SDA-RF-AT-3.14.pdf

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SDA-RF-AT-3.14

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what I have called Intermediate-technology. But I reZ^ivedti)ybrybadreceptiqifvvhenfigot-back to Delhiand
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being an imperialist, a fascist, a racist, a beast who had
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JIt was not until a few years later when the Prime Min- , you ask the doctor to come, and he gives you good ad^X*-^ter of India asked me to come to India and consult with vice, and you abuse the doctor, the doctor leaves, Still,
rZ4^vJm bn the rural areas, and only after I had traveled the you never know what will happen.
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.whole of The country, that .something clicked in my mind;
Fifteen months later, there was an alMndla confef
namely, that for developing countries, there is, bn the rence on intermediate technology, and a leading Indian
one hand, a very low level of technology which does not. economist said, "This is what we must attend to." .
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keep people’going except in relative misery, and, on the
So, for a number of years I hhve been talking and
r»*hpr the
the* rich
nrh man
mnn'c
hinh.fm/ai tonhnninnu
fuT& *' ^jnkingqnd lecturing about intermediate technology.
other,
’s high-level
technology which -ic*
is outside their reach.
Then comes the awful moment—with some people this
.
Of course,, high-level technology, can be
mpmbnt never comes—when you ask yourself, or your
ed'at this or that point in developing countries, but the' friends say, “Are we only talkers or are we doers?” But
points tend to be ths big cities. That technology-cannot ^what cgh one do? Talking and giving lectures is not il­
eradicate the three-fold disease of mass• migrgtJpnJntQ;.'• legitimate, 1 but if one wants to do something one sets
cities, followed by mass unemployment, and finally the/ up an organization.
• threat or actuality of mass hunger, because, in the end,
We set up an organization, and we called it the In­
: food is produced not on balconies in the cities, but in the termediate Technology Development Group, Limited.
vast rural areas. In India, development effb’rfs were by­ It’s still very limited. I happened to have earned an inpassing the rural areas, where eighty-five per cent of the ordlnately high fee from an article published in The Obpeople live, thus exacerbating this three-fold disease, server. I used that hundred pounds to start the orgomaking the problems larger and more unmanageable.
nization. Many people — particularly young people -—
Between low-level technology and high-level tech- think that before*you start anything you must have a lot
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nology, there is a great vacuum which must be filled with of money. We started with an idea and without^ money.

That was in 1964. Now, the Intermediate Technology
Development Group involves more than a thousand
people.
Needless to say, I do not have a thousand people
on my payroll. I’ve got thirty people on the payroll, and
to raise the money for that is difficult enough. But we
have adopted, quite consciously, a decentralized mode
of operation. We said to ourselves from the start: we
can’t build up technological workshops (that is vastly
expensive), but plenty of technological workshops al­
ready exist. We must get them to work for us.
This has worked; it has worked magnificently, not
only with academic institutions, but also with industry.
Virtually all the work, except for that of the over-all di­
rection, which must be done from the headquarters, is
performed by other people on their own behalf, if I may
put It that way, but for us.
Our first thought was, how can we start? We hit on
an idea that some people in California in a quite differ­
ent context also hit upon when they produced the Whole
Earth Catalogue. Cataloguing is always a good idea for
starting. We said, we’ll make a catalogue, suitable for
the rural areas of the world, of small-scale equipment
that is still available from British industry. We confined
ourselves to British industry because we had no money to
travel. We coufd reach British organizations from Lon­
don without having to travel.
We got the Association of Agricultural Engineers to
do the cataloguing on agricultural equipment, and va­
rious other associations to catalogue other equipment.
We compiled this catalogue without money. Indeed, peo­
ple who wanted to get into the catalogue had to pay us.
We called the catalogue Tools for Progress: A Guide
to Small-Scale Equipment for Rural Development. The
catalogue itself was a tool. It helped the poor find equip­
ment relevant to their problems. Once you are out in
the bush, you cannot find anything. Tools for Progress
traveled the world. It even became economically selfsupporting. It is now sold out. When we looked at it
again, we found it was too superficial, so we decided to
take problems up, subject by subject, as the winds blew
and as opportunities arose.
We set up voluntary specialized panels to advise
us. The first subject we tackled was building. There
can’t be any development unless there is some building.
Why don't people get on with their building, let’s say, In
Africa? There are architects, surveyors, and civil en­
gineers in Africa, and, at a lower level, there are brick­
layers, electricians, plumbers, carpenters. Still, most of
the people remain unemployed in Africa, or else they
try to find a job with a foreign contractor. Our advisory
panel on building said that the missing factor in this si­
tuation Is the building contractor. We decided to train
indigenous contractors.
We started in Nigeria, and developed a great stock
of teaching material. We found, in fact that the con­
tractor is the forgotten man in Nigeria. When we disco­
vered him he was delighted, delightful, and eminently
teachable. These courses have been put on throughout
the country without the aid of the government. They have
412

