schumaher small is beautiful

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S M A L L IS BEAUTIFUL.Copyright @ 1973 by E. F. Schumacher.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America . No part of thisbook may be used or reproduce d in any manner without written permissionexcept in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., IO East 53d Street,New York, N.Y. 10022.

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Small is Beautifu

Economics

as if People Mattered

E. F. Schumacher

Harper L Row, PublishersNew York, Evanston, San Francisco, London


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III

II. Social and EconomicProblems

Calling for the DevelopmentIntermediate Technologyof

INTRODUCTION

In manyplaces in the world oday the poor are getting

poorer while the rich are getting richer, and the establishedprocesses of foreign aid and developm ent planning appearto be unable to overcome this tendency. In fact, they oftenseem to prom ote it, for it is always easier to help those whocan help themselves than to h elp the helpless. Nearlyall th eso-called developing countries have a mod em s ector wherethe pa tterns of living and working are similar to tho se ofthe d eveloped countries, but theyalso have a non-modemsector, accounting for the vast majority of t he total po pd a-tion, where the patterns of living and working are not onlyprofoundly unsatisfactory but&o in a process of accelerat-ing decay.

I am concerned here exclusivelywith the problem ofhelping the people in the non-modem sector.This does notimply the suggestion that constructive workin the modemsector should be discontinued, and there can be no doubtthat it will contin ue in any case. Butit does imply the con-viction that all successes in the modem sector are likely tobe illusory un less thereis also a healthy gr ow th -o r at easta healthy ond ition of stability-among the very reat

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numbers of people today whose life is characterised not onlyby dire poverty but also by hopelessness.

THE NEED FOR INTERMEDIATE TECHNOLOGY

Th e Cunditim of the PoorWhat is the typical condition of the poor in most of the so-called developing countries? Their work opportunities areso restricted that they cannot work their way out of misery.They are underemployed or totally unemployed, and whenthey do find occasional work their productivity is exceed-ingly ow. Some of them have and, but often oo little.Many have no land and no prospect of ever getting any.They are under-employed or totally unemployed, and whendrift into the big cities. But there is no work for them in thebig cities either and, of course, no housing. All the same,they flock into the cities because the chances of fnding somework appear to be greater there than in the villages wherethey are nil.

The open and disguised unemployment in the rural areasis often thought to be due entirely to population growth,and no doubt this is an important contributory factor. Butthose who hold this view still have to explain why additionalpeople cannot do additional work. It is said that they cannotwork because they lack capital. But what is capital? It isthe product of human work. The lack of capital can explaina low level of productivity, but it cannot explain a lack ofwork opportunities.

The fact remains, however, that great numbers of people

do not work or work only intermittently, and that they aretherefore poor and helpless and often desperate enough toleave the village to search for some kind of existence in thebig city. Rural unemployment roduces mass-migrationinto cities, leading to a rate of urban growth which wouldtax the resources of even the richest societies. Rural un-employment becomes urban unemployment.

Help t o Those wh o N e e d it M o s tThe problem may herefore be stated quite simply thus:what can be done to bring health to economic life outsidethe big cities, n the small towns and villages which still con-tain-in most cases-eighty to ninety per cent of the totalpopulation? As long as the development effort s concen-trated mainly on the big cities, where t is easiest o establishnew industries, to staff them with managers and men, and

to find finance and markets to keep them going, the com-petition romhese industries will further disrupt anddestroy non-agricultural production in the rest of the coun-try, will cause additional unemployment outside, and willfurther accelerate the migration of destitute people intotowns that cannot absorb hem. Th e process of mutualpoisoning will ot be halted.

It is necessary, therefore, that at least an important partof the development effort should by-pass the big cities andbeirectlyoncernedwith the creation of an agro-

industrial structure in he rural and small-town areas. Inthis connection it is necessary to emphasise that the primaryneed is workplaces, literally millions of workplaces. No one,of course, would suggest that output-per-man is unimpor-tant; but the primary consideration cannot be to maximiseoutput per man; it must be to maximise work opportunitiesfor the unemployed and under-employed. For a poor manthe chance to work is the greatest of all needs, and evenpoorly paid and relatively unproductive work is better thanidleness. Coverage must come before perfection, to usethe words of Mr. Gabriel Ardant.

