The most important challenge is how to provide essential public services such as education and health to large parts of our population who are denied these services at present. Education is the critical factor that will empower the poor to participate in the growth process and our performance in this area has been disappointing. Literacy is still less than 70% and while the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan has expanded access to primary schools in terms of enrolment, it has yet to provide quality education.

Values may be said to have their home in the human world. Of course, things have value for creatures other than humans. Animals seek out things, among other things care for their own kind, and for their young ones. And, it may be said that such behaviour shows that for animals too the world consists of things which have value and others which have no or negative value. But animals do not regard things as valuable or not valuable; they do not evaluate or make judgments of value.

Way back in the early 1970s, we searched for a world better than the one we saw around us, a world bigger than ourselves and our lives, a world worth living to make. The journey took us in various directions: some to devise development projects to alter rural reality, some to politics; others to theatre, poetry, writing, the arts or design in search of a language that was authentic and true to the times and yet others to rediscovering the ends and means of education. There was a restlessness, an impatience, a desire to get on with it and not just talk about it.