been very successful, and the teaching materials have
been verified.
Once we have produced the knowledge of how to
do something, we let the knowledge roll, by the laws of
gravity. The Nigerian courses have leapfrogged to Ken­
ya, to Tanzania, to Zambia, and other countries. The
materials are freely available, although they are not free
of charge because it costs some money to produce them.
Then we leave it alone, because that particular knowl­
edge gap has been filled. We are not an aid organization
in the conventional sense, but a knowledge organization.
Now, the building panel has advised us to give at­
tention to local building materials and upgrade both the
materials and their use. We are doing that work in con­
junction with the engineering department of Cambridge
University in England. That is a central part of our whole
organizational idea: to use facilities that already exist,
rather than duplicating them.
All our advisory panels are built on what we call the
ABC combination. A is for administrators, people from
government. They know how to pull the ropes. You have
to have them on your side, or they may stop you. But|
they can't do it alone. A governmental development po­
licy is ineffectual because civil servants do not live a
life that produces the particular abilities needed to make
a thing viable. For that you must have businessmen with
you. That's the B factor. It is not difficult to find highly
enlightened and generous businessmen. But the busi­
nessmen can't do it alone either; they are under their
own constraints. We need communicators, the people
of the word, the academics, and research people. That's
the C factor. None of the three groups can do it alone,
but bring them together and you will get a synergic effort.
It is also an enjoyable experience for all three groups.
A normally has a rather poor opinion of B and C; B feels
the same about A and C; and 0 has a poor opinion of
the other two. But when they meet, they discover that
actually they are all quite able and decent people.
Our second advisory panel was on water. Her©
again was exemplified our ideology of intermediate tech^
nology. The good Lord sends water to most places
where It is wanted. But in arid countries the water runs
away into rivers and out to sea. Modern intelligence sug­
gests the building of a desalination plant. But even If
you get the money for it, and even if It is built, it is mon­
strously expensive and energy-consuming, and you still
have it in only one place, when what is wanted is water
throughout the country.
So we developed various small-scale technologies
to hold the water where it is wanted (particularly for
human requirements) and where it has to be protected.
This meant underground water catchment tanks. We ad­
justed the technology to the level of the poor; In economic
terms that means that outgoing expenditures to build the
tanks must be minimal, ideally zero. The labor content
can be what it has to be, because there are a lot of work­
ers who for a long stretch of time during the year have
nothing to do. These tanks can be built by the villagers.
The expenditure is minimal; It is the price of, say, one cow
IMPACT/DECEMBER 1975

for a twenty-thousand-gallon tank.
In this case, funded by an aid organization, Oxfam,
we demonstrated these tanks in Botswana. The Bot­
swana government told us that having water where it
is wanted had changed their entire prospect. They asked
us to train the villagers. We said we do not train the
villagers. If we train them they come Into a European
environment and will not return to the villages. They
will become government clerks. But we are prepared to
^^jfcain the primary school-teachers from the village, be'^Cduse they have enough motivation to go back into the
village. And with that knowledge these teachers, at
least to start with, can build rainwater catchment tanks
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for their schools.
The water panel advised us not only on these catch­
ment tanks, but on all problems of water lifting, and wa­
ter in and water out. We also recommended that the
dimensions of the tank be such that there would be
enough water for all human requirements and something
to spare for micro-irrigation of horticulture as practiced
in Israel. Then the whole thing was fully documented, we
produced a handbook on self-help water and sewage
technology, and that was the end of pur activity.
This is now usable knowledge. As I say, knowledge
follows the law of gravity. Knowledge Is free. It travels
across frontiers. There Is no customs duty on it. I was
recently in quite a different part of Africa and I found
these catchment tanks being built there. They are also
being built on a large scale in Jamaica, and in other non­
African states.