It is important that there should be enough work forail ecause that is the only way to eliminate anti-productive reflexes and create a new state of mind-thatof a country where labour has become precious and mustbe put to the best possible use.

In other words, the economic alculus whichmeasuressuccess in terms of output or income, without consideration

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of the number of jobs, is quite inappropriate in the condi-tions here under consideration, or it implies staticapproach to the problem of development. The dynamicapproach pays heed o the needs and reactions of people:their first need is to start work of some kind that bringssome reward, however small; it is only when hey experi-ence that their time and labour is of vdue that they can

become interested in making it more valuable. It is there-fore more important that everybody should produce some-thing than that a few people should each produce a greatdeal, and this remains true even if in some exceptional casesthe total output under the former arrangement should besmaller han it would be under the latter arrangement. Itwill not remain smaller, because this is a dynamic situationcapable of generating growth.

An unemployed man is a desperate man and he is practi-cally forced into migration. This is another justification forthe assertion that the provision of work opportunities is theprimary need and should be the primary objective of econ-omic planning. Without it, the dri ft of people into the largecities cannot be mitigated, et alone halted.

The Nature of the TaxkThe task, hen, s to bring into existence millions of newworkplaces in the rural areas and small towns. That modemindustry, as it has arisen in the developed countries, cannotpossibly fulfil this ask should be perfectly obvious. It hasarisen in societies which are rich in capital and short oflabour and therefore cannot possibly be appropriate forsocieties short of capital and rich in labour. Puerto Ricofurnishes a good illustration of the point. To quote from arecent study :

Development of modem factory-style manufacturingmakes only a imited contribution to employment. ThePuerto Rican development programme has been unusu-ally igorous and successful; but from 1952-62 theaverage ncrease of employment in E.D.A.-sponsored

plants was about 5000 a year. With present labour forceparticipation rates, and in the absence of net emigrationto the mainland, annual additions to he Puerto Ricanlabour force would be of the order of 40,000 . . .

Within manufacturing, there should be maginativeexploration fmall-scale, more ecentralised, morelabour-using forms of organisation such as have persistedin the Japanese economy to the present day and havecontributed materially to its vigorous gr~wth.~

Equally powerful llustrations could be drawn from manyother countries, notably India and Turkey, where highlyambitious five-year plans regularly show a greater volumeof unemployment at the end of the five-year period than atthe beginning, even assuming that the plan is fully imple-mented.

The real task may be formulated in four propositions:First, that workplaces have to be created in the areas

where the people are living now, and not primarily in metro-politan areas into which they tend to migrate.

Secund, that these workplaces must be, n verage,cheap enough so that they can be created in large numberswithout this calling or an unattainable level of capitalformation and imports.

Third, that the production methods employed must berelatively simple, so that the demands for high skills areminimised, not only in the production process itself but alsoin matters of organisation, raw material supply, financing,

marketing, and so forth.Fourth, that production hould be mainly rom ocalmaterials and mainly for local use.

These four requirements can be met only if there is aregional approach to development and, second, if there isaconscious effort to develop and apply what might becalled an intermediate echnology. These two conditionswill now be considered n turn.


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The R e g i d m Dktrct ApproachA given political unit is not necessarily of the right size foreconomic development to benefit hose whose need is thegreatest. In some cases it may be oo small, but in thegenerality of cases today it is too large. Take, for example,the case of India. It is a very large political unit, and it isno doubt desirable from many points of view that this unityshould be maintained. But if development policy s con-

cerned merely-r primarily-with India-as-a-whole, thenatural drift of things will concentrate development mainlyina few metropolitan areas, in the modern sector. Vastareas within the country, containing eighty per cent of thepopulation or more, will benefit ittle and may indeed suffer.Hence the twin vils of mass unemployment and massmigration into the metropolitan areas. The result of devel-opment s that a fortunate minority have heir ortunesgreatly increased, while those who really need help are leftmore helpless than ever before. If the purpose of develop-

ment s to bring help to those who need it most, eachregion or district withm the country needs its owndevelopment. This is whatsmeant by a regionalapproach.

