COVER STORY • Future Design – Thinking About Our Legacy to the Next Generation • 9FInterview with Dr. Ashok Khosla, Chairman of the Development Alternatives Grouputure Design Is a Good Idea,
If It Also Addresses Extreme
Poverty

By Japan SPOTLIGHT
Dr. Ashok Khosla is chairman of the Development Alternatives Group, an international environmental
NGO based in New Delhi. As former president of the Club of Rome, a global environmental NGO with longterm perspectives on policy issues, he is the ideal person to talk with about our main subject in this issue
of Japan SPOTLIGHT, Future Design. His thoughts and ideas on poverty and the environment, over boththe long term and short term, are revealed in our interview with him.
(Interviewed on Nov. 21, 2018)

Introduction

was the inter-relationship between theenvironment, development and eradicating
JS: Could you briefly explain about
poverty.
your involvement in international
What does the word “environment” mean
activities in sustainability?
for poor people? For the rich, it mainlycomprised at that time pollution – mercury
Khosla: I began my career as a scientist andpollution such as the Minamata case in
did my Ph.D. in experimental physics.
Japan, air pollution from sulphur dioxide in
However, even from my earliest school days, I
North America or Europe, and coastal
was always worried about the social issues ofcontamination in the United Kingdom. Maybe
our world, particularly about the problems ofa little about wildlife – DDT getting into thepoverty and environmental degradation.
organs of penguins in Antarctica, and a few
When I was studying at graduate school atthings like that. But these were concerns that
Harvard University, I had the opportunity tohardly went beyond a few rich people andwork with Roger Revelle, one of the great
nature lovers. So we set up this agency wherescientists of the 20th century, whose research
we quickly realized that in a poor country one
Dr. Ashok Khosla
was instrumental in identifying the threat of
couldn’t go on saying “no” to development.
climate change. At the time we worked together, in the mid-1960s,
What was needed was to find better ways to do development, and in
he was professor of population studies and clearly understood thatsome ways the concept of sustainable development emerged from
population, resources and the environment are inextricably linked.
that experience. At the same time, because I was among the few
We designed and taught the very first university course in the worldfrom the Third World who had the background knowledge toon the environment. It was an eye-opener. The issues were huge,negotiate on these issues, I became deeply involved in new global
complex and highly inter-related, and yet had been subjected to very
discussions from the time of the Stockholm Conference in 1972 –little study, debate or analysis; and there was very little literature on
which took place soon after I set up the agency in India. In thethe subject. So I helped Professor Revelle design and teach thismonths and years that followed, the topic of environment exploded
course for five or six years and learned a great deal about issues thaton the international stage. I found myself in international meetings
were only just emerging in the public consciousness or policy
every few weeks and got to learn a lot from other parts of the world
dialogue. Then, after getting my doctorate, I came back to India, andand also provide inputs and insights from a poor country. At thatsoon after, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi asked me to set up atime, in 1975-6, the United Nations was setting up the UN
government agency for the environment, which was the first such
Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nairobi, and they asked me toagency in the Third World. In fact, it was the seventh in the whole
become the director of Infoterra, the first international informationworld. Its job was to introduce a more holistic way of thinking insystem on the environment. I did that for five years. It was apolicy making and in analyzing how the concept of environment waswonderful job and I got to meet political leaders andrelevant to the issues of Third World countries and, particularly, whatenvironmentalists and scientists in more than 100 countries, and it
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was a great experience.
My parents had given me a very expensive education, but I was
not doing what I had set out to do, which was to take care of thepoverty and environment issues in my own country. So I packed up
my bags and came back to India and set up this organization,
Development Alternatives (DA), 36 years ago, and started to work on
issues that I believe are important for a poor country. I think we’ve
made a number of breakthroughs. The term “sustainable
development” in part came out of that experience in the early days in
India. I was fortunate enough to be on the Governing Council of theInternational Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). In March
1980, the IUCN published jointly with UNEP and the World Wide
Fund for Nature a book called The World Conservation Strategy, andthat was the first time that the term “sustainable development” wasused in print. Later, I served as a special advisor in the Brundtland
Commission (the World Commission on Environment andDevelopment), which produced a report in 1987 which was called“Our Common Future” and endorsed the concept of sustainable
development as a central objective for the international community.
After that everyone in the UN started talking about sustainable
development.
So, it was a small group of us that produced the World
Conservation Strategy and it was a major breakthrough in thinking as
it said that the environment is very important but so is a decent life.
We have to have development to keep improving the lives of people.
But it must be designed to reach everybody, now and into the future;
we must not destroy our resource base while pursuing the goals ofdevelopment. That is how we got into this whole business. The workthat we did was more and more recognized. In 1992, UNEP gave me
the Sasakawa Award.
My work took me often to Japan, both for various UN andfoundation meetings, and also to serve on the board of Toyota Motor
Co.’s environment awards. The time I have spent in Japan has been awonderful experience because I think the Japanese understand whatsustainable development is through their concept of “Satoyama”. I
think they lost a little bit of that in the 20th century and became moredazzled by the American idea of economic “progress”, but I findmore and more people in Japan talk of the Edo Era now and the past
as being something that shouldn’t be lost. I think Japan has a very
important role to play in bringing an ethic of conservation andsustainability into the world. Japan is a country that has a deep
commitment to these issues, as does India.

