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I am indeed honoured at being invited to deliver the prestigious second K R Narayanan Oration of the Australia South Asia Research Centre at The Australian National University, Canberra. My pleasure is all the more since I have intimately known and closely worked with Dr Narayanan, Vice President of India who is an unique combination of an outstanding journalist, successful diplomat, honest politician and above all a self-effacing, humble and exemplary human being. He firmly believed that the welfare of the world depends on creating a new world order guided by the spirit of sharing and cooperation at the international level involving politics, economics, social engineering and all the resources of science and technology. Quoting his own words, ‘The development of the awesome power of the science and technology has to be animated by the spirit of humanism for the good of mankind and not for purposes of exploitation or destruction’. In tune with his philosophy, I have chosen the topic ‘Space Technology for Sustainable Development’ for this lecture.
The spectacular achievements in the last three decades have firmly established the capability of space technology for bringing out a socio-economic revolution in the world because of its immense potential to transform even stagnant societies in a most cost effective and timely manner. While the ability to view in entire electromagnetic spectrum enabled space exploration to unveil the magnificent panorama of the vast cosmos, satellites from their vantage point in space have been able to provide a synoptic, repetitive and instantaneous access to any point on our planet, virtually shrinking time and distance. The vast and unlimited potential benefits of space technology have already extended to communication, meteorology, TV broadcast, education, agriculture, industrial growth, resource management, environmental pollution, disaster mitigation, flood and drought management, health and entertainment, virtually touching every facet of human endeavour (Rao 1995a).
In spite of these spectacular advances, as Smt. Indira Gandhi stated at the UNISPACE ‘82 conference ‘It is pertinent to ask if such spectacular advances, which in some way have brought the world together have also contributed to reducing the glaring disparities which divide people, the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots. The promise of gains from advanced technologies elude the majority of peoples, whose aspirations for a better and richer life remain unfulfilled’. Developing countries, in particular, which account for over 75 per cent of the world population, suffering from serious shortage of resources and capital, lack of trained man power, large scale illiteracy, low agricultural productivity, industrial backwardness and exploding population, have become the target of the pollution of rampant poverty. In spite of the food grain production increasing at an average rate of about 3 per cent per year, the food productivity in the developing countries continues to remain very low varying between 0.5 to 2.5 ton/ha. as against the world average of 2.6 tons/ha. leave alone the productivity of over 4.5 ton/ha. in the developed nations (Fig. 1). With the steadily increasing population in these countries more than offsetting the increased food production, over 65 countries are today facing serious food deficit and acute famine conditions (Rao 1991). The Asia-Pacific region alone accounts for a staggering 65 per cent of world’s extremely poor population, sustaining on less than 2000 calories/day. The gap between the total food grain production in the world and the demand is expected to reach 140 million tons by 2000 and with the projected increase in population from the present 5.7 billion to 8.5 billion by the year 2025 and 11 billion by 2100, the situation is bound to become explosive.
The term sustainable development coined several years ago has now become a common currency. The World Commission on Environment in its report ‘Our Common Future’ (1987) defined sustainable development as:
… development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs. It is not a fixed state of harmony, but rather a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development and institutional changes are made consistent with future as well as present needs.
Unless sustainable development to overcome poverty alleviation concurrently addresses food, economic and health security for achieving substantial improvement in the quality of life across the world, we will surely fail in our attempt to reverse the prevalent state of scarcity and social structure of inequity in our society.
Serious concern for the well being of humanity has led to the definition of more appropriate indices, such as sustainable livelihood security index (SLSI), for providing a realistic and accurate representation of the quality of life. Fundamentally, assessment of quality of life must encompass four basic components namely food sufficiency, ecological integrity, economic security and social equity. While ecological security covers environmental degradation over land, forest and water, economic efficiency deals with input/output ratio of productivity in monetary terms. The social equity factor essentially deals with human aspects in a given region in terms of their statistics below the poverty line, literacy rate, nutritional status, health care aspects and employment opportunities. It is only through the adoption of a holistic approach involving sustainable development strategies that we can ensure a reasonable quality of life to meet the basic requirements of the present as well as future generations. Considering that each one per cent growth in population would require at least 2.5 per cent growth in GNP as demographic investment, providing food, economic and health security to all the people in the world becomes our greatest challenge.
The rampant pollution of poverty in the developing nations is further being severely stretched on an elastic scale due to the explosive growth in population. Even with the assumption of reaching the replacement fertility rate of 21 per thousand by 2025 based on an optimistic extrapolation of reduction in crude birth rate during the last two decades, the present level of population of 4.3 billion in the developing countries will cross 7.2 billion by 2025 and reach 9.4 billion in 2100 as compared to the total population of the affluent societies, expected to stabilise below 2 billion (UN 1994). Asian regions, which accounted for 3.1 billion or 59 per cent of the global population of 5.4 billion in 1990, will cross 5.9 billion by 2100 (Fig. 2) of which the share of India alone is likely to be around 1.8 billion. It is clear that the only choice we have is to appeal to science and technology for rapidly building up the necessary carrying capacity to meet the basic demands of the population projected by the realistic scenario. The impressive economic breakthrough achieved by the East Asian Tiger countries5 is a good example of the impact of rapid industrial development and massive literacy programme in substantially improving their GNP.
