Dear Gobar Times Readers,

Our parents’ send us to school to study, become wise and get good jobs. How many of us qualify for the job advertised at the back page of this issue of Gobar Times? How many of us would want to work for Munni Worldwide Inc.? Yet the poor in India, mostly rural women and girls, do that job all the time. They use biomass. They burn firewood and gobar. They are the true managers of our natural resources and yet they are underpaid, undervalued and unrecognised. Back in the 1980s, Amulya Reddy of the Indian Institute of Science characterised the traditional approach to energy planning as "Consumption Obsessed, Supply Biased" (COBSUB) - a description that applies to not just the energy sector, but to the conventional approach to economic development as a whole. The alternative he saw was "Development Focused, End-Use Oriented, Service Directed" (DEFENDUS) model. He advocated the need for specialised agencies responsible for biomass energy and rural energy in India. If only Munni Worldwide Inc. demanded a Minister for Biomass—a Gobar Mantri for India.

– Pandit Gobar Ganesh
E-mail: panditji@cseindia.org