Inclusive Growth & Environment
JS: Inclusive growth is very important, but

environmental sustainability is occasionally
misunderstood as being anti-inclusive growth.

Khosla: When referring to growth, the word “inclusive” is a kind of
32 Japan SPOTLIGHT • March / April 2019

euphemism; it’s a way of avoiding the real issues. The term inclusive
actually means including everybody and leaving no one behind.
However, the word “inclusive” is used increasingly by governments
and corporates without making any commitment to doing what isnecessary to bring about its real goal, i.e. to benefit all. When they
use the term, do they mean they understand that neither extreme
wealth nor extreme poverty is compatible with sustainable
development? The rich tend to over-consume resources, especiallynon-renewable resources – they tend to over-utilize energy
resources, fossil fuels, minerals, construction materials. All thesethings are needed in large quantities by the rich, and probably inmuch greater quantities than it is possible to regenerate by nature.
But the poor – who are really not to blame – also have to survive andthey have to get food for nourishment, fuel for cooking, and water
for drinking; so they also can be a negative factor on local
environments and end up by over-stressing what were once
renewable resources.
“Affluenza” is a disease where the rich are basically mining theearth to have a good time – by mining much more than they areentitled to. The poor, who suffer from another terminal disease,“Povertitis”, are mining the biomass and the local resources beyond
regeneration and so they suffer basically in their local surroundings
usually – but when multiplied by millions around the world it
becomes global. Deforestation is caused largely by demand fortimber by the rich, but the little final coup de grâce that happens isthat the local people need fuel, so after the forests have been
depleted the little that is left behind is picked up by the locals, andthus the forest becomes extinct. When that happens, people become
extinct.
So the word “inclusive” for me is not meaningful because it says
everybody should get a little bit, but in terms of our present day
policies actually the bulk of the “bread” is eaten by a few (1%) andeverybody else gets the crumbs. This is not inclusive. Inclusivemeans that everybody is part of the development process, and thepoorest have adequate resources to live a decent and meaningful life,
a life they can consider as fulfilled. The rich must also learn to live
within limits, which we might term as sufficiency. At the moment,
most of our discussion is on efficiency. How do you get more forless? But we have to learn to get less for less. If you are using up 30
or 40 or 50 tons per capita annually of materials – as many richcountries are – when Mother Earth can only produce five or six tons
per capita, you are taking more than your share. So “inclusive”
sidesteps, in my opinion, the issue that we are not only going to haveto raise the floor, but you are going to have to lower the ceiling. This
doesn’t mean that everybody is equal, but it means that combined, in
the aggregate, the average is below what is a threat to theenvironment and the lowest are not so low that they live very meager
lives. So that is what the word “inclusive” means to me – that all ofus have to recognize that we are responsible, and the affluent aregoing to have to lower their resource consumption, and the very

COVER STORY 9

poor are entitled to raise theirs for a decent, healthy life.