Small tower is the oven in which pottery pieces are baked.
PHOTO-. UNESCO/P. Almasy

third advisory panel deals with agricultural equip­
ment. Here again, technology has zoomed out of reach
of the poor. British tractors—and no doubt even more
so in the United States-—are such complex artifacts that
the British farmer cannot risk letting volunteer workers
run them. They can’t even let engineering graduates on
the tractor. If you push the wrong gear on a twenty-four
gear tractor, the owner is between five hundred and a
thousand pounds out of pocket. In poor rural areas the
question is whether a tractor is in every case necessary.
So we studied the whole range of agricultural equip­
ment from the point of view of poverty. We couldn’t do
it ourselves, so we approached the National College of
Agricultural Engineering, in Bedfordshire. They were de­
lighted. They wanted ideas for their students to work
on. Their intermediate technology unit first made a world­
wide search for low-cost simple equipment that can be
locally fabricated. They came up with seventy such items
of equipment and we published this information. This is
down-to-earth knowledge. We give the chap who feels
he needs a particular item the drawings so that he can
fabricate it himself. To him it is immensely exciting to
discover he can do certain things so much better than he
had ever done them before.
Unfortunately, the mainstream of technological dev­
elopment is using this fabricating knowledge to make
things bigger and more complex. We try to use this in­
telligence to make things smaller and simpler. For exam­
ple, we were up against the problem of metal bending:
how to get the metal around the wooden wheel of an ox­
cart. That is no problem in Pittsburgh or Sheffield, but
how do you do it in a small town in Africa, or in India?
Well, our forefathers knew how to do it. They had a
most intelligent tool, but it had fallen into oblivion. We
discovered one of these tools in a French Village, and we
took It to the National College for Agricultural Engineer­
ing and asked them to upgrade it, put modern mathema­
tics into it, and get the curvature just right.
The upshot is that this tool has now been redesigned.
Any village blacksmith can make it and do the job per­
fectly. The cheapest modern equipment that we could
locate anywhere In the world to do this job costs seven
hundred pounds and requires an electric drive. Ours
costs seven pounds and works with human power. It is
a symbol of what Is now possible, namely reducing the
capital cost of a piece of basic agricultural equipment
by the factor of a hundred—from seven hundred down to
seven—and at the same time doing away with a need
for electricity, because In most of these places there is
no electricity.
We have fifteen advisory panels In all—on coopera­
tives (why do they so easily fail, for instance?); on rural
health (that has been effective, but it’s never been fund­
..413

ed, so we have never been able to get full-time people
on it); on wood and woodworking; on transport.
Our developed societies have engaged in aid studies
for more than twenty years, but the poor are still as poor
now as they were before. There ore specific needs aris­
ing cut of situations, but the situations have to be un­
derstood.
Our Intermediate Technology Development
Group does not touch agriculture from an agriculturalscience point of view. We touch only the outgrowth of
agriculture.
We do not reject anything in another people’s cul­
ture. We carve cut for ourselves work that responds to
need, a need which may not be immediately and spon­
taneously recognized everywhere by the people them­
selves, but that, with a little bit of to-ing and fro-ing, is
eventually recognized by them; and then they ask for it.
What we do first is find out the work-load pattern of
the specific community over twelve months. This reveals
c characteristic curve. Anyone can see that for some time
nobody has anything to do: the village is idle. Then
comes the month when everybody is out in the fields—
men, women, grandpa, grandma, and babies After that.
there is nothing much to do. and then comes another lit­
tle peak. The characteristic curve varies from place to
place, particularly when there is double cropping. We
say that unless we can break through at the peak of the
curve with some mechanical help, you are stuck. This
determines what sort of equipment is actually needed.
People immediately understand this. It presents no
problem. There is no cultural gap. once you have dis­
covered a people’s real needs and helped them to under­
stand those needs. We do not have money, so we can­
not foist our ideas and knowledge on them. Until they
osk for help, we cannot do anything.
If the Pakistanis tell us they need a super, super
thing, we say, “Well, then, for that you don’t need us.’’
But they may say, “Our electricity grids will not reach
the northern province, not in the lifetime of anyone now
alive. They are left without any power. What can we
do? We have falling water coming out of the Himala­
yas. No big sites, but lots of little streams. Could you
help us to get mini-turbines to harness this water
power?*'
At that point, we survey the field, hand it over to our
power panel, which comes back and tells us, “As for as
Britain is concerned, there is only one man who makes
mini-turbines. He makes them as a hobby. The design of
this turbine hasn't been looked at since 1902."
We can do things better in 1974, so we take this to
the engineering department in Reading University where
it becomes a student project. We say, “Can’t we make it
at half the weight and with a simplified design so that
Pakistanis can make it themselves?”
We encounter no cultural gap in Pakistan on that.
We have no sociological problem. The Pakistanis al­
ready know what they need.
Of course, there is more to it than that. The turbine
by itself is not enough. You must have the use of that
electricity. I am talking of mini; I am talking not of four
hundred megawatts, But forty, fifty, two hundred kilowatts.
414

