Defining Sustainable, Holistic and Inclusive Development

Pupils work out what development is for, and who gets left out of it, starting from their own list of what they cannot live without.

How long

45 to 60 minutes.
Add 30 minutes if you run the case study as well.

Who it is for

Secondary

How it is taught

Case study, class discussion and a short film.

What you need

Pens, notebooks, a projector and laptop with internet, sticky notes.

What it is for

To introduce needs and wants. Whose need comes first? Are we building a society that lets people in, or one that keeps them out? And to get every student to look again at their own list.
To get students thinking about what a better life actually means — and that it is not the same thing for everyone in the room.

The manual states these. What it does not state is not here.

The manual leaves this session untitled. The name is ours, taken from what the session says it is for; everything below is the manual's.

Kumati is an imaginary town and every figure in that case study was invented for the exercise — the whole point of it is to weigh indicators that contradict each other, so the numbers have been kept as the manual set them and the town is named as fictional wherever it appears. None of it is data about any real place and none of it should be quoted as such. The manual gave no source for the figures either, because there is none.

How it runs

The teaching sequence as the manual gives it.

01

Work alone — 5 minutes.
02

Ask each student to list the things they cannot live without. Alone, in their own notebook, five minutes. A list or a drawing, whichever they prefer.
03

Film: 'MAN' by Steve Cutts — 5 minutes.
04

Screen the short animation 'MAN'. It follows one man's relationship with the natural world — what he takes, what he clears, what he leaves behind, and what finally happens to him — all of it done in the name of development.
05

The film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiQU1R0tJUE
06

Discussion — the list and the film together.
07

Ask what they noticed in the film. Write it up on the board as they say it.
08

Then put the questions. The film shows the exact opposite of sustainable development: forest, river, land and animals used up to build something. Why does the balance between needs and wants matter? What happens on the day a thing runs out? Is that good development? What else could have been done? Take the answers seriously, including the ones that defend the man.
09

Case study: Kumati — 10 minutes.
10

IS KUMATI DEVELOPED? (Kumati is an imaginary town. Every figure below was made up for this exercise. None of it is real data about any real place.)
11

Kumati is a small town of about three lakh people, spread over fifty localities. A survey has just reported the following. Ask students to mark each statement: does it say Kumati is developed, or not?
12

One. Every locality has got a community hospital in the last five years.
13

Two. More than 75% of the town's children are enrolled in school.
14

Only 39% of them actually attend.
15

Three. The town's income has risen by 1.5% over seven years.
16

Four. Each community hospital has 12 qualified doctors.
17

It is supposed to have at least 20.
18

Five. Deaths from infectious disease have fallen by 5% in three years.
19

Ask who is being counted here — and who never reaches a hospital to be counted at all.
20

Six. A few years ago about 5,000 houses in one locality were pulled down to build a multiplex.
21

Those families have still not been given anywhere proper to live.
22

Seven. Literacy has gone up by 1% in two years.
23

Eight. The government has announced more than 45 new employment schemes.
24

Nineteen of them have actually started.
25

Nine. Wide roads, flyovers and high-rise buildings are going up across the town.
26

Ten. The sex ratio has moved from 760 girls per 1,000 boys to 800 girls per 1,000 boys.
27

That is four years of change.
28

So: is Kumati developed? Argue it out in groups and come back with one answer per group.
29

Ten minutes. A group that cannot agree should say so, and say where it split — that is a real answer too.
30

Or run this instead.
31

Activity: the magic lamp.
32

Split the class into four groups. Group one are small farmers in a village. Group two live in a basti in a big city. Group three keep house in a middle-income colony. Group four run businesses in the city.
33

Each group has found a lamp that grants wishes. They get five wishes for a better life, and they may not ask for money. Ten minutes to agree on five wishes that fit the life they have been handed — not the life they actually have.

Talking about it

Discussion points, worked examples and the handouts the manual prints with this session.

Points for discussion

Development and sustainable development: fairness within a generation, and fairness between generations.
Needs against wants.
What has 'MAN' got to do with sustainable development? Is there a connection at all, or is the film just angry?
Some things are a genuine need and still do damage — electricity, a vehicle. The answer there is to use them well, not to go without.
Plastic: convenience or necessity? Sort the two.
Roads and highways cut through forest. Was there another way to the same destination?
Watering a cricket pitch in a drought year.
Thirsty cash crops planted where the traditional crop needed far less.
Plantations counted as forest cover.
Overfishing and poaching.
The point is not that all development is bad. It is that development which is careless, wasteful or unfair to one group should be argued with.
Then discuss Kumati, or the lamp.
Economic and social development are tied together. Neither can be traded away for the other.
Does a bigger economy guarantee a better life?
Can a place be called developed if one section of it lives badly? Bring in child mortality, maternal mortality, malnutrition, stunting and wasting — the things that never show up in an income figure.
Did the four groups wish for different things? Which group's wishes sounded most like your own, and what does that tell you?
What is a better quality of life? Is it the same as a higher standard of living?
Standard of living is how much we consume. Quality of life is whether any of it is any good. They come apart more often than people expect.
What would it actually take to give people here a better quality of life?
How is a need different from a want? And does the line move depending on who is drawing it?
How were your needs different from the other groups' in the lamp activity?
A better life needs three things at once: people doing well, the place doing well, and enough money. Take out any one and the other two do not hold.

Where this comes from

Bridge the Gap is a compilation. This is what the manual records for this session.

The manual prints no source for this session. It is published here as Swechha has used it, adapted over years of classroom work; if you recognise its origin, tell us and we will credit it.

Before you start sets out where the compendium as a whole comes from.

Where to go from here.

Next session

Issue AnalysisSustainable Development, 3 of 11

The theme

Sustainable Development11 sessions and the background reading

All eight themes

Teach43 sessions across 8 themes

Understand the data

The whole library · the A to Z