To Choose Our Future

Describes alternative development strategies that can enable India to pass on to its children a more prosperous, vibrant and sustainable India than today. It draws on lessons from 30 years of work on sustainable national development. The book presents some basic scenarios to enable decision makers to make better informed choices among possible pathways that will lead to sustainable outcomes.



Since its birth in 1947, India has made enormous progress. More people than ever before in our history have longer, healthier and more fulfilling lives. Rapid gains in agriculture, industry, energy production and infrastructure have brought the benefits of modern science to a large segment of the population. And our economy now makes available to our growing middle class comforts and possibilities that they could never have dreamt of at the time of our tryst with destiny.

Yet, we also have more people who are poor, hungry and deprived than ever before. And the environmental resources – the soils, the rivers, the aquifers, the forests - on which they depend are rapidly degenerating, leaving more and more people subsisting on less and less. There is growing evidence that the environmental and resource costs being paid by the nation are eating more and more heavily into the benefits that we are getting from the present patterns of development.

To Choose Our Future describes alternative development strategies that can enable us to pass on to our children – all our nation’s children - a more prosperous, vibrant and sustainable India than today. In looking at the various options we have for how our nation will be when it is 100 years old. It draws upon lessons from 30 years of work on sustainable national development, led by Development Alternatives under the Chairmanship of Dr. Ashok Khosla. The book presents some basic scenarios of the future to enable the people and decision makers of our country consciously to make better informed choices among possible pathways that will lead to sustainable outcomes in the least possible time – for the greatest common benefit, and at least overall cost.

The book identifies the single most important priority for India today: creating sustainable livelihoods on a large scale.