A further illustration may be drawn from Italy, a rela-tively wealthy country. Southern Italy and Sicily do notdevelop merely as aresult of successful economic growthin Italy-as-a-whole. Italian industry is oncentratedmainly in the north of the country, and it s rapid growthdoes not diminish, but on the contrary ends to intensify,

the problem of the south. Nothing, succeeds ike successand, equally, nothing fails ike ailure. Competition romthe north destroys production in the south and drains d ltalented and enterprising men out of it . Conscious effortshave to be made to counteract these tendencies, for if thepopulation of any region within a country is by-passed bydevelopment it becomes actually worse off than before, sthrown into mass unemployment, and forced into massmigration. The evidence of this truth can be found all overthe world, even in the most highly developed countries.

In this matter it is not possible to give hard and fastdefinitions. Much depends on geography and local circum-stances. A few thousand people, no doubt, would be too fewto constitute a district for economic development; but afew hundred thousand people, even if fairly widely scat-tered, may well deserve to be treated as such. Th e whole ofSwitzerland has ess than six million nhabitants; yet it isdivided into more than twenty cantons, each of which is a

kind of development district, with the result that there is afairly even spread of population and of industry and notendency towards the formation of excessive concentrations.

Each district, ideally speaking, would have some sort ofinner cohesion and identity and possess at least one town toserve as a district centre. There is need for a cultural strut-ture just as there is need for an economic structure; thus,while every village would have a primary chool, therewould be a few s m a l l market towns with secondary schools,an d the district centre would be big enough to carry an

insti tution of higher learning. The bigger the country, thegreater is the need for internal structure and for a decen-tralised approach to development. If this need is neglected,there is no hope for the poor.

The Need fo r an Approprictte TechmtogyIt is obvious that t h i s regional or district approach ha sno chance of success unless it is based on the employmentof a suitable technology. Th e establishment of each work-place in modern industry costs a great deal of capital-

something of the order of, say,S2000

on average. A poorcountry, naturally, can never d o r d t o establish more thana very limited number of such workplaces within any givenperiod of time. A modern workplace, moreover, can bereally productive only within a modem environment, andfor this reason alone is unlikely to fit into a district con-sisting of rural areas and a few small towns. In everydeveloping country one can fh d industrial estates set up inrural areas, where high-grade modem equipment is stand-ing idle most of the time because of a lack of organisation,

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finance, aw material supplies, transport, marketing facili-ties, and the hke. There are then complaints and recrimina-tions; but they do not alter the fact that a lot of scarcecapital resources-normally imports paid romcarceforeign exchange-are virtually wasted.

The distinction between capital-intensive and labour-intensive industries is, of course, a familiar one in develop-ment theory. Although it has an undoubted validity, it doesnot really make contact with the essence of the problem; forit normally induces people to accept the technology of anygiven line of production as given and unalterable. If it isthen argued that developing countries should give prefer-ence to labour-intensive rather than capital-intensiveindustries, no intelligent action an ollow,because thechoice of industry, in practice, will be determined by quiteother, much more powerful criteria, such as aw materialbase, markets, entrepreneurial interest, etc. The choice ofindustry is one thing; but the choice of technology to be

employed after the choice of industry has beenmade, squite another. It is therefore better to speak directly oftechnology, and not cloud the discussion by choosing termslike capital intensity or labour intensity as ones point ofdeparture. Much he same applies to another distinctionfrequently made in these discussions, that between large-scale and small-scale industry. It is true hat modernindustry is often organised in very large units, but large-scale sby no means one of its essential and universalfeatures. Whether a given industrial activity is appropriateto tlle conditions of a developing district does not directlydepend on scale, but on the technology employed. A small-scale enterprise with an average ost per workplace ofE2000 is j u s t as inappropriate as a large-scale enterprisewith equally costly workplaces.

I believe, therefore, that the best way to make contactwith the essential problem s byspeaking of technology:economic evelopment n overty-stricken areas can befruitful only on the basis of what I have called intermediatetechnology. In he end, intermediate technology willbe

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labour-intensive and will lend itself to use in small-scaleestablishments. But neither labour-intensity nor small-scale implies intermediate technology.

Definition of Intermediate TechnologyIf we define the level of technology in terms of equipmentcost per workplace, we can call the indigenous technologyof a typical developing country-symbolically speaking-adi I-technology, while that of the developed countries couldbe called a di 1000-technology. The gap between these twotechnologies is so enormous that a transition from the oneto he other is imply mpossible. In fact, the urrentattempt of the developing countries to infiltrate the ~ 1 0 0 0 -technology into their economies nevitably ills off the.E I-technology at an alarming rate, destroying traditionalworkplaces much faster than modem workplaces can becreated, and thus leaves the poor in a more desperate andhelpless position than ever before. If effective help is to be

brought to those who need it most, a technology is requiredwhich would range in some intermediate position betweenthe LI-technology and the .E I ooo-technology. Let us call it-again symbolically speaking-a LI oo-technology.