For developing countries there is, on the one
hand, a very low level of technology which

doos not keep people going except in relative
misery, and on the other, the rich man’s

high-level technology which is outside their
reach.

That is better than nothing. It takes a few wires and at
the end of the wires some busy Pakistani can make
something.
We had a situation in Zambia where the egg produc­
ers were in despair because the supply of packaging ma­
terial had given out. We said, “Why can’t you make egg
trays in Zambia?” Nobody in Zambia knew.
Back in London we found that with very few except^**
ions all the egg trays in the world are made by one multi­
national company, headquartered in Copenhagen. We
contacted them. They scid. “No problem, we will build
c factory in Lusaka. If you raise the money by aid, so
much the better; we know we will get paid. How many
do you want?”
We said, “It's a small, widely dispersed population.
They need every year about a million egg trays each hold­
ing thirty-six eggs.”
Long pause. They said "Forget it. The .smallest
machine which costs a quarter of a million pounds, will
make a million a month.
Obviously that is not for Zambia. It's not for deve­
lopment We asked, “Why don't you make a small ma­
chine?”
“Oh. we talked to our engineers, that would be un­
economic.”
We take things at that point where everybody say^^
it is uneconomic. We got a young fellow and gave him two *
jobs. First we asked him to redesign the egg tray which
we didn't think was of a good design anyway. We want­
ed trays that one can fill with eggs and put one on top
of the other, stringing them together and shipping them
like that, without crating, because crating is very ex­
pensive. These countries do not have a lot of timber.
That problem was taken to the Royal School of
Arts in London. Within six weeks, we had the perfect
design, one far better than that of the multinational
company in Denmark. We patented it.
The second job we gave this young man was to set
up a small production unit to make these trays. The pro­
totype was produced at the University of Reading. We
took the prototype to a manufacturer in Scotland and
it is now on sale and has been installed in quite a num­
ber of African countries. We have inquiries about this
unit from all over the world, including advanced coun­
tries. It has two per cent of the capacity of the hither­
IMPACT/DECEMBER 1W

to smallest unit so it fits into situations where nothing
now available fits. And it costs two per cent of the
hitherto cheapest model. So, in fact, if I may use the
economists’ jargon, the capital output ratio is just as
good in the small scale, the one thing that no engineer
would believe and most economists will not believe.
But it is there.
Now, this was handed over to one of our subsidia­
ries, and today we have a.lusty sale of this machine,
simply because it meets actual recognized needs.
Here is another example. In malawi, an aid mission
went to the farmers in a particular district and said,
"We can show you methods that will double your yield."
The farmers were mpst interested, because they knew
that they were poor. It all worked very successfully.
They doubled their yield. A year later, the aid people
returned and found that the farmers had reverted to
their previous methods. The aid people were disap­
pointed. They went back to their own country and
criticized these farmers, talked about their cultural gap
pnd all the rest.
We happened to be in Malawi, end we were asked
to have a look. We did not asume that these ^people
were stupid. We found the answer, namely, that they
had been subsistence farmers and consumed every­
thing they produced. Now that they hod produced twice
as much, this extra crop had to be taken to market.
But there were no means of transport, except the beast
of burden in Africa, the woman. The women carried the
extra food to market in baskets on their heads, walking
for miles and miles. They did it for one season, but
they said. "Never again." The wise old farmers sa«d,
"It is more important to keep our women happy than
to treat them as slaves. Our old system was better."
At that point, we got involved. We said "Look, you
can have double yields, and you can get the stuff to mar­
ket. Our transport panel will show you how to do it."
We brought to Malawi a very simple oxcart design
.from Scotland. We organized a scrap dealer to produce
"he few metal parts from an inexhaustible source of ma­
terial in Africa, namely, wrecked motor cars. We devised
a little do-it-yourself kit for the metal parts. We trained
local carpenters to make oxcarts, and to!d them that if
they comp’eted the course, we would give each of them
one of these kits. They could then go home and make
oxcarts that they could sell at a price enabling them to
buy more of these kits. They would be in business if they
wanted to be. Once they had the oxcart, their problems
disappeared.
One more example. The Pakistanis were desperate
for increased brick production. They went to the World
Bank and got a loan.- Then they got an expert, an ab­
solutely first-class retired brickmaker. He said, "I’ll give
you the design for a super brickworks. The only possi­
ble location for It is just outside Karachi. It has the best
clay in the world. It will cost five million pounds, it wiii
produce a million bricks a week, and it will give 150 jobs."
But this does not fit Pakistan. The country is littered
with brickworks to which no one has ever given any at-

