Contextualising Development: From Economic Growth to Sustainable Practices

Ask almost anyone what their country needs more of, and “development” tops the list. It promises jobs, roads, electricity, hospitals, and a way out of poverty. For decades, governments have treated development as a single, obvious goal – something every nation should chase along the same path. But this neat picture hides a harder truth. Development is not automatically good for everyone, and it does not always solve the problems it claims to fix. Sometimes it creates new ones: drowned villages, polluted rivers, displaced families, and a widening gap between the rich and the poor. To use the idea responsibly, we first need to ask where it came from and what it actually does.

Where the idea of “development” came from 🔗

The way we use the word “development” today is surprisingly recent. It was shaped largely by a single political moment. On 20 January 1949, US President Harry S. Truman delivered his inaugural address and laid out four foreign policy goals. The fourth point proposed a bold new program to share American scientific and industrial progress with what he called “underdeveloped areas”.

That phrase changed how the world saw itself. With one speech, more than half the planet was sorted into a single category – underdeveloped – and given one shared aspiration: to catch up with the industrialised West. The anthropologist Gustavo Esteban and others have pointed out that Truman’s words turned development into something a powerful country could do to a poorer one, framing diverse societies as merely earlier versions of a Western model. The historian Gilbert Rist noted that the speech gave the word a new, transitive meaning – countries would now be “developed” by others.

Truman’s logic was also strategic. The Point Four Program emerged during the early Cold War, when the United States wanted to keep newly independent nations from aligning with the Soviet Union by showing that democracy and capitalism could raise living standards. Development, in other words, was never a purely neutral or technical project. It carried political assumptions from the very start.

Why this history matters today 🔗

Recognising these origins helps us see that “development” is not a law of nature. It is a particular idea, built in a particular time, reflecting particular interests. Once we treat it as a choice rather than an inevitability, we can start asking better questions. Development for whom? At what cost? Measured how? These questions sit at the heart of what we might call contextualising development – understanding it within its social, ecological, and historical setting instead of accepting it as a one-size-fits-all good.

The hidden costs: ecology and displacement 🔗

The most visible price of conventional development is environmental. Rapid industrialisation, large dams, mining, and unplanned urban growth have caused deforestation, air pollution, and the poisoning of rivers. Cities have paid a heavy toll: industrial expansion boosted output but degraded air quality, while rivers like the Yamuna and the Ganga absorbed waste as factories prioritised production over protection. None of this appears as a loss in standard growth figures, even though it directly harms public health.

The second cost is human displacement. Big infrastructure projects, especially dams, have uprooted millions of people from their land, often the poorest and most marginalised communities. This is where one pioneering Indian scholar’s work becomes essential.

Irawati Karve and the people behind the projects 🔗

Irawati Karve (1905-1970) was a pioneering anthropologist who founded the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pune. While she is widely remembered for her studies of kinship and caste, she also conducted what is regarded as the first anthropological study of development-caused displacement by a large dam in India, examining the people uprooted by the Koyna dam in Maharashtra.

Karve’s findings were quietly devastating. She did not argue that the dam was unnecessary. Instead, her research showed how the government, despite its stated good intentions, failed to deliver justice to the displaced. The resettlement was hurried and left families struggling. The displaced received cash compensation, which Karve considered unjust for people who were often poor and unable to navigate a new economic world with a lump sum of money. Her work was decades ahead of its time in connecting development to questions of displacement, rehabilitation, and ecological concern.

Karve’s message is simple but profound. Behind every project celebrated as “progress,” there are real people who bear its costs. Development that ignores them is not really development at all – it is a transfer of benefits from the weak to the strong.

The myth that growth equals progress 🔗

For a long time, a nation’s success was measured almost entirely by its Gross Domestic Product. The assumption was that if the economy grew, everyone would eventually benefit through a “trickle-down” effect. The Indian experience exposes the cracks in this belief.

Growth without fairness 🔗

Economic expansion since the 1991 liberalisation has been impressive, but the gains have been deeply uneven. The fruits of growth have not been evenly distributed, leaving a large section of the population behind. By some estimates, the top 10% of the population holds the overwhelming majority of national wealth, while problems like jobless growth and rural distress persist. Inequality in income distribution has grown even as headline figures soared.

This creates a stark contradiction: rapid economic growth coexisting with pervasive social inequality. A rising GDP can mask the reality that millions still lack adequate healthcare, education, and basic infrastructure. Growth, by itself, guarantees neither fairness nor wellbeing.

Amartya Sen and development as freedom 🔗

The economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen offered the most influential challenge to the growth-only view. In his landmark book Development as Freedom, Sen argued that development should be understood not in terms of income or GDP, but as the expansion of the real freedoms that people enjoy.

For Sen, freedom is both the goal of development and its main engine. Real development means removing what he called “unfreedoms” – poverty, poor health, lack of education, tyranny, and the denial of opportunity. This is the heart of his capability approach: poverty is best understood as a deprivation of capabilities, not merely a shortage of income. What matters is what people are actually able to do and to be.

Consider two people with the same income. One lives in a region with clean water, good schools, and accessible healthcare; the other has none of these. They may look equal on a balance sheet, but their real freedom to lead a life they value is vastly different. Sen’s framework captures this difference, which GDP simply cannot. His thinking directly shaped the United Nations’ Human Development Index, which measures progress through health and education alongside income.

Toward sustainable and inclusive development 🔗

Putting these critiques together points to a clear conclusion: development must be redefined to include sustainability and inclusion, not just expansion. Economic growth should not come at the cost of environmental ruin or social injustice.

This is the logic behind the global shift toward sustainable development, captured in the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which tie together poverty reduction, inequality, and climate action as inseparable parts of a single agenda. The same thinking appears in domestic policy through the emphasis on inclusive growth – the idea that economic progress must reach all sections of society, especially the marginalised, while protecting the environment for future generations.

What contextualised development looks like in practice 🔗

A more responsible approach involves a few key shifts:

• Better measurement: Moving beyond GDP to include indicators of health, education, environmental quality, and social equity gives a fuller picture of real progress.
• Ecological balance: Protecting natural resources, investing in renewable energy, and treating environmental costs as genuine costs rather than invisible side effects.
• Justice for the displaced: Heeding Karve’s warning by ensuring that those who bear the burden of projects are genuinely rehabilitated, not merely compensated and forgotten.
• Expanding freedoms: Following Sen by treating education, healthcare, and social opportunity as the substance of development, not as luxuries to be funded only after growth arrives.

Contextualising development, then, is not about rejecting progress. It is about insisting that progress be measured by how it affects real people and the planet they live on. Truman’s confident vision of 1949 set the world on a single track. The work of thinkers like Karve and Sen reminds us that the track itself deserves scrutiny – and that a better one is possible.

What do you think? If you had to design a single indicator to replace GDP as the measure of a nation’s success, what would it capture? And when a development project benefits a city but uproots a village, who should decide whether it goes ahead?

References

1. https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/19/inaugural-address
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Four_Program
3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342122270_The_first_anthropological_study_on_development_caused_displacement_by_a_big_dam_in_India
4. https://www.ijrar.org/papers/IJRAR19K7816.pdf
5. https://www.iipa.org.in/GyanKOSH/posts/transforming-india-policy-levers-for-sustainable-inclusive-growth
6. https://www.developmenteducationreview.com/issue/issue-8/amartya-sens-development-freedom-ten-years-later
7. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/27466009_Amartya_Sen's_Development_as_Freedom
8. https://sdgs.un.org/goals
9. https://uppcsmagazine.com/inclusive-growth-as-the-central-point-of-development-strategy-in-india/