A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

Hind Swaraj, he clearly expressed his disdain for the representative
democracy of the British parliamentary system and proposed instead a
local governance structure based on direct participatory democracy (the
Panchayat system). As for education, he proposed the Nai Talim (new
education) system that called for learning based on local production systems.
Gandhi therefore proposed a holistic philosophy rather than a
piece meal approach for practices that could lead to the common good
of humanity.
People’s Science and Practices of Decentralised Production
Schools based on nai talim came up during Gandhi’s time. One of the
earliest attempts to put his ideas of decentralised production into practice,
by working out appropriate and related science and technology innovations
was taken up by one of Gandhi’s associates, J.C. Kumarappa.
He had already helped to set up the All India Village Industries Association,
before he set up a center for appropriate rural technologies in central
India in Wardha (where the main nai talim center was also established).
Kumarappa summarized the concept of decentralised economy in a
book ‘Economy of Permanence’ that he wrote while serving a prison
sentence while fighting for India’s freedom.
Since the new government in India after independence took the path of
large scale industrial development, Gandhian ideas of decentralised development
were and are still practiced by a fairly large number civil society
groups in nearly all parts of the country.
One large organisation working in this direction is the All India People’s
Science Network (AIPSN), a prominent people’s science movement in
India.
People’s science has emerged as a major mobilisational concept in India,
evidenced by the fact that AIPSN has nearly half a million members. The
movement first originated in the southern Indian state of Kerala when a
group of left oriented scientists and writers got together to work towards
the democratization of scientific literature. Since science was
nearly totally transacted in the colonial English language in India, they
began large scale translation of scientific literature into the local Malay-
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