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Worsening socioeconomic conditions in the Third World have underscored the urgency of implementing a development path that de-emphasizes growth and technological monoculture. The technological orientation of this development paradigm has been variously called intermediate, progressive, alternative, light-capital, labor-intensive, indigenous, appropriate, low-cost, community, soft, radical, liberatory, and convivial technology. However, appropriate technology, for reasons to be addressed later, has emerged as the allembracing rubric representing the viewpoints associated with all the other terms.

From Gandhi's perspective, any concern with goods requires mass production, but concern with people necessitates production by the masses. The Charkha (spinning wheel) was Gandhi's ideal appropriate technology device, and he saw in it a symbol of freedom, self-reliance, and a technical means that was right for India. The idea of technology discriminately enriching a minority of people at the expense of the majority or putting masses of people out of work to increase profit was in Gandhi's view counterproductive and unacceptable. However, Gandhi was not uncompromising in his rejection of large-scale, capital-intensive industrial enterprises. Modern-sector industrial development, in Gandhi's view, should supplement and reinforce the development of small-scale industries and agriculture in the hinterland.

The rationale was that with appropriate technology the chances of its acceptance by those for whom it was intended would be greatly improved.