sustainable development (later published as Our Common Future).
- 1992: the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro.
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