ASTRA-CST at the Start Line (1974–1990)

A number of research institutes sought to address this disconnect in the post-independence development path and the IISc responded with its own research programmes dedicated to the needs of rural India in 1974 with the setting up of the Centre for Application of Science and Technology to Rural Areas (ASTRA, now renamed Centre for Sustainable Technologies (CST). What commenced as a discourse on alternative developmental models with a thrust on appropriate technologies centred around renewable energy and local resources gradually crystallised by the late 1980s into ideas of sustainable development. As its canvas of concerns grew, the ASTRA-CST had to reorient its vision incorporating the larger ‘sustainable development goals (SDG) as we understand today. The paper attempts to fathom how certain fields of research and development (R&D) became mainstreamed at this Centre and led to various technology development efforts. The first phase of activity of ASTRA-CST has not been adequately discussed in literature and this paper attempts to extend and to address that shortcoming. At this time, villages of rural India could best be described as reasonably closed ecosystems with moderate interactions achieving a low-level equilibrium. However, there was very little data about the various material flows, natural and man-made resource cycles, especially that relevant to land productivity, food consumption and its production pattern, water resource and security, health, rural industry, resource transformations and underlying skills, processes and efficiencies, residue management and re-use, environmental impacts, etc. and evolving such a knowledge-base was the key output of the first phase. The second phase involving various ‘homegrown’ technological and socio-technical interventions including stages of participatory technology development efforts resulted in large scale ‘dissemination’. A third phase addressed larger sustainable technologies solutions transgressing boundaries of the rural and urban that had marked the earlier phases. It is heartening to note that in some areas such as biomethanation, water-wastewater reuse, eco-friendly houses, biomass based alternative fuel platforms, rural industrial skilling, participatory technology development, etc. have gradually become policies at the national and global level and ASTRA-CST’s contribution is yeoman.