Since its birth in 1947, India has made enormous progress. More people than ever before in our history have longer, healthier and more fulfilling lives. Rapid gains in agriculture, industry, energy production and infrastructure have brought the benefits of modern science to a large segment of the population. And our economy now makes available to our growing middle class comforts and possibilities that they could never have dreamt of at the time of our tryst with destiny.

Yet, we also have more people who are poor, hungry and deprived than ever before. And the environmental resources – the soils, the rivers, the aquifers, the forests - on which they depend are rapidly degenerating, leaving more and more people subsisting on less and less. There is growing evidence that the environmental and resource costs being paid by the nation are eating more and more heavily into the benefits that we are getting from the present patterns of development.

To Choose Our Future describes alternative development strategies that can enable us to pass on to our children – all our nation’s children - a more prosperous, vibrant and sustainable India than today. In looking at the various options we have for how our nation will be when it is 100 years old. It draws upon lessons from 30 years of work on sustainable national development, led by Development Alternatives under the Chairmanship of Dr. Ashok Khosla. The book presents some basic scenarios of the future to enable the people and decision makers of our country consciously to make better informed choices among possible pathways that will lead to sustainable outcomes in the least possible time – for the greatest common benefit, and at least overall cost.

The book identifies the single most important priority for India today: creating sustainable livelihoods on a large scale.

Chairman of the Development Alternatives Group, a social enterprise set up in New Delhi in 1982 that designs and markets socially relevant, commercially viable and environmentally friendly technologies.

After post-graduate degrees in natural sciences from Cambridge and experimental physics from Harvard, Ashok Khosla became Director of the Indian Government’s first Environment Office in 1972 and then Director of Infoterra in UNEP in 1976.

Currently, Co-Chair of the UN’s International Resource Panel. Earlier, he was President of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and of the Club of Rome.

Ashok has been a member of the Government of India’s National Security Advisory Board and Scientific Advisory Council to the Cabinet and was awarded the OBE by the UK Government, the UN Sasakawa Environment Prize by the UN, the Zayed International Environment Prize by the United Emirates Government, the Duke of Edinburgh Medal by WWF and the Award for Outstanding Social Entrepreneur by the Schwab Foundation.