Ashoke Chatterjee (AC) does not like to be called ‘design guru’. But it is really not possible to come up with a better title for this piece on him. For though not a designer, his influence on design and design education in India has been immense. After all, he was Executive Director of India’s first and leading design school, the National Institute of Design (NID) from 1975 to 1985; a Senior Faculty Advisor for Design Management and Communication from 1985-1995, and Distinguished Fellow at NID from 1995 till his retirement in 2001.
AC played a critical role in conceptualizing the meaning of design in the Indian context. In 1977, he brought together UNIDO and International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) members, designers, design-educators and others from across the world to the NID campus at Ahmedabad for a 2-day symposium. The meeting ended with the historic Ahmedabad Declaration which embodies the value of humanism in design. The core of the statement affirms:
- ‘Its firm conviction that design can be a powerful force for the improvement of the quality of life in the developing world;
- Its firm belief that designers must have a clear understanding of the values of their own societies and of what constitutes a standard of life for their own people;
- That design in the developing world must be committed to a search for local answers to local needs, utilising indigenous skills, materials and traditions while absorbing the extraordinary power that science and technology can make available to it;
- That designers in every part of the world must work to evolve a new value system which dissolves the disastrous divisions between the worlds of waste and want, preserves the identity of peoples and attends the priority areas of need for the vast majority of mankind’.
AC has lived this spirit and has helped designers and design-students across the country imbibe this spirit. He made it a fundamental principle of design education that students needed to understand that design is not restricted to contributing to business profits but also includes contribution made to the livelihoods of artisans, farmers, and the marginalized; and that designers must grapple with social issues. He was one of the early votaries of sustainability and brought this understanding to the education of designers.
As AC is always the first to aver, he is not a designer. He went to Woodstock School, after which he took an Economics degree at St Stephens College, New Delhi. Following this, he did his MBA at Miami University in Ohio, USA. He was with the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC, where he worked as a communications specialist, the Indian Tourism Development Corporation etc., before finding his home in NID and Ahmedabad. He has advised, and advises, several national and international agencies including INTACH, Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (Geneva), the Gujarat Ecology Commission, the Government of Rajasthan Department of Health. He served for many years as honorary president of the Crafts Council of India.
We have had the good fortune to regularly interact with AC over the decades. He was a not-infrequent visitor to the Centre for Environment Education where we worked for many decades, and each occasion brought its laughter, learning and a warm sense of having a caring mentor. He has been on the Governing Council (GC) of CEE from the early years, and as a local GC member, was invited for brainstorming, meetings, events, certificate-distributions and what have you—and if he did not have any prior commitments, he would attend. He generously served on the advisory committee of several large projects that CEE was involved in, and brought his wisdom to bear not only on the content and design, but also on stakeholder management. As programme leaders, we would often be called into the GC meetings to make presentations on our projects; the butterflies in our tummies would settle when we met his twinkling eye, and he nodded ever-so-slightly to us. And after the presentation, he would sometimes pass us a little chit saying that we had done a good job. That truly made our day!
Ashoke Chatterjee played a key role in the National Drinking Water Mission, which in the late 1980s was tasked with ‘providing safe drinking water to all villages, assisting local communities to maintain sources of drinking water in good condition, and for specific attention for water supply to scheduled caste and scheduled tribe communities.’ AC prepared a road map on the communications aspect of this initiative, without which the gains could neither have been attained nor sustained. He worked closely with CEE in developing communication and education on fluorosis, a disease endemic to large parts of Gujarat.
With all his commitments, AC writes too. Dances of the Golden Hall on the art of Shanta Rao, and Rising, on empowerment efforts among deprived communities in rural Gujarat, are among his well-known books. His latest work (with Harji Malik), in English and Hindi, is titled Learning Together at Jawaja and chronicles the 50-year journey of the Jawaja project.
There is never a meeting with AC when we don’t come away feeling enriched—both as professionals and as human beings.
THE RURAL UNIVERSITY, JAWAJA
One of the criticisms against academic institutions is that they are far removed from every day realities and seldom contribute in solving real-life challenges. The Jawaja project undertaken by IIM Ahmedabad in partnership with the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad is an early exception. Ashoke Chatterjee was a key part of this.
