As more and more people move into cities, villages are increasingly left behind. One does not need to look internationally to observe the consequences of brain drain; this migration exists domestically as droves of the youth work force relocate to urban hubs while human capital diminishes in the country-side. As this trend continues, villages increasingly become sinks for energy, goods, services, technology, and more, while the city solidifies its role as the source. In other words, the village becomes the consumer; the city, the producer. An obvious consequence of urban migration is that cities exceed carrying capacities above which the standard of living and quality of life degrade for residents, and the environment is adversely affected from overextraction. Meanwhile, villages develop greater dependencies on cities. These cities, depending on the region, may be hundreds of kilometers away without the necessary local context to produce relevant solutions. This would be a serious outcome should villages continue to gradually lose the capacity to locally problem solve. In fact, civil rights activist Mahatma Gandhi warned that increasing dependence on external and foreign bodies made rural India vulnerable to exploitation. Traveling the length and breadth of India starting in 1915, however, Gandhi saw promising models for rural development in small community ashrams. These ashrams approached complete self-sufficiency and were effective, productive hubs for reactive governance. These experiences formatively shaped his perception of the village — during Gandhi’s time, India was home to around 700,000 villages — as the ideal ecological unit. Rural development was his priority for nation building post-British liberation. Gandhi famously said, “the future of India lies in her villages.” There have been numerous efforts across India to fulfill Gandhi’s vision. Examples include the villages of Mandede (population 795) and Pabal (population 3857), both outside of the city of Pune (population 4,569,000). Mandede and Pabal target carbon neutrality and circular production from the domains of agriculture, energy, water, waste, and services such as education and health. Remarkably, both villages are prone to drought, yet remain at the forefront of self-sufficiency experimentation and research in the country. However, efforts like these remain largely disjointed and unvalidated, sufffering from knowledge fragmentation and the lack of impact metrics. There are no widely adopted metrics in this field for concepts like self-sufficiency. This body of work aims to develop a Self Sufficiency Index (SSI) that can be applied broadly across Indian villages with different geographical, cultural, and sociopolitical contexts as a robust, comparative marker for rural development via a bottom-up approach, from which technology and policy strategies can be drawn and further evaluated. Ultimately, this body of work views the village as a node in a powerful, distributed system for development. Thus far, the village’s potential has largely remained latent. India is a fertile ground to incubate a metric like SSI given its vast network of villages, over 665,000 today, and long history of rural self-reliance. Although this work is based on self-sufficiency, its wider contribution and the author’s founding motivation are in new development metrics implemented at the village level rather than the national or multi-national level. Largely, policy and organizations established for approaching global climate goals, to take a domain-specific issue as an example, have resulted in directives to national governments and major industries — a top-down approach seen in the Conference of the Parties (COP), the Paris Climate Agreement, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) — that has so-far proven ineffective. Analysis indicates that current global climate practices projected to the end of the century will lead to a 3.2 - 4.4°C increase in temperature by the end of the century, significantly above the 1.5°C target. It is thus reasonable to propose a supplementary bottom-up approach to meeting global climate goals. Such an approach would require suitable evaluation frameworks and impact metrics, a gap in existing work that SSI strives to address. The future may indeed prove that a strategy of collective striving is the answer to the necessary ambitions of our time. Every metric has an underlying ideology. The Human Development Index (HDI) used by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), for example, considers life expectancy, education, and per capita income over other domains such as community life and civic participation. Here, the development of SSI, currently in its initial stages of formulation, is an exchange not only around methodologies, but fundamentally around the ideologies the metric will reflect.