Such an intermediate technology would be immenselymore productive than the indigenous echnology (which soften in a condition of decay), but it would also beimmensely cheaper than he sophisticated, highly capital-intensive technology of modern industry. At such a level ofcapitalisation, very large numbers of workplaces could becreated within a fairly short time; and the creation of suchworkplaces would be within reach for the more enterpris-ing minority within the district, not only in financial termsbut also in terms of their education, aptitude, organisingskill, and so forth.

This last point may perhaps be elucidated as follows:The average annual income per worker and the average

capital per workplace in the developed countries appear atpresent to stand in a relationship of roughly I : . Thisimplies, in general erms, that i t takes one man-year to

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create one workplace, or that a man would have to save onemonths earningsa year for twelve years to be able to own aworkplace. If the relationsh p wereI : O , it would requireten man-years to create one workplace, and a manwouldhave to save a mon ths earnings a year for12 0 years beforehe could make imself owner of a workplace. This , ofcourse, is an impossibility, and it follows that he SIOOO-technology transplanted into a district which is stuck on thelevel of a E I-technolo gy sim ply canno t spread by any pro-cess of n orma l growth.It cannot have a po sitive demonstra-tion effect; on the co ntrary, as can be o bserved all over th eworld, its demo nstration effect swholly negative. T h epeople, to whom the Iooo-technology isnaccessible,simply give up and often cease doing even those thingswhich they had do ne previously.

The intermediate technologywouldalso fit much moresmoothly into the relatively unsophsticated environment inwhich it is to be utilised. The equipment would be fairly

simple and therefore understandable, suitable for mainten-ance and repair on the spot. Simple equipment is normallyfar less depen dent on raw materials of gre at purity or exactspecifications and much more adaptable to market fluctua-tions than highly sophisticated equipment. Menare moreeasily trained; supervision, control, and organisation aresimpler; and here is far less vulnerability to unforeseendifficulties.

Objections Raised and DiscussedSince the idea of interm ediate technology was first pu t for-ward, a number of objections have been raised. Th e mostimmediate objections are psychological: You are trying towithhold the best and make us put up with somethinginferior and outdated . Thi s is the voice of th ose who are n otin need, who can help themselves and want to be assisted inreaching a higher standard of living at once.It is not hevoice of those with whomwe arehere concerned, thepoverty-stricken multitudes who lack any real basisofexistence, whether in rural or in urban areas, who have

neither the best nor the second best butgo short of eventhe m ost essential means of subsistence. On e sometimeswonders how many development economists have any realcomprehension of th e con dtio n of th e poor.

Thereare economists and econom etricians who believethat development policy can be derived from certainallegedly fixed ratios, such as the capital/outputratio. Theirargument ru ns as follows: T h e amoun t of available capitalis given. Now, you may concentrate it on a small num ber ofhighly capitalised workplaces, or you may spread i t thinlyover a large numb er of cheap workplaces.If you do helatter, you obtain less total ou tpu t han if you do th eformer; you therefore fail to achieve the quickest possiblerate of economic growth. D r. K aldor, for instance, claimsthat research has shown that the most modern m achineryproduces much more outputperun it of capital investedthan less sophisticated machinery which employs morep e o ~ l e . ~ N o tnly c apital bu t also wagesgoods are held

to be a given quantity, and this quantity determines thelimits on wages employment in any country at any giventime.

If we can employ only a limited n um ber of peo pleinwage labour, then let us employ them in the most pro-ductive way, so that they make th e biggest possible con-tribution o he national outpu t, because that will alsogive the quickest rate of economic grow th. You shouldno t go deliberately out of your way to reduce p roduc-tivity in order to reduce the amo unt of cap ital per worker.Th is seems to me nonsense because you may find that byincreasing capital per worker tenfold you increase theoutput per worker twentyfold. There is no questionfrom every point of view of the superiority of the latestand more capitalistic technologies.