DA’s Activities
JS: How do you see the future activities of DA?
Khosla: We were set up 36 years ago. Since then, the world haschanged enormously. It has changed as much as it probably did in
the previous 360 years. When DA was started, we didn’t have an
understanding of all these issues; we didn’t have many of themachines or technology, or cell phones or the Internet orcommunication systems and new means of transportation. A huge
number of things have changed and one cannot carry on doing thesame things or keep on addressing the same issues for ever. So, DA
has always had a strategic planning system in which we review ourrelevance to what is going on in the world. To produce usefulimpacts, we have to continue to be relevant. What was relevant 36
years ago is not necessarily very relevant today. Some of it is, suchas water and housing – according to the government of India, there
are twice as many people without a decent home as there were when
we were set up. Things are getting worse. Maybe not the percentage– the percentage may be going down – but the absolute numbers ofpeople who are deprived of basic needs may, because of population
growth, be larger than when we started.
The problems of those days still exist for a large number ofpeople. There are not many institutions that work on these in asystemic, large-scale way. Governments are too far removed.
Corporates are too busy making money. NGOs address many ofthese problems but they don’t have the scale that the problem
requires. So, if you are looking at the numbers – for example, several
hundred million people in India are below the poverty line, many ofthem suffering from chronic hunger and permanent malnutrition.
Some 300 million people in India, mostly women, cannot read or
write. Here is another example of where we can learn from Japan; inJapan in 1868 the Meiji Restoration basically recognized that it was
too expensive for the nation to have anybody who was illiterate, sothey decreed universal literacy. No Japanese was allowed to be
illiterate. Why? Because it was good for the individual and it wasgood for the nation. We didn’t do that; India’s policies, even after 70
years of independence, left hundreds of millions illiterate and thus
outside the mainstream. We at DA think that this is unacceptable, so
we devised a program, called “TARA Akshar”, to teach people how toread and write and do arithmetic. It works incredibly well. In twomonths, for a cost of about $120 (about 13,000 yen) we can teach awoman how to read, write and do arithmetic from scratch. We use IT,
laptops and highly sophisticated educational methods, and it works.
We have now been able to bring literacy to almost a quarter of amillion women, using money from foundations, from corporates,from bilateral agencies and other donors.

SDGs & Indo-Pacific Region
JS: You mentioned education and environment andinclusive development – these seem to be included in
the UN SDGs. How do you assess the importance of
these goals and what are the critical challenges in the
Indo-Pacific region?

Khosla: In a sense, the SDGs emerged from the earlier Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs), which were adopted in 2000 and had atime horizon of 2015. Like the MDGs, the SDGs were initiated by aglobal summit at which the heads of government of all UN members
made commitments to fulfill them by 2030. They aimed, like the
MDGs, at eradicating poverty, removing hunger, and delivering basic
needs such as water, education and shelter. And they went beyond
the MDGs in committing to major improvements in the social,environmental and economic health of all societies. We worked
around the world on huge consultations, the biggest worldwide
consultation ever, involving governments, foundations, media,
academics, NGOs – as a result of which we got 17 goals. So thesegoals were hammered out through this incredible process by people
going all over the world, but they had to be agreed to by everyone. It
was almost unanimous: only a couple of countries did not sign.
Obviously, if these goals were to be adopted unanimously, some,including a few important ones, had to be watered down. It’s notwhat I would call the lowest common denominator, but some actions
that are very important for sustainability could not be fully
represented.
While every country has adopted the 17 SDGs, it is understoodthat each country and each region like the Asia-Pacific region and theIndian Ocean region are going to have to set their own priorities
among them. There should be many more goals for this region,
which are not in there. It is not possible for this entire region toachieve the standard of living of Japan and South Korea andSingapore and Hong Kong without our entire natural resource baseand ecosystems collapsing. In the case of Japan, over the last 20
years the economy has become transformed. People are notunhappy in Japan, but even though they are not adding more andmore yen to the GDP, they are doing better things with their GDP.
Their growth rate is not going up and up but it demonstrates that it ispossible for countries to have better lifestyles and better possible
ways of living, without going on increasing resource use andincreasing the damage to the environment. There is no extreme
poverty in Japan; it is largely an inclusive economy. We now need tohave that understanding throughout the region.
I don’t think that we have given much thought to the issue of
extreme economic and social disparity in this region. A few countries
have largely solved the problem. I think Japan, Taiwan and South
Korea have, and China is on the way. But most countries have a long
way to go before that happens. We think that the SDGs are a
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wonderful way of focusing the mind of policymakers. But then there
is too much focus on them, so when there is a project that doesn’t fit
into the SDGs, even if it is locally very relevant and important, it
won’t be accepted or funded. The issue then is, we need to be clearthat real people have real problems and some of them may or may
not fit into any of the SDGs. I like the SDGs, they represent a verylarge part, maybe 80%, of what needs to be done, but I think someof the SDGs should be open-ended to allow countries andcommunities to address other problems. The SDGs are all interrelated, and countries should find out which are the mostsynergistic. If you put some money into one SDG you also solve
others, so there is a need to understand the links, the nexus –prioritizing them in a way that gives you maximum impact forminimum costs.