It was in 1975 that Ravi Matthai, IIM-A’s legendary first fulltime director, set out on a journey to see how corporate management principles could be used to solve the major problem facing India–poverty. Ravi Matthai had stepped down as Director in 1972, and could now devote time to such a project.
The decision was taken to work in Jawaja, a drought-prone district of Rajasthan, consisting of about 200 villages and a population of 80,000. There seemed very little scope for development there, given the arid landscape and lack of water and other physical resources. But Prof Ravi Matthai had a different perspective, because he saw people as the biggest resource.
As the project team understood the area better, they found that the area had a 300-year tradition of leather-craft. The communities there were also skilled at weaving. And so the project decided to build on these skills to develop sustainable livelihoods for the communities there. Prof Matthai roped in NID to join hands with IIM-A, to work on livelihoods and empowerment of the communities in Jawaja. Thus along with Ashoke Chatterjee, his counterpart in NID, he started the journey which involved many faculty from both institutes.
The idea was to connect traditional artisans with contemporary disciplines of management and design, and knowledge institutions which had this knowhow. There were some important basic principles underpinning the effort. The first and foremost was that the relationship was one of mutual respect and learning—after all, even as the communities learnt new skills, the faculty of the institutions were learning how their knowledge could be put to use in solving social problems. Another important aspect was to see how much of the value chain could be controlled by the artisans and communities themselves, so that their incomes could be enhanced. The idea was to innovate and design new products which would have new markets, so that the traditional value chains could be broken and the craftspeople could play a greater role in more areas. The focus was also on working in groups, to give greater resilience and strength to the efforts.
The process was, by design, a gradual one, moving from basic products which did not need very high quality craftsmanship, such as leather school bags and woven floor mats, to higher value ones like office supplies, trendier bags, and high-end furnishings.
The challenges were, of course, many. Apart from the need to design new products which would use the old skills, technologies and equipment, another major concern was quality control.
To quote Ashoke Chatterjee on the subject: The Jawaja project was one experiment which integrated many aspects of craft: heritage, culture, social structure, design vocabulary and NID’s design inheritance. But it was not a craft project; it was development defined as self-reliance for those who have been the most dependent in our society. Ravi Matthai explained self-reliance thus: Can people do something for themselves tomorrow that others are doing for them today and they should be released of that dependence? Ultimately, Jawaja taught us that the whole is about people and you have to attend to people first and last or else nothing you do will be sustained.
The depth of AC’s understanding of craft traditions in India, and his humanity are reflected when he says: Jawaja provided a benchmark in crafts: first focus on and understand the community before we intervene in crafts. Who are the people? What are their earnings? What are their aspirations? What is in it for them? Before we start giving people lectures about their ancient traditions, ask what’s in it for them to stay in the tradition? In the case of Jawaja, many of the heritage problems for leather workers were things they wanted to run away from. Their caste elders told them they must not be identified as leather workers; they must have some other identity. When they stopped flaying animals they were left stranded without an identity. We often look at tradition and heredity as some exquisite artefact, but for them it was centuries-old discrimination.
The Jawaja project was an educational experiment-in-action based on the idea that development activities must be a vehicle for learning. The enduring success of the bold experiment is seen even today at several levels.
The first was the creation of self-reliant institution of crafts people–the Artisans’ Alliance of Jawaja and its associations. These started to manage all links of the value chain in Jawaja, from raw material procurement, finances, bank dealings, design and technology know how, and marketing processes. These are active even today, and continue to innovate, produce and market products which are highly valued.
The second is the impact of the project on the larger development scene. It was the learning from running this grassroots education and empowerment project that the idea of setting up a specialized institution for education in rural management came up, and the Institute of Rural Management (IRMA), Anand, was born. This was given shape by Prof Ravi Matthai and two other professors who had been with IIM-A—Dr Kamla Chowdhry and Dr.Michael Halse.
The Jawaja experiment’s widespread legacy is that it influenced development sector thinking on how to approach community-based livelihood interventions in a spirit of mutual respect and learning.
–Meena
From: Inspirations: Individuals and Institutions That Defined India’s Sustainability Journey. Mamata Panday, Meena Raghunathan.Bookwell Publications. 2025.
See also: The Jawaja Project https://millennialmatriarch464992105.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=3624&action=edit
Pic: NID site
Millennial Matriarchs 
