The ‘Future of India’ in the US Comment On This Article Below. Return to the article Karthik Kumar comments : The AID initiative is commendable. However, as an Indian sitting in India, I am distressed at all our focus on the negativeness of our approaches and the lack of imagination. For example, poverty alleviation in our collective lexicon appears to be focussed on developing alternative technologies or attempting social change through land re-distribution or some such approach. Over fifty years of attempting these and similar approaches, our efforts are still continuing. This however, is not to decry the efforts, but to point out that maybe our approach of intervention is perhaps incorrect. Perhaps instead of poverty alleviation, if one were to try the approach of wealth creation, targetted at the poor, maybe something will come out of it. The example of Grameen Bank and microcredit in Bangla Desh demonstrates the power of this approach. I have a few ideas on these, if you let me know to who I can send these ideas I shall be delighted to do so. Best wishes, Karthik Kumar Sreekumar Vijaykumar comments : I appreciate your response to the article. However, I have a few comments to make regarding your observations. I think the issue is much more complex. The reason alternative technologies haven't taken off is the lack of support for it, financially and policy wise (perhaps because it is not as romantic as high-tech). About microcredit, there is definitely an effort going on in various parts of India to start savings groups. AID has backed some of these and again, it's a good approach, but only one of the hundreds of approaches needed to solve India's problems. As Mr Sainath informed us, even in Bangladesh, microcredit accounts for less than 1 % of all credit. Most credit is still manipulated by moneylenders and big institutions. Sharmila Sridevi comments : I am interested in getting in touch with radhika rammohan