Does Culture Make A Difference? : Progress and Development in India and its Implications Book

Contents: Foreword/Surendra Munshi. Preface/Martin Walde. I. Perspectives: 1. The grammar of progress and development/Martin Walde. 2. Culture: Universalism, relativism or what else?/Jorn Rusen. 3. Modernity and the sense of loss/Ashis Nandy. II. Tradition and religion: 3. Time and history in Indian traditions and its implications for the concept of progress and development/Debi Prasad Chattopadhyay. 4. Progress, religion, rationality: The importance of cultural differences/Triloki N. Madan. III. Dimensions of development: 5. Human development and multiculturalism/Ramaswamy Sudarshan. 6. Reaching the millennium development goals: a history of India’s Anti-Poverty Strategy/Pronab Sen. 7. Reducing poverty in the reform process/Vinod Vyasulu. 8. Poverty eradication–South Asia’s Burdens: A question of urgent redressal/Shobha Raghuram and Manashi Ray. IV. Environmental issues: 9. Ecological footprints, culture and environmental concerns/Madhav Gadgil. 10. Nature, knowledge and culture/Vandana Shiva. V. Developmental projects and community participation: 11. Causes of success and failure of German Development Cooperation: experiences from evaluations and the relevance of culture and participation/Alexandra Caspari. 12. The city from here: Urban development and slum communities in Calcutta/Venkateswar Ramaswamy. VI. Conclusion: 13. A summary of the Conference/Sriparna Basu. Notes on Contributors.

"Is culture still important for the twenty-first century world-society that is in the making?

Are terms like ‘progress’ and ‘development’ transcultural and universally applicable, or do they have unique and distinct echoes in every culture?

These fundamental questions were at the heart of a three-day conference, organized by Geothe Institute/Max Mueller Bhavan, Calcutta and the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ), featuring distinguished panelists from India and Germany who took a searching look at ‘development’ in its Indian application as well as at the possibilities for Indo-German cooperation in development.

This volume contains the most important contributions to the conference and several articles that have been written exclusively for this publication. Tracing the contours of many views around the ideas of progress, modernization and development, coming at them from the perspective of diverse disciplinary specialisms and activisms, this collection helps us comprehend in practical terms various oft-used words such as ‘progress’, ‘development’, ‘dynamics’, ‘change’ or ‘modernization’." (jacket)