What is Development and Stages
of Development
Lecture 23
What is Development
• What is the purpose of development? ls it to
fulfill the needs of the many or the needs of the
few? Over centuries they have been telling us it
former and what was delivered was the latter.
• The ordinary people in certain ways share many
products of development like transport,
newspapers, TV, to a degree email and internet,
telephone and mobiles.
• They have developed access to foreign products,
mechanization of the farming process and
modem medicine.
• However the process of development has
segregated the society while people have gained
less and lost more by means of needs while a few
may be saved by the Cardiac Centre.
• Hundreds of thousands are dying of Hep A, B, C,
tuberculosis, diarrhea, diabetes, kidney failure
and cancer. Million, do not have ever access to a
qualified doctor and at least half the Pak is in the
midst of excess food production.
• Yet here we are with our uncritical acceptance
of the "modern", of "development'' of
"growth" of "science" and "technology". The
superiority of the whole paradigm of modem"
runs very deep in us.
• Development means movement towards
modernity and that comes about through
modest technology.
• Modern technology are machines and
geochemical, biological process that provide
comfort by reducing our work, keeping us abreast
of the latest news, provide easy access to
information through TV, internet, print media,
mass produce, items of daily needs like processed
food, stitched clothes, provide means of fast
transport to travel to other cities and from one
end of the world to the other Technology
regulates extremes of weather and provides
bridges across rivers and almost to store water to
irrigate otherwise dry lands.
• Technology has enabled us to enhance food
production and provide pesticides for the
health of plants and medicine for the health of
man. Of course it has also provided us the
means to annihilate our enemy from a
distance with the touch of a button.
• But there is no medicine without side effects
while modernity has provided us with so many
comforts and facilities it has segregated the
society into layers.
• Although in one sense it has reduced distances
through telecom, news and travel times, it has
actually distanced the people by breaking their
bonds with each other. Individualism and
selfishness pervades the family breaking
horizontal and vertical bonds.
• Whole community are in diaspora. Formerly rich
cultures are reduced to residual cultures.
• Many local languages have already disappeared others
are on the way out. Parents, grand parents and chi
ldren in one household all speak different languages,
just as lower classes, middle class and the upper class
speak different languages.
• Language is a big repository of culture and tradition
and is a means to pass on traditional values and
relations. Like the biodiversity in nature a rich cultural
diversity characterized the human society.
• But with the belief that some cultures are superior and
others are inferior the latter lose their right to exist.
• Modern education too has played a great role
in promoting modernity and killing diversity of
all types.
• Education these days is obsessed with the
singular objective of recognition and the
acceptability for a good job. It does not aim to
carry forward thehistoric tradition or to serve
the local community.
• Its aim is to serve the individual and provide
service to whosoever will pay the highest price
or salary. The individual is increasingly bereft
of any obligation to the family leave above
community.
• From dependency of the family the individuals
have shifted to the dependency of the job.
• The employees have gradually turned the
screws and the dream of a well paid job has
transformed into the nightmare of wage
slavery cutting off social and intellectual
linkages.
Traditional Society:
• This initial stage of traditional society signifies a
primitive society having no access to modern science
and technology. In other words, it is a society based on
primitive technology and primitive attitude towards
the physical World. Thus it is defined as a traditional
society “as one whose structure is developed within
the limited production function.
• Also the traditional society is not recognized as being
completely static. In this stage of a society output could
be increasing through the expansion of land area under
cultivation or through the discovery and spread of a
new crop.
