Author archive: Ashish Kothari

What does self-reliance really mean? Amazing stories from India’s villages

We Will Survive the Coronavirus. Will We Survive Ourselves?

From Livelihoods to Deadlihoods

Towards Alternatives: Radical Ecological Democracy (Part 2)

Towards Alternatives: Radical Ecological Democracy (Part 1)

Ashish Kothari, a founding member of the environmental group Kalpavriksh, spoke at our Economics of Happiness conferences in Leh, Ladah, and Bangalore, India. He has authored and edited over thirty books, including Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India, co-authored with Aseem Shrivastava.

Not so long ago, Dalit women farmers in Telangana used to face hunger and deprivation. Today, they have contributed foodgrains for pandemic relief. Farmers on the Tamil Nadu-Karnataka border have been sending organic produce to Bengaluru even during the lockdown. And Adivasi villages in central India are using community funds to take care of migrant workers who have returned home. These inspiring stories show the potential of empowered rural communities to cope with crisis. And they expose the tragedy of […]

What an astonishing slap in humanity’s face, this coronavirus. But the silver lining is that it is also a rude wake up call. I say ‘silver lining’, for at the centre of this is a massive humanitarian crisis of illnesses and deaths – and for working classes who cannot switch to ‘online’ work, whose workplaces are shut and who unlike their bosses do not have wealth to fall back on. The COVID-19 pandemic has generated historically unprecedented global action, partly […]

In India, economic development and modernity have transformed livelihoods into deadlihoods. They are wiping out millennia-old livelihoods that were ways of life with no sharp division between work and leisure, and replacing them with dreary assembly line jobs where we wait desperately for weekends and holidays. Economic progress, we are told, is about moving from primary sector jobs to manufacturing and services. And so the livelihoods that keep all of us alive – farming, forestry, pastoralism, fisheries, and related crafts […]

Local resources, locally managed Localisation, a trend diametrically opposed to globalisation, is based on the belief that those living closest to the resource to be managed (the forest, the sea, the coast, the farm, the urban facility…), would have the greatest stake and often the best knowledge, to manage it. Of course this is not always the case and in India many communities have lost the ability because of two centuries of government policies, which have effectively crippled their own […]

« July 2021 »

The third in our Planet Local series, this article is excerpted from Globalisation in India: Impacts and Alternatives by Ashish Kothari. Kothari will be speaking at the Economics of Happiness conference in Bangalore, India on March 15th. Readers can learn more about Kothari’s work by listening to the latest episode of Local Bites, ISEC’s podcast program. If the aim of human society is happiness, freedom, and prosperity, there are indeed many alternative ways to achieve this without endangering the earth and […]