Tubewell powered by electricity furnishes water for irrigation, wash­
ing and bathing.
PHOTO’. Marc and Evelyn Bernheim

tention. The government decided not to build a super
brickworks.
We advised an intermediate-technology approach to
these derelict, highly inefficient local brickworks. I took
a young brickworks specialist with me, and we walked
through them. He said, "There's no problem, I suggest
this, and this, and this. We can increase1 productivity
by a factor of three, with no loss of jobs, no investment
worth talking about, and you will get three times as many
bricks as before." This is precisely what the Pakistanis
wanted.
To give this kind of help, you need people who can
break away from an experience formed by life in rich
countries where there is plenty of capital, where the main
thrust is labor saving, and where they take for granted an
infrastructure of roads and transports for the distribu­
tion of, say, a million bricks.
Two of our quasi-separate units are of a special
kind. One ir the industrial liaison unit, which is in touch
with about five hundred firms in Britain representing two
415

hundred branches of industry. This enables us to take
our problems to industry. Of course, industry does not
work for love, but we can now talk to them and say, if
you can hit this off, there may be music in it for you, it
may be profitable. We have learned that adaptations
can be done best by industry, not in research establish­
ments. We know the manufacturers who can produce
the Implements we wont to put into the world.
Britain's Ministry for Overseas Development has
now funded our industrial liaison unit. That ministry
cannot do the job except with industry, but for govern­
ment to cooperate with industry is extremely difficult.Government cannot create precedents; if it works with
one firm, then it must be open to work with all
other firms. But oubllc moneys are not adequate for
this kind of work. So the Ministry for Overseas Develop­
ment has funded us and brings its industrial problems to
us. We can then do with Industry what needs to be done.
Our second special unit is the university liaison unit.
That Is a bit of a misnomer, because it includes not just
universities but technical colleges, polytechnics, and so
on. We farm out to these institutions student projects in
which the subject matter seems to be interesting, but
which we cannot take to industry because it is not right.
Before you take anything to industry, it must be right.
For example, on these underground rainwater catchment
tanks the building material is very labor intensive. In
many developing countries there is that black, nasty sub­
stance, refinery residues, bitumen. It is used on roads.
Wouldn't that stuff make a good bottom for the rain­
water catchment? It turns out It has to be reinforced in
some way. The immediate answer is, yes, you can rein­
force It with glass fiber. But glass fiber costs six hundred
dollars a ton. So we said, why not natural fiber? In Tan­
zania they are drowning In sisal. Couldn’t sisal be used
for reinforcement? Well, nobody had ever studied that.
So we got this researched with all the paraphernalia of
a scientific study at the Imperial College of Science and
Technology. We know what can and cannot be done with
natural fibers, although It Is not Immediately clear where
to go from here. But at. least we can talk to industry and
ask them how one can bring this to the prototype stage.
Our Industry and university liaison units are In touch
with a score of research institutions in Britain, and we
have launched about two hundred such student projects,
some of them absolutely fascinating.
We are left with a problem. After working up this
knowledge, how do we get it across? We cannot commu­
nicate with lots of different people In each developing
country—we are now working in two dozen such coun­
tries. They need a focal point. We have been trying to
get each of them to set up an Intermediate technology
group. So far, eight developing countries have such
groups.
We have also urged similar groups to start up in de­
veloped countries. An intermediate technology group was
founded In Switzerland last year at the Duttweller Insti­
tute. Others have started in Sweden and the Netherlands
This means that In our search fqr suitable equipment or
416

