![Picture](/uploads/2/4/8/6/24865078/5686670.jpg)
While I was in India recently on a volunteer trip, the rapid pace of development was hard to miss: Highways under construction cut huge gashes in the earth. Countless trucks hauled loads of bricks and concrete. Long convoys of combines filled the roads. Giant power plants dotted the landscape, sending long plumes of smoke into the sky. Construction was happening everywhere—scaffolding made of bamboo poles wrapped half-built structures, new districts grew on the edges of cities, gobbling up fields and farms....
All this framed the words “developing world” more meaningfully—not as “poor” or “behind” as sometimes tossed around, but instead as building, evolving,progressing…. In India today, development happens relentlessly, under your very eyes. A European colleague who travels frequently in India put it this way: In the Netherlands, the route from the airport to his town hasn’t changed much in decades. In India, the road from the airport to teeming cities like Kolkata and Delhi, is almost unrecognizably different from one visit to the next.
In small rural villages in West Bengal, far from highways and surrounded by rice paddies to the horizon, I could feel the wheels of history turning. In villages that had changed little over generations—cows still living in the same buildings as people, women hunched in small kitchens cooking over charcoal
pits, people hauling water in worn brass buckets—I was hard on the heels of progress. In some places, electricity had arrived just one week ago. In others, solar systems that had given light and power to some, some of the time, were being unceremoniously pulled out—replaced by wires carrying coal-fired electricity from far-off plants. As an outsider from the developed world, seeing the world through a green-colored lens of sustainability, tearing out sustainable solar systems seemed crazy, a giant step backward. I asked a local: Why the change? “People want power all the time, not just sometimes.” He paused, “It’s progress.”
Originally published 11/5/11
All this framed the words “developing world” more meaningfully—not as “poor” or “behind” as sometimes tossed around, but instead as building, evolving,progressing…. In India today, development happens relentlessly, under your very eyes. A European colleague who travels frequently in India put it this way: In the Netherlands, the route from the airport to his town hasn’t changed much in decades. In India, the road from the airport to teeming cities like Kolkata and Delhi, is almost unrecognizably different from one visit to the next.
In small rural villages in West Bengal, far from highways and surrounded by rice paddies to the horizon, I could feel the wheels of history turning. In villages that had changed little over generations—cows still living in the same buildings as people, women hunched in small kitchens cooking over charcoal
pits, people hauling water in worn brass buckets—I was hard on the heels of progress. In some places, electricity had arrived just one week ago. In others, solar systems that had given light and power to some, some of the time, were being unceremoniously pulled out—replaced by wires carrying coal-fired electricity from far-off plants. As an outsider from the developed world, seeing the world through a green-colored lens of sustainability, tearing out sustainable solar systems seemed crazy, a giant step backward. I asked a local: Why the change? “People want power all the time, not just sometimes.” He paused, “It’s progress.”
Originally published 11/5/11