Number of words: 333

Complex imported ideas, forced through the retort of Indian sensibility, often come out cleansed of content, and harmless; this seems so regularly to lead back, through religion and now science, to the past and nullity: to the spinning wheel, the bullock cart. Intermediate Technology should mean a leap ahead, a leap beyond accepted solutions, new ways of perceiving coincident needs and resources. In India it is circle back to something very like the old sentimentality about poverty and the old ways, and has stalled with the bullock cart; a fascinating intellectual adventure for the people concerned, but sterile, diverse from reality and usefulness.

And while, in the south, science seeks to improve the bullock cart, at Ahmedabad in Gujarat, at the new modern and expensively equipped National Institute of Design, they are – on a similar intermediate principal and as part of the same cult of the poor – designing or redesigning tools for the peasants. Among the finished products in the glass showroom downstairs was a portable agricultural spraying machine, meant to be carried on the back. The bright yellow plastic casing looked modern enough; it was hard to know why at Ahmedabad – apart from the anxiety to get the drab thing into bright modern plastic – they had felt the need to redesign this piece of equipment, which on the tea gardens and elsewhere is common place and, it might be thought, sufficiently reduced to simplicity. Had something been added? Something had, within the yellow plastic. A heavy motor, which would have crippled the peasant called upon to carry it for any length of time: the peasant who already in some parts of India, has to judge tools by their weight and, because he has sometimes to carry his plough long distance in his field, prefers a wooden plough to an iron one. My guide acknowledged that the spray was heavy, but gave no further explanation.

Excerpted from Pages 121 to 122 of ‘India: A wounded civilization’ by VS Naipaul