Long-Termism & Future Design
JS: Today’s world is too much based on short-termism. How do you think we can change this trend
from excessive short-termism to a more practicallong-termism?

Khosla: The short-termism comes ultimately from two sections ofsociety. One is businesses like corporations – who have to meet the
expectations of the financial institutions that provide them withcapital and who insist on seeing returns on their investment improve
every quarter. The other is politicians – because they have to getelected, so their entire time horizon is usually the few years till thenext election. These time horizons have nothing to do with the timecycles that processes of nature or of society follow. Unless the world
evolves governance on the one hand and financial mechanisms on
the other that value the longer-term as beneficial to careers andearnings, nothing much is going to happen.
We now have to design financial systems and political structuresthat provide incentives which are based at least in part on long-term
performance. At the moment, nobody does that – they literally havequarterly or annual time horizons, after which they get their bonuses
or political gains – and no accountability for the long-term
consequences of their decisions. It is obvious that these systems
and institutions are not going to change easily because those whoare in a position to make that change are benefitting hugely fromletting them continue. They are happy with the way things are, bothwith the money they get and the power they have, and they are notabout to give these up voluntarily. Only the people at large, the public
acting as voter and consumer, can force a change. Now younger
people are beginning to see the disasters the present system iscausing for their future: climate change, biodiversity loss and species
extinction, fish stocks plummeting, oceans acidifying, and they are
getting deeply concerned. I think we have to train young people tosee that it is in their interest to extend the short-termism into longer34 Japan SPOTLIGHT • March / April 2019

termism. It won’t happen overnight, but the transformation needed isrelated to a fundamental change of mindset.
The business and financial professionals are trained in businessschools and get MBAs. The first thing to do is to radically change theMBA course to teach participants about ethics and sustainability. My
personal feeling is that just by eliminating business schools many ofthe problems could be solved, but let’s face it, they are not going togo away. The next best thing is to press them to change theircourses in recognition of the imperatives of human survival: it is as
important to do the right thing as it is to make a lot of profit.
Students will have to demand to learn about how to care for theworld in the long term while building “successful” careers inbusiness. People are increasingly showing opposition to shorttermism through voting. The two big aspects are the mindset of thebusiness and financial institutions and of government leaders. If wewant to change that, we need a combination of very wise people, like
Mahatma Gandhi, and a global movement. This global movement will
come from a massive media and educational campaign and a largescale voter transformation campaign.
JS: The Future Earth research program created theconcept of future design. Under that concept, themost serious concern is about future generations
and the damage done by short-termism. Agingsocieties are increasing, and environmental concerns
are increasing, and in Japan we have serious
concerns about the fiscal budget deficit, which isenormous. In light of this, some Japanese
academics, mostly economists, made an experimentof Future Design last year by nominating somegovernment officials or members of townshipgovernments as a sort of virtual future generation.
Their mission is to think about the interests of future
generations. It seems to be working well, and they
are now starting to think about this mechanism ofintegrating the interests of future generations into
politics. Would you concur that this could be a goodsolution to overcome short-termism?

Khosla: I am among the founding members of the World FutureCouncil, whose aim is to act as the voice of the voiceless – abouthighlighting the rights and concerns of those who have been left
behind by today’s development approaches and of those who are notyet born, the future generations. There is a horizontal and verticaldimensions to all of this – the vertical is your future, and thehorizontal represents the people living today. On the vertical axis, wehave more and more future problems: the aging population, fallingbirth rate in rich countries and the high birth rate in poor ones, thedependency ratio is getting higher, fewer people being in the
productive age group. There are some solutions such as robotics

