In China, jobs in modern industries have actually declined with the growing employment in light industries. Modern industrial jobs have come down by 20 million since the 90s paving the way for light industries in the countryside. Across the world, many countries are adopting just this. Light industries are nothing but cottage industries, usually less capital intensive than heavy industries and consumer oriented. India has to develop a new model of sustainable industrialisation where the lost traditions are brought alive. Can India think of a model of light industrialisation? Can India bring about an industrialisation which respects labour above all. Can a transformation bring back Tagore's dream when he wrote in 1928 that Villages are like women. In their keeping is the cradle of the race.

Man has been digging holes into the very foundations, not only of his livelihood, but also of his life; he is feeding upon his own body. The reckless wastage is best seen in the villages, where the light of life is being dimmed, the joy of existence dulled, the threads of social communion snapped. It should be our mission to restore the circulation of life’s blood into these maltreated limbs of society; to bring to the villages health and knowledge; wealth of space in which to live; wealth of time in which to work, rest and enjoy; respect which will give them dignity; sympathy which will make them realise their kinship with the world of men, and not merely their subservient position.

At the time that Tagore was writing, there was still a semblance of balance in this salient relationship of human society between villages and cities. Since independence the imbalance in favour of cities has grown rapidly.

We in urban India live proudly today in a copycat economy, whose worn-out template has been given to us by the declining industrial cultures of the Western world. We love the big. We fear being small. And yet, isn’t it true that the tiniest things so often are of great consequence?

What might light industrialisation in India look like? It will certainly use machinery, but will economise on it. It will eschew capital-intensive technologies and assembly-line mass production which have already rendered tens of millions of our working people redundant.

“Villages are like women. In their keeping is the cradle of the race. They are nearer to nature than towns, and in closer touch with the fountain of life. They possess a natural power of healing. It is the function of the village, like that of women, to provide people with their elemental needs, with food and joy, with the simple poetry of life and with those ceremonies of beauty which the village spontaneously produces and in which she finds delight".

“Mother Earth has enough for the healthy appetites of her children and something extra for rare cases of abnormality. But she has not nearly enough for the sudden growth of a whole world of spoilt and pampered children.”