Th e f irs t thing that might be said about these argumentsis that they are evidently staticin character and fail to takeaccount of the dynamics of development.To do justice to


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the real situation it is necessary to consider the reactionsand capabhties of people, and not confine neself tomachinery or abstract concepts. As we have seen before, itis wrong to assume that the most sophsticated equipment,transplanted into an unsophisticated environment, will beregularly worked at full capacity, and if capacity utdisationis low, then the capital/output ratio is also low. It is there-fore fallacious to reat capital/output ratios as echnologi-

cal facts, when they are so largely dependent on quite otherfactors.Th e question must be asked, moreover, whether there is

such a law, as Dr. Kaldor asserts, that the capital/outputratio grows if capital is concentrated on fewer workplaces.No one with the slightest industrial experience would everclaim to have noticed the existence of such a law, nor isthere any foundation for it in any science. Mechanisationand automation are introduced to increase the productivityof labour, i.e. the worker/output ratio, and their effect onthe capital/output ratio may just as well be negative as itmay be positive. Countless examples can be quoted whereadvances in technology eliminate workplaces at the cost ofan additional input of capital without affecting the volumeof output. It is therefore quite untrue to assert that a givenamount of capital invariably and necessarily produces thebiggest total output when it is concentrated on the smallestnumber of workplaces.

The greatest weakness of the argument, however, lies intaking capital-and even wages goods-as given quanti-ties in an under-employed economy. Here again, the staticoutlook inevitably leads to erroneous conclusions. The cen-tral concern of development olicy, as I have arguedalready, must be the creation of work opportunities forthose who, being unemployed, are consumers--on howevermiserable a level-without contributing anything to he

of either wages goods or capital. Emp!oym&t is theprecondition of everything else. The output of an idleis nil, whereas the output of even a poorly equippedcan be a positive contribution, and this contribution

can be to capital as well as to wages goods. The distinc-tion between hose two is by no means asdefinite as theeconometricians are inclined to thi nk, because the definitionof capital itself depends decisively on the level of techno-logy employed.

Let us consider a very simple example. Some earth-moving ob has to be done in an area of hg h unemploy-ment. There is a wide choice of technologies, ranging fromthe most modern earth-moving equipment to purely manualwork without tools of any kind. The output is fixed by thenature of the job, and it is quite clear that the capital/outputratio will be highest, if the input of capital is kept lowest.If the job were done without any tools, the capital/outputratio would be infinitely large, but the productivity per manwouldbeexceedingly ow. If the jobwere done at thehighestevel of modern technology, the capital/outputratio would be low and the productivity per man very high.Neither of these extremes s desirable, and a middle way

has to be found. Assume some of the unemployed men werefirst set to work to make a variety of tools, including wheel-barrows and the Me, whle others were made io producevarious wages goods. Each of these lines of production inturn could be based on a wide range of different techno-logies, from the simplest to the most sophisticated. The taskin every case would be to find an intermediate technologywhich obtains a fair level of productivity without having toresort to the purchase of expensive and sophisticated equip-ment. The outcome of the whole venture would be an econ-omic development going far beyond the completion of theinitial earth-moving project. With a total input of capitalfrom outside which might be much smaller than would havebeen involved in the acquisition of the most modern earth-moving equipment, and an input of (previously unemployed)labour much greater than the modern method would havedemanded, not only a given project would have been com-pleted, but a whole community would have been set on thepath of development.

I say, therefore, that the dynamic approach to develop-


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ment, which treats the choice of appropriate, intermediatetechnologies as the central issue, opens up avenues of con-structive action, which the static, econometric approachtotally fails to recognise.

This leads to the next objection which hasbeen raisedagainst the idea of intermediate technology. It is argued thatall this might be quite promising if i t were not for a notori-ous shortage of entrepreneurial ability in the under-developed countries. This scarce resource should thereforebe utilised in the most concentrated way, in places where ithas the best chances of success, and should be endowedwith the finest capital equipment the world an ffer.Industry, it is thus argued, should be established in or nearthe big- cities, in large integrated units, and on the highestpossible level of capitalisat ion per workplace.

