This is the story of a Himalayan community and their struggle for a quality of life, both for themselves and for the environment which shelters them. Robert Alter has spent a lifetime serving the people of what is now the new hill state of Uttaranchal. As he reflects upon his life and work at the NGO he set up and co-ordinated, his humanistic approach and gentle narrative transform and transmute experiences of the everyday. Ordinary lives take on epic proportions as men and women come together to forge a new future against ancient barriers of exploitation and neglect, bringing to their lives a sense of shared purpose. Located within the contemporary discourse of human geography, ecology and development, the intensely human stories of these hill people are told against a backdrop that gave the world the defining experiences of the Chipko movement, the Tehri Dam controversy and the ‘Save the Doon’ campaign. Water for Pabolee challenges many prevailing notions of development. It helps re-define sustainability as the capacity of those most in need of change to take actual charge of it. Pabolee is symbolic of communities and households across the globe where access to water is the touchstone of survival as well as of a life beyond mere existence. In the words of Nitin Desai, Secretary-General of the World Summit on sustainable development 2002: ‘If you get water right, all the other factors of sustainable development fall into place’. Water for Pabolee speaks for communities and activists struggling today to do just that. It draws on their experience to tell us of what and who must change if people, and the authorities responsible for their interests, are at last to ‘get it right’. Making its appearance in the International Year of the Mountain, Water for Pabolee is about the forces that are shaping our world, and the choices that will determine if a better life can be a reality for millions.
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