Ashish Kothari: “We have to dream, with our feet rooted to the ground”

Ashish Kothari has spent half a century advocating for environmental causes and people’s movements, such as the Narmada Bachao Andolan and the Beej Bachao Andolan. In 1979, while still in school, he cofounded Kalpavriksh, a nonprofit that initially sought to resist the destruction of Delhi’s Ridge Forest and now supports community-led conservation efforts throughout the country. He has served on several government committees, helping to prepare the National Wildlife Action Plan and the Biological Diversity Act, and has also written and edited dozens of books, including Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India and Alternative Futures: India Unshackled.

In his work, Kothari has often had to confront, and examine, the paradigm of development followed by contemporary nation states, which, he argues, sees the destruction of the environment and community relations as collateral damage for the creation of material wealth that is often concentrated in very few hands. In an email interview, he told Hiral Trivedi, an intern at The Caravan, about the limitations of this model and the need to develop radical alternatives that can bring about transformation without compromising on values such as solidarity, diversity, freedom and autonomy.

At the time of Independence, India was one of the poorest countries in the world. Nearly eight decades later, it has gained a great deal of prosperity. Could you reflect on this growth and development? Is it reflected in people’s lives?

It is important to interrogate the words “poor” and “development.” The definitions of these words have been handed down to us by the Western industrialised world. These are based on a certain kind of neoliberal economics that views life in narrowly financial terms. Other aspects of well-being, such as community relations or mutual aid, what we get freely from nature, cultural attributes, diversity and so on are not included. In such a scenario, poverty reduction or eradication, or development, is focussed heavily on material growth, measured by indicators such as GDP. A community or country that is poor in material wealth can be rich in other aspects that make for human prosperity—a word that denotes overall well-being but has been distorted to mean only financial wealth—but this is not factored into development planning. Indeed, the word “development” originally indicated unfolding, or opening up, and should have included opportunities to flourish as human beings.