The argument hinges on the assumption that entre-preneurial ability s a fixed and given quanti ty, and thus

again betrays a purely static point of view. I t is, of course,neither fixed nor given, being largely a function of the tech-nology to be employed. Men quite incapable of acting asentrepreneurs on the level of modem technology may none-theless be fully capable of making a success of a small-scaleenterprise set up on the basis of intermediate technology-for reasons already explained above. In fact, it seems to me,that the apparent shortage of entrepreneurs in many devel-oping countries today is precisely the result of the negativedemonstration ffect of a sophisticated technology nfil-trated into an unsophisticated environment. The introduc-tion of an appropriate, intermediate technology would notbe ikely to founder on any shortage of entrepreneurialability. Nor would it diminish the supply of entrepreneursfor enterprises in he modern sector; on the contrary, byspreading familiarity with ystematic, echnical modesofproduction over the entire population, it would undoubtedlyhelp to increase the supply of the required talent.

Two further arguments have been advanced against theidea of intennediate technology-that its products wouldrequire protection within the country and would be unsuit-

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able for export. Both arguments are based on mere surmise.In fact a considerable number of design studies and cost-ings, made for specific products in specific districts, haveuniversally demonstrated that the products of an intelli-gently hosen intermediate technology ould ctually becheaper than those of modern factories in the nearest bigcity. Whether or not such products could be exported is an

open question; the unemployed are not contributing toexports now, and the primary task is to put them to work sothat they will produce useful goods from local materials forlocal use.

Applicabilityof Intermediate TechnologyTh e applicability of intermediate technology s, of course,not universal. There are products which are themselves thetypicaloutcome of highly sophisticated modem industryand cannot be produced except by such an industry. Theseproducts, at the same time, are not normally an urgent needof the poor. What the poor need most of all is simple things-buildingmaterials, lothing, household goods, gricul-tural implements-and a better return for their agriculturalproducts. They also most urgently need in many places:trees, water, and crop storage facilities. Most agriculturalpopulations would be helped immensely if they could them-selves do he first stages of processing their products. Allthese are ideal fields for intermediate technology.

There are,however, also numerous applications of amore ambitious lund. I quote two examples from a recentreport :

The first relates to the recent tendency (fostered bythe policy of most African, Asian and Latin Americangovernments of having oilrefineries in their own tem-tories, owever mall their markets) for internationalfirms to design mall petroleum refineries with lowcapital investment per unit of output and a low totalcapacity, say rom 5000 to 30,000 barrels daily. Theseunits are as efficient and low-cost as the much bigger and

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morecapital-intensive efineries corresponding to con-ventional design. The second example relates to packageplants for ammonia production, also recently designedforsmall markets. According to some provisional data,the investment cost per ton in a package plant with asixty-tons-a-day capacity may be about 30,000 dollars,whereas a conventionally esigned unit, with a dailycapacity of I O O ons (which s, for a conventional plant,

very small) would require an investment of approximately50,000 dollars per ton.

The idea of intermediate technology oes not implysimply a going back in history to methods now out-dated,although a systematic study of methods employed n thedeveloped countries, say, a hundred years ago could indeedyield highly suggestive results. It is too often assumed thatthe achievement of western science, pure and applied, iesmainly in the apparatus and machnery hat have been

developed from it, and that a rejection of the apparatus andmachinery would be tantamount to a rejection of science.This isanexcessively superficial view. The real achieve-ment lies in the accumulation of precise knowledge, and thisknowledge canbeapplied in a great variety of ways, ofwhich the current application in modern industry is onlyone. The development of an intermediate technology, there-fore, means a genuine forward movement into new territcry,where the enormous cost and complication of productionmethods for the sake of labour saving and job eliminationis avoided and technology is made appropriate for labour-surplus societies.

That the applicability of intermediate technology sextremely wide,even if not universal, willbeobvious toanyone who takes the trouble to look for its actual applica-tions oday. Examples can be found in every developingcountry and, indeed, in the advanced countries as well.What, then, is missing? It is simply that the brave and ablepractitioners of intermediate technology do not know of oneanother, do not support one another, and cannot be of

assistance to those who want to follow a similar road butdo not know how to get started. They exist, as it were, out-side the mainstream of official and popular interest. Thecatalogue issued by the European or United States exporterof machinery s still the prime source of technical assist-ance* and the institutional arrangements for dispensing aidare generally such that there is an unsurmountable bias infavour of large-scale projects on the level of the mostmodem technology.

