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Themes


Rural India, with more than 1 billion people, is in the vortex of a transformational crisis in the social, economic, technological and political arenas of development.

The transformation that it is undergoing broadly consists of:

  1. Change of an agrarian economy into a modern multidimensional economy.
  2. Change of a traditional stratified society into an egalitarian society.
  3. Change into a modern democracy through the Panchayati Raj and other people's institutions.
  4. Change into a knowledge society by linking knowledge with development and enabling its adaptation and spread, as well as building knowledge networks.
  5. Migration of population caused by urban pull and rural push factors.
It is necessary to manage all these changes within limits, to achieve development measured along three dimensions - the triple bottom line - i.e. economic, ecological and social. This is necessary to ensure that material progress does not take a heavy toll of our 'natural capital' and land our developing country into higher' abject poverty'. This is also to ensure that economic progress is accompanied by minimal adverse impact on ecology, by deploying technologies that use the planet's finite resources efficiently. Rural India is so vast and varied in terms of Natural & Human Resources
that there cannot be any uniform set of policy prescriptions for it as a whole on the basis of Macro level analysis only, even though the objectives of development may be the same. That is why the conference lays emphasis on"Grassroots level concerns". The goals of rural development must also be consistent with the expanded vision of development in the form of 'The Millennium Development Goals', defined by the United Nations summit in September 2000. These consist of the following eight goals.

Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger .
Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education.
Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women.
Goal 4: Reduce child mortality.
Goal 5: Improve maternal health.
Goal 6: Combat HIV / AIDS, malaria and other diseases.
Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability.
Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development.

The first seven goals are mutually reinforcing and are directed at reducing poverty in all its forms. For their achievement, they require (a) significant policy changes and programmatic interventions by the government on the one hand, and (b) intensive grassroots level involvement and collective effort, on the other. The last goal (8) - Global partnership for development – is about the means to achieve the first seven. Achieving these goals by 2015 will require focus on development outcomes as well as on inputs.