techniques, we are not restricted to Britain. The Germans
wanted to set up an institute, but they started out too big,
and so they were shot down; but they are trying again. In
the United Slates our main link is with VITA, the Vol­
unteers for International Technical Assistance.
We have less organized connections with other coun­
tries, but the units in the developing countries are the
most important. In any case, gradually an international
network has come into being, through which the know­
ledge can flow. To promote this flow, we have started an
international journal called Appropriate Technology. It
does not simply report on the splendors of our own work.
Its pages are open. We want to provide information of
what is being done, by whom, where, and in what line.
We are not primarily interested in disquisitions on how
difficult a problem is, but rather instructions on what one
can actually do for oneself. We are trying to answer this
most difficult question: How do you get knowledge that
has been worked out in London to the two million villages
that might need it?
Another large problem is how to finance something1
like this. It is not difficult to finance our overseas projects,
which are launched not primarily to help these particular
people, but to verify the knowledge, train the people, and
to prove that it is both meaningful and socially accepta­
ble. That Is easy to finance. What is extremely hard to
finance is the thinking work at headquarters.
To do that, wfe have created four subsidiaries to our
main organization, the Intermediate Technology Develop­
ment Group, Limited, which is registered as a charity. The
four wholly shared subsidiaries are commercial organiza­
tions. The first Is a consultancy bureau. When a request
comes from Tanzania, if they will pay my expenses, I will
go to Tanzania free of charge. But when a request comes
from an oil-rich country, it would be stupid and, from an
over-all economic view, not even very helpful, to refuse
to make them pay for the help. They don’t miss the mon­
ey, and ft helps to solve certain balance-of-payment
problems.
The second subsidiary Is a trading company which
sells our designs, machines, implements like the metal­
bending machine, and also more ambitious machines;
and that Is also profitable.
The third subsidiary is a retail shop in London. Peo­
ple in developing countries produce all sorts of things for
sale In the advanced countries, but they know very little
about marketing. The best way to heln is to have a shop
where they can learn It by doing. This shop Is called
Afro Arts, Limited. It Is very attractive. The shop sells
their products at horrifying prices to people who have too
much money. The profits flow Into our research work.
The fourth subsidiary is Intermediate Technology
Publications, Limited, We now have a long publications
list with a high commercial turnover. Currently, we sell
about five hundred pounds worth of our literature a week.
This is chicken feed in big-business terms. But is very
specialized material and very inexpensively produced and
is designed for the poor. This has to be commercially
managed, so we turned our publications department Into
IMPACT/DECEMBER 1975

nny, the same company that has launched our
That means that some of the sharp edge of comriiscipline is introduced into it.
profits of these subsidiaries help to run the head; organization.
oncluding note: when one says that people in dej countries are not stupid,, one does not imply that
in developed societies are stupid. Everybody is
it in the things he knows and has experienced.
I say is, “Let us take the people in developing

Mitinued from page 409)
lion dollars in Thailand since
an attempt to establish the
as a “keystone” for carry. various military strategies
1 to preserve the U.S. role
.cific power.
iations between the U.S. and
1 have been attended by
ited and contradicting facn the one hand, the revolu»* victory in Indochina im­

countries more seriously, and let us not imagine that our
experience fits their case.” Those people are intelligent.
They know how to live on virtually nothing. We are intel­
ligent and know how to live in a society where all the
high-technology presuppositions are fulfilled. But'it takes
a mighty effort to jump out of our own experience and
put ourselves inside the experience of these people. There
we may be stupid, as stupid as a most intelligent
farmer might turn out to be the moment he has to cope
with our technology.

poses new restrictions and necessi­
tates substantial changes in the
military/security relationships bethe 2 countries. Moreover, the U.S.
is facing severe economic problems
at home and substantial congres­
sional cuts in the aid request for
Thailand. In addition, Washington
has been uncertain what course the
new civilian government in Bangkok
will take. The new political realities
in Indochina obliged the reigning
powers to say that the US must re­

move its military presence within a
year. On the other hand, the power­
ful vested interests, dependent on
American presence, have developed
among military and political leaders
during the long years of massive
American involvement. Thus, sourc­
es say. members of government pri­
vately want less than a total pull­
out.
— A digest from “Thailand in a
Changing Asia" Indochina Chronicle
{May-June 75) by Praxis.
417