If we could turn official and popular interest away fromthe grandiose projects and to the real needs of the poor, thebattle could be won. A study of intermediate technologies asthey exist today already would disclose that there is enoughknowledge and experience to set everybody to work, andwhere there are gaps, newdesign studies could be madeveryquickly. ProfessorGadgil, director of the GokhaleInstitute of Politics and Economics at Poona, has outlinedthree possible approaches to the development of inter-

mediate technology, as follows:

One approach may be to start with existing techniquesin traditional industry and to utilise knowledge ofadvanced techniques to transform them suitably. Trans-formation implies retaining some elements in existingequipment, skills and procedures . . . This process ofimprovement of traditional technology is extremelyimportant, particularly for that part of the transition inwhich a holding operation for preventing added techno-logical unemployment appears necessary. . . .

Another approach would be to start from the end ofthe most advanced technology and to adapt and adjust soas to meet the requirements of the intermediate. . . . Insome cases, the process would also involve adjustment tospecial local circumstances such as type of fuel or poweravailable.

A k d pproach may be to conduct experimentationand research n a direct effort to establish intermediatetechnology. However, for this to be fruitfully undertaken


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it would be necessary to define, for the scientist andthetechnician, the limiting economic circumstances. Theseare chefl y the scale of operatioils aimed at and the rela-tivecosts of capital and labour and the scale of theirinputs-possible or desirable. Such direct effort at estab-lishmg intermediate technologywould undoubtedly becondu cted agains t the backgrou nd of knowledge ofadvanced technology in the field. However,it could covera much widerange of possibilities than the effortthrough the adjustment and adaptation approach.

Professor Gadgil goes on to plead th at:

T he main attention of the personnel on he appliedside of N ational Labo ratories, technical institutes and thelarge university departments must be concentrated ont h s work. T h e advancement of advanced technologyinevery field s being adequately pursued in th e developedcountries; the special adaptations and adjustments re-quired in India are not and are not llkely to be givenattention in any other country. They must, therefore,obtain the highest priority inour plans. Intermediatetechnology should become a national concern and not, asat pres ent, a neglected field assigned to a small numb erof specialists , set a ~ a r t . ~

A similar plea might be made to supranational agencieswhichwould be well-placed to collect, ystematise, and

develop the scattered knowledge and experience alreadyexisting in this vitally important field.

In summary we can conclude:I . The dualeconomy in the developing countries will

remain for the foreseeable future. Themodem sectorwill not be able to absorb the whole.

2. If the non-modern sector is not made the objectofspecial development efforts, it will continue to dis-integrate; this disintegration will continue t o manifestitself in mass unemploym ent and mass migration into

metropolitan areas; and this will poison economic ifein th e modern sector as well.

3. T h e poor can be helped to help themselves, bu t onlyby making available to them a technology that recog-nises the economic boundaries an d limitations ofpoverty-an intermed iate technology.

4 . Action programmes on a national and supranationalbasis are needed to develop intermediate technologiessuitable for the promotion of full employment indeveloping countries.


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the Teilhard Centre for the Futureof Man, London, 23rdOctober 1971.

Part III-The Third World

Based on the Anniversary Address delivered to the generalmeeting of the Africa Bureau, London , 3rd M arch1966.

DEVELOPMENT

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS CALLING FOR THEDEVELOPMENT OF NTERMEDIATETECHNOLOGY

First published by UNE SCO , Conference on the Applica-tion of Science and Technology to he Development ofLatin America, organised by UN ES CO with the coopera-tion of The EconomicCommissionor Latin America,Santiago, Chile, September1965.I .

2.

3.

4-5.

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A Planor Full Employm ent in the DevelopingCountries by Gabriel Ardant (International Labour

Wages and Employment in the Labour-SurplusEcoo-omy by L. G . Reynolds (dme rcaz Economic Revew,

Industrialisation in DevelopngCountries, editedbyRonaldobinsonCambridgeniversityverseasStudies Committee, Cambridge, 1965)IbidIbd, quoted from Notes onLatin American IndustrialDevelopment byNuiioF. de FigueiredoZbid

Technologies Appropriate for the Total DevelopmentPlan by D . R. Gadgil in Appropriate Technologies forZndian Industry (SI ET Institute, Hyderabad, ndia,

& W, 1963)

1965)

1964)

TWO MILLION VILLAGESFirst published in Britain and the World in the Seventies,a collection of Fab ian Essays, edited by George Cunning-ham, Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., London, 1970.

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schumaher small is beautiful

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