CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
India and Appropriate Technology
“THE BIG MISTAKE GANDHI made was to advocate the spinning wheel,” said one influential Indian government economist. “It’s much too efficient. With the unemployment and underemployment we have in our villages the truly appropriate technology is the hand-held spindle, the spinning whorl.” Yet this is hardly how the Indian villagers define “appropriate technology” for themselves.
What struck me most when traveling in the winter of 1978–79 for six weeks through rural India was not the pervasive poverty or the palpable unemployment; I had expected both. What I had not expected, however, were the four ...
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