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and AI. A lot of things can be done through machines that were done
before by people. But not all, or even most. We will have to evolve
combinations of mechanistic solutions with social, political andstructural ones to get the sustainable futures our next generations
are entitled to. The problems of Japan or South Korea, or of
Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, are about aging populations. In
Japan, you have every right to be worried about these issues, butpeople from Bangladesh, for example, would say that they still
haven’t taken care of the present, never mind the future. We have toaddress both problems simultaneously.
On the horizontal axis is the question of how inclusive is global
society today – both within and between nations. I feel a little
ambivalent about India. For Japan, Sweden, Hungary, it is clear. Evenfor Spain it is clear. There will be real problems with stagnant or
declining populations. We have to take care of the present though;otherwise there will be no future. We have to let forests and soil
regenerate, which takes thousands of years. They are being
destroyed primarily because of the greed of the affluent for more andmore resources, but also because of poverty and overpopulation. We
have to try and find a mix that solves both problems. Some of it istechnological, but most of it is inclusiveness, equity and lowering the
disparity between people today, and then you have a future. Parts ofEurope have addressed this by importing people. Migration ismaking up for their lack of young people. If you don’t want to have alarge number of young people from overseas coming in, you have tosolve the problem in a different way. But if you do not change yourlifestyles in the North, sea level rises and extreme events such as
hurricanes are going to send a lot of migration to the North. That is
why the African continent is heading for Europe and South America
is heading for the US, because people are living in extremely difficult
conditions, primarily caused by the inequities in the global economic
system. If you want to maintain the integrity of your society which
has been there for thousands of years, then you have to make otherpeople’s lives better at the same time as you improve yours.
Unfortunately, to most people in the richer economies, this iscounter-intuitive. People don’t think like that. So you need to see thewhole Asia-Pacific region as a place that needs equity, not just within
the countries but between them.
JS: Would a Ministry for the Future or a House ofCouncilors for the Future be a good idea?

Khosla: Absolutely. The problem in India and other countries is thatwhen you make a ministry for achieving a political goal, it usually
becomes a bureaucracy and then it loses its creative force, the will
and the passion that is needed to bring about change. The Ministryof Happiness, the Ministry of the Future, the Ministry of the
Voiceless are all good ideas, but you need to think of them not asnormal ministries but more like Commissions that have access to thebest minds in the country, and that can take very difficult decisions,which politicians cannot do. We have a few such ministries in India,
including the Ministry of Wellbeing and the Future in the Himalayan
State of Sikkim. Next door, in Bhutan, the predominant policy driveris to increase gross national happiness rather than GDP. My answer
to your question is, a ministry is not exactly the word I would use –an entity with very high credibility should be like a commission inwhich some of the top leaders can be included, which has to deliver
results in the form of studies, reports, and inquiries. You also needan ombudsman, a body that people can go to when things are notworking well. The World Future Council has been looking at thesethings a lot and gives awards for good policies for the future.
JS: Finally, how do we convince politicians sufferingfrom short-termism of the utility of these ideas? The
benefits for future generations should be consideredas human assets.

Khosla: If you tell all this to a prime minister or a minister, it is notgoing to change their minds. It is not possible by simply talking or
writing to bring about fundamental paradigm shifts. I think you needan institutional framework, and my suggestion is that for every
ministry there needs to be a counterpart committee that is officiallypaid for by the government to act as an independent sounding board
and conscience: a sort of voice of the voiceless, presenting a deeply
thought-through analysis of the consequences of the ministry’s likely
decisions – and particularly the unintended consequences. So for
example, if you have a ministry for industry, you also need a small
group of very high-level people who are multidisciplinary – women,men, people from engineering and physics, social sciences,
historians. All the policies of this ministry have to be subjected to
critical evaluation for the future. This committee would be called“The Committee of the Voiceless”. Take another example, China,
which has banned domestic logging. What happened as aconsequence is that logging has intensified in Indonesia and Borneo.
They are being deforested to supply China’s needs for wood, so the
problem has just been exported. A committee needs to sound thewhistle about the kind of problems that their government’s policy willcause. Then the minister has to think about it a bit more, and realizethat sooner or later people cannot carry on doing it forever. I think
you need an institutional framework. Journalists, professors andNGOs going around giving lectures or workshops are not going tobring about the change. You need an institutional framework at thenational, prefectural, and local township level that by law has the jobof blowing the whistle on activities that can backfire in the long term.
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Written with the cooperation of Joel Challender, who is a translator, interpreter,
researcher and writer specializing in Japanese disaster preparedness.

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