An immediate consequence of the population growth is the decrease in the available per capita arable land from 0.17 ha. to just about 0.1 ha (Rao 1991; World Resources Institute 1992), which will inevitably force large scale migration of rural people into urban areas in search of gainful employment. Globally the urban population has increased from 1.4 billion in 1970 to 2.6 billion in 1992 and is expected to cross 3.5 billion by 2000, which means almost 55 per cent of the global population will reside in cities by the turn of this century. The developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America are witnessing exactly the same phenomena of urbanisation which occurred in the developed west 50 years ago. Urban population in Asia which has already crossed 1 billion is increasing at the phenomenal rate of almost 4 per cent per year as compared to less than 1.2 per cent in America and Europe (World Bank 1994). In India, the urban population has dramatically increased from a mere 30 million in 1900 to over 260 million and is expected to cross 400 million by 2000. Inadequate public transportation, scarcity of safe drinking water and poor sanitation have turned all our major cities into sources of concentrated hazard instead of engines of growth. The solid waste generated each day by the megacities in Asia is over 80 to 100 tons per million, almost twice that in the western cities, turning them into breeding grounds of all communicable diseases. The city of Calcutta alone produces over half a million ton of solid waste every year, half of which is not even collected, let alone recycled.
Despite of the exponential growth in communication capabilities all across the world in the last 50 years, the glaring differences in the development of communication infrastructure between developed and developing nations is very striking. Communication infrastructure like many other social parameters such as energy consumption and literacy, is traditionally considered as an indicator of the level of economic development. Even with the impact of satellite communication revolution, the availability of telephones in the metropolitan cities of the developing countries is less than one for every 100 persons as against one for every two persons in the developed societies. The picture in the rural developing areas is even more dismal with over 2000 persons having to compete for access to a single telephone (Rao 1993). While practically all the developing countries have taken some advantage of satellite communication, only just about 20 out of the 170 geostationary satellites in orbit today, belong to the developing nations and at the present rate of growth, the share of the developing countries either in leased transponders or in terms of dedicated satellites is unlikely to exceed 15 per cent of the global usage even by the year 2000.
The close organic linkage between development and education is abundantly clear from the existence of the powerful functional relationship between the literacy index of a country and its gross national product. Analysis indicates that least developed countries with 70–80 per cent illiteracy have only a per capita income of about $200 per year whereas middle income group of nations with illiteracy rates of 35–50 per cent have an annual per capita income of about $600 as against over $10,000 annual per capita income enjoyed by the citizens of developed nations having less than 5 per cent illiterates (Gao and Rao 1992) (Fig. 3). According to UNESCO 1985 statistics, almost 30 per cent of the global population were illiterates, 98 per cent of whom belonged to the developing countries. The geographical distribution of illiterate population indicates that Asia alone accounted for 75 per cent of the total illiterates, in the world, Africa coming a close second with 18 per cent and the rest 7 per cent being distributed in Latin America and other parts of the world (Rao 1995; World Bank 1994), most of them being in dispersed and remote rural areas. Unless eradication of illiteracy is tackled on a war footing and not by mere slogan adoption, over 2.5 billion or about 30 per cent out of an estimated 7.2 billion population in the developing countries will continue to remain illiterate even by the year 2025 (Rao 1988).
In spite of the wide recognition that the existing socio-economic imbalance between developed and developing nations is directly attributable to the significant difference in their levels of educational advancement, lack of adequate resources continues to prevent the developing countries from overcoming their fundamental disadvantage. In 1986 alone, out of a total investment of about $800 billion on education, 40 developed nations accounted for 80 per cent of this expenditure while the total share of the 161 developing nations (Rao 1995; Gao and Rao 1992) was just 14 per cent. The annual per capita investment in all forms of education including higher education in the third world countries is hardly $ 25 per year compared to over $500 per year in the developed world. Many of the rural areas of the third world countries do not even possess an elementary education facility and where schools exist, they seldom have more than a single qualified teacher and are often run without even a black board. Typical is the example of China, where most of the teachers employed in the primary schools, are those who graduated from the same schools under poorly qualified teachers, resulting in massive inbreeding which has perpetuated the vicious circle. It is estimated that over 3 million poorly qualified teachers in China comprising of 40 per cent of teacher population in primary schools and 72 per cent in junior schools are continuing to cater to the educational growth of that country (Liu 1994). Statistics clearly indicate that the birth rate as well as infant mortality of children drastically gets reduced with the increase in female literacy level. Considering that education of women is most crucial for achieving social equilibrium, through population control and health care (Fig. 4), the task of eradicating illiteracy among women who constitute over 60 per cent of the total illiterates in a developing society, becomes the single most important goal for promoting cultural growth and socio-economic prosperity of any rural society. The answer clearly lies in the wide spread utilisation of distance education involving satellite based TV and radio broadcasting media, which are most ideally suited to provide basic education as well as continuing education to the vast, inaccessible and sparsely distributed population of the world.