The Indians’ Digital Media & Communication For Sustainable Development

From January 2007, after 13 years of blogging for Asian & PH Agriculture, today I am at the stage of my journalistic career where I am looking elsewhere for other advocacies and expressions of sustainable development. That is how I found on the Internet the book Media & Communication in Sustainable Development published by the Society for Education & Research Development, SERD, in Haryana, India (above image from the cover). It is a thick book, more than 400 pages, and there are more than 40 authors, an average of 10 pages each. I am not surprised, because “communication for sustainable development” is a new and hot topic. And next to the Philippines, India claims mastery of a second language, English, except that their variant is British and PH is American.

The book is edited by Vikas Kumar & Pawan Gupta. Mr Kumar has a PhD from Kurukshetra University in Haryana, India, and authored 2 books. Mr Gupta is Director of the Army Institute of Management & Technology in Greater Noida.

I am a Filipino residing in Manila, but I love their book because it tackles 3 subjects very, very close to my heart: media, communication and sustainable development.

I have been studying the book for 3 days, and I am sorry to say it fails itself. Well, it succeeds 50% – there is the media-communication part; in fact, the book is all communication. But it fails 50% – the sustainable development part. No author and no Editor ever mentions, which means they all assumed, that everybody knew and everybody agreed on what they were thinking as sustainable development. A dangerous professorial absent-mindedness! (They even forgot the year of publication – I can’t see it. I must say the Editors and the Publisher are not digital masters.)

The definition or description or delineation of what is “sustainable development” should be right in the Editor’s Introduction for the readers to appreciate the book.

If you ask me what I consider sustainable development, I will say that it must be technically feasible and economically viable and environmentally sound and socially acceptable.

Technically feasible– As planned and claimed, the technology or system, T/S, works. This is operations. Economically viable – Proven in repeated uses by farmers, say, the T/S is economical in resources and therefore worthy of being adopted. Environmentally sound – The T/S does not waste environmental resources, or only very little of it. Socially acceptable – The users are the final arbiter of a T/S – do they accept it?

In the Preface, the book says:

Sustainable development is a Global will to improve everyone’s quality of life, including that of future generations, by reconciling economic growth, social development and environmental protection.

It is the quality of life that is all-important.

However, definition of quality of life is very much subjective in nature and varies from one continent to another, from one region to another, one country to the next and most importantly one community to another.

That is exactly why you have a 4^th requirement for sustainable development: socially acceptable!@517