The current Punjab problem of Sikh terrorism and fundamentalism could be viewed in the light of 'development', where the green revolution has made the rich richer and the poor poorer. The poor peasants happen to be Sikhs and the rich traders and business men happen to be urban Hindus. Traditionally a wheat growing area, Punjab (and neighbor Haryana) has taken to growing high-yielding, high-quality rice - mostly for export and profit taking. This breed of rice requires a great deal of irrigation. The water supply being limited and coming from the rivers of the Himalayan mountains, water dispute is a major bone of contention and the resource of demand for Khalistan. Here again the main victims are women and children who suffer most brutally in the male games of violence and rioting. If development is counted in the industrialization of the country, most of the industries are capital rather than labour intense. They have helped largely in destroying indigenous cottage industries: plastic has replaced pottery; mechanization has deprived women of their traditional jobs of weeding and hoeing, harvesting, threshing, and marketing vegetables, fish, etc.

They cannot operate tractors, threshers, harvester combines, air conditioned vending trucks - these have been usurped by the males. Whole communities of rural poor women and children have been forced out of their homes, into the city slums which are hot beds of crime, drugs and prostitution. If development means multi-million dollar huge dams, in India there is enough evidence to show that whole villages have been uprooted, forests, hundreds of years old, have been submerged, and the neighboring hills, the fragile Himalayas, made unstable, giving rise to landslides, floods and earthquakes. (For example, Tehri Garhwal Dam, The Narbada Project. The Bodhghat Project (sponsored by the World Bank) in the tribal Gondwana belt of Madhya Pradesh and others).⁵ The government promises concrete houses, schools, and hospitals for the uprooted tribals, totally destroying their ecosystem, their indigenous herbal healing, their life-style of harmony with the forest, land and their thatched homes, practical in providing airy coolness during long hot and humid summers and easily renewable.

Education and literacy are said to be the fourth cornerstone of development. Much needs to be reflected upon regarding what, how and for whom. An ethics, a morality of development needs to be understood and implemented. Unless and until the various gaps in society, in living, the dualities between people, the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural, the industrial and the agrarian, the first, second, third and fourth worlds, man and woman, father and child; between I and thou resolved, development, literacy and education will only breed violence, destruction and degeneration.

The power and arrogance of literacy knows no bounds. The arrogance of the written word has brought us to the brink of annihilation. The very paper I write on, the very words that I am spawning, are felling a tree, a large price indeed for literacy. Ganga Devi remains a crucial question in our thrust for literacy and development.

¹Kamla Bhasin and Bina Agarwal, Women and Media: Analysis Alternatives and Acts (Delhi: Kali for Women with ISIS, International Pacific and Asian Women's Forum, 1984).

²1981 Government of India Census figures.

³ Zafar Futehally, "The Hills are Alive, Just Alive," (New Delhi: The Express Magazine, May 29, 1988).

⁴Kishwar Ahmed Shirali and Sandhya Kanwar, "Mental Illness and Hill Women: A Demographic Study," (New Delhi: Journal of Personality and Clinical Studies, 3(2), 1987), pp. 103-108.

⁵ Chandra Kant Naidu, "The Dam on the River Narmada," (New Delhi: The Express Magazine, May 29, 1988).

Kishwar Ahmed Shirali teaches Psychology at Himachal Pradesh University. Shimla (Northern India). She is active in the women's movement in India, and participated in the Women, Literacy and Development Conference (World Literacy of Canada) held in Toronto. F ebruary.1988.