Noted environmental activist, community organizer and advocate of appropriate technologies in rural India, Michael Mazgaonkar delivered two talks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Oct 22 and 23. His talks were titled "Gandhian Engineering -- Empowering Rural India through Environmental Conservation and Sustainable Technology." About 60 people attended on each of the days. The talk was organized by the Association for India's Development (AID), Boston and MIT chapters; the MIT-India program; MIT Engineers without Borders; and the MIT Graduate Student Council.

Mazgaonkar, along with his wife Swati Desai, has been living in a village called Juna Mozda in southern Gujarat in India. The village, nestled in the Satpura hills, is comprised of the Vasava adivasis (Bhils). These adivasis have traditionally lived off the land and the surrounding dense forest. They cultivate maize, rice, pigeon peas and some local varieties of cereals such as Kodri, Bunti and Moriyo. Mazgaonkar says they spent their first two years in the village just learning about the life of the villagers. Gradually, after gaining the confidence of the villagers, they were able to participate in the lives of the villagers by listening to them and offering some solutions to their needs.

Some of the ideas implemented by Mazgaonkar and Desai have been in the form of local innovations, like a windmill to generate electricity and LED lamps to provide light. They also started a cooperative for women, called the Mozda co-operative, which involves the village women in livelihood issue.

Mazgaonkar, an engineer by training, realized that the adivasis naturally used local materials and the simplest possible technology. His decision to provide help, whether in the form of lighting or soil conservation, has always been after a thorough process of discussion with the villagers. Also, he decided early that the expertise of maintaining the technologies that he introduced would be local: the people in the village would be trained to handle everything from putting together a windmill, for instance, to maintaining it. "Lack of schooling should not be lack of knowledge," as he put it in response to a question about his "transferring technology" to the village people.

He repeatedly stressed the importance of consensus building while offering any solutions to the people in the rural areas: "They are the ones who know what will improve their lives," he said. Citing the example of the international attention on the supposed pollution from indoor stoves in India, Mazgaonkar said that none of the people in the rural areas who use such stoves have been consulted when such studies are made and solutions suggested.

Mazgaonkar also revealed his involvement in several other people's struggles in the area, such as in environmental endangerment of water-bodies by chemical industries in the Golden Corridor area of Gujarat and the building of dams. The Golden Corridor of Gujarat produces about 30% of India's chemicals and the local areas carry the brunt of contamination from effluents and dumping. He also cited the case of a dam in Valsad which became known to the local residents only when engineers visited the area to carry out some measurements.

Several people in the audience raised questions regarding the inevitable conflict between national interests and local interests. They felt that if compensation policies could be just, then some form of sacrifice should be borne by people for larger national interests, even if that involved displacements. Mazgaonkar pointed out the high percentage of tribals in the people displaced by development projects India since Independence. Referring to the way the government goes about acquiring land for dams and in the process seeks to displace people, he said, "We do not have the right to demand of people that they change their lifestyle for someone else's benefit. If anything, for anybody displaced, their lives should be better than before. So, they should be given an option to return to their original place if they find the new conditions to be worse."

For more information on AID,  please visit www.aidindia.org.

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