THREE VILLAGES
IN NEPAL
• NEDD WILLARD

Reprinted from WORLD HEALTH

The

leading out of Pokhara is paved at first but

few months ago.” We all looked at each other and quick­
soon stops at a dry gully where we left the Landrover. ly reached an agreement. We would trace the water line
Then it was a footpath all the way to the first village. back, either to its source, or to the first place where it
There were three of us, Mr Tulli, of the Local Develop­ was giving water.
ment Department (LDD), Gordon from UNICEF and my­
We followed the path around the shallow terraced
self, all off to see how far the rural water supply scheme fields past one dry tap after another until we came to
had progressed in these mountains near Pokhara.
the school. This was a large low building, now covered
It was after two in the afternoon and the walking with bunting as a minister or some other high official was
x
wasn’t too hard yet though everyone began to sweat as expected.
“Is there a water tap here?”
the path began curling up the flanks of a bare moun­
“Not yet,” said the hired hand, “but you can ask the
tain. Where the mountain folded back, and there were
Pradhan
Panch (President of Village Council). He is
trees and fern growing in abundance, the air was cooler.
charge of everything in the village.”
Aruna was three hours' walk away.
The Pardhan in his best suit was not too glad to see
“Here is the first tap,” announced Mr. Tulli with
pride. A solitary tap in a board cement basin stood un­ us even less so when we told him why we had come. At
first, his answer to all our questions consisted of a li­
der a large tree.
tany
on cement: “If only we had more cement, we could
“But where is the water?” I asked.
do
the
job.” But when we insisted about the dry taps.
“We will ask the local farmer. We are staying at
most of them enthroned in cement bases but giving no
his house for the night anyway.”
water, he mumbled something about lack of repairs.
After a short, steep climb of steps, made from large
“Is there water at the collection point?” Gordon
slabs of grey stone, we reached the farmhouse. It was
asked.
long and low with a sturdy thatched roof and windows
“Oh yes, that Is working fine.”
outlined in dark wood. There was an open space on top
“Then take us back along the line until we find a
where we would sleep tonight.
place where water is running,” we insisted. Reluctantly,
The farmer was off celebrating somewhere, so it especially since the minister or his deputy was due to
was his hired hand who took us on a tour of the water arrive soon, the local mayor agreed to accompany us.
system in Aruna. The stone steps ran steeply to the top
There was a bright sound of water splashing and
of the first crest and then leapt down again. Further on, then we saw the fountain. Water was rushing out of the
another concrete emplacement, with another lonely tap, pipe, overrunning the concrete basin and losing itself iii
was waiting’for us.
gurgling streams that ran down the hill through the ricw
“Where is the water?”
paddies. A woman arrived to fill her brass jugs with water.
“Oh, it doesn't run every day. Sometimes it comes This tap was certainly working well. The mayor beamed.
on for an hour or two.” We were all unhappy at this.
He beamed less when we traced the line forward and
After all, who in the village could tell when the water found that the plastic pipe had been dug out of the
would be on and be able to profit by it? By thp time we ground, broken off and its end twisted shut. No one fur­
reached the third tap, which was only a piece of plas­ ther down the line was going to get any of that water now
tic pipe held upright by a stout plank, we were getting splashing wantonly over the hillside a few feet further
suspicious as well as unhappy. No water came from the back.
tap and a little digging showed that it was not connected
“We lack tools. And skilled men to use them,”
to the two taps we had seen earlier. No water would moaned the headman.
ever go through that line, even on the odd hours it
“What happened to the taps we gave you to close
chose to flow.
off the pipes so as not to waste water, and the tools to
An old woman was watching us from a nearby field work on the pipes?” Tulli demanded angrily .
“We never got them.”
where she had tethered her goats. Slyly, she had made
Tulli made extensive notes on the working of this
their tethers just long enough to allow them to browse
water scheme in order to check the facts on his return
in her neighbor's rice field.
We called to her, “Tell us, when did you see water to'Pokhara and then we made our tired way back to the
farm to sleep. We left the mayor glad to see us go but
here for the last time?”
"Oh, about a month ago, I can't be sure, maybe a worried that we might come back or write an unkind re418

IMPACT/DECEMBER 1975

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