I have the honour to welcome you all to the presentation ceremony of the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding for 1992. We are delighted that Mr. Maurice Strong is personally present here to-day to receive the Award. I have great pleasure to extend to him a hearty welcome.

We are bestowing the Nehru Award to-day on one who has striven more than anyone else in adding a new dimension to international understanding -- understanding not only among nations but between humankind and its environment. In that sense Mr. Maurice Strong is a transcendental internationalist who has worked for a new compact between the nations and peoples of the world and nature and the forces of nature which sustain the earth and life on the earth.

The philosophy and the programmes propagated by Mr. Maurice Strong strike a chord in the minds of the people of India. They are in line with what our sages and great men have taught us from ages past. The Upanishads said: "All in the manifested world, consisting of moving and non-moving, are covered by the Lord. Use its resources with restraint. Do not grab the property of others, distant and yet to come." Could there be a better motto for to-day's conservationists and environmentalists? Mahatma Gandhi, who was opposed to the concept of "nature red in tooth and claw" and preached non-violence as the law of life, had held that "we should feel a more living bond between ourselves and the rest of animate creation". A friend wrote to him long ago in 1932 warning him of the danger of "blue brain".

Gandhiji, who read the letter while lying under a tree, wrote back:- "Who knows what the blue brain is! But living under a tree might cause `green brain', and it would certainly be a good thing to have it." What ancient Indian philosophy and modern environmentalist movement have emphasized is the need for a green brain, a green mind and a green heart particularly in the present electro-mechanical-electronic age.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru combined both the ancient and the modern in his "basic approach" to life and affairs. He advocated "the basic approach of peaceful means" keeping in view "the ideal of life force which is the inner base of everything that exists". Noting that "the highly industrialized countries of the world are now facing many problems both in the physical and psychological sphere of lack of adjustment of man to his environment", he projected his basic approach to the practical schemes for the planned development of India.

As early as 1957, when environmental awareness was not very evident in the world, he wrote to the Chief Ministers of the Indian States: "I should like to refer to something which is rather important and which, perhaps, has not received much attention. We want both to exploit as well as conserve our natural resources. Sometimes the desire to exploit outruns discretion and we forget the part of conservation..... The growth of science and technology, which has brought so much power to man, has sometimes made him ignore the fact that nature cannot be trifled with. There is a certain interdependence between man and his environment, and any upsetting factor may bring about harmful consequences". Referring to the many river valley projects that India was building he advised that before the projects were launched ecological survey of the area should be made in order to find out what the effect would be on the drainage system and on the flora and fauna of that area so that imbalance of nature could be avoided.

A lover of mountains, birds, animals and plants he also warned against too much use of insecticides, herbicides and destruction of birds and cutting down of trees which would tamper with the economy of nature. This scientific and practical approach was an integral part of Nehru's wider philosophy of peace and peaceful co-existence and his belief that "the welfare and the peace of the world require the extermination of poverty and disease and ignorance from every country so as to build up a liberated humanity." Nehru was saying in his own way what his daughter, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, put it later so dramatically at the Stockholm Conference, viz "Poverty is the biggest polluter", and what Mr. Maurice Strong has been propagating as a crusador for sustained development.

Mr. Maurice Strong has stated more than once:- "Eradication of poverty must become a primary goal of the world community". In his O.D. Skelton Lecture in Canada he said: "We cannot divorce ourselves from the gathering crisis of the developing world or from the degeneration of the countries of the east, from the point of view of our own economic and security interests, as well as our moral responsibilities. Industrialized countries have an obligation to reduce the environmental impacts of their own economic activities and to leave space for developing countries to fulfil their development needs and aspirations." It is well-known that the present environmental crisis in the world is the result of the excessive and reckless consumption of the resources of the earth by the great and powerful developed countries.

The United States alone is estimated to have consumed during the past fifty years more fossil fuels and minerals than the rest of humanity in recorded history. In this context, as Mr. Maurice Strong has put it: "It is difficult to envisage that the major environmental and social imbalances which technological change has produced, can be addressed successfully unless the gross imbalance between the rich and the poor is redressed". This was one of the central themes of the Stockholm and Rio Summit Conferences. Whether the flow of funds and environmentally sound technologies to the developing world take place in adequate measure to meet the challenge remains a moot question.

The developing world to-day is faced with the unbearable burden of a double revolution, that of effecting an industrial revolution and of a technological revolution for protecting the environment and promoting sustainable development. It is often conveniently forgotten that the developed countries have achieved their present high level of economic prosperity through massive pollution and destruction of the environment regardless of democratic and human rights in an earlier and darker era of history. This is what Maurice Strong put in softer terms when he said: "In creating wealth, the North has created the principal global risks; the developing countries should share in those risks; they should share in the benefits, too." This is what he set to achieve at the Rio Summit.

Though the achievements have not been concrete enough at Rio he managed to produce "an explosion of awareness about these issues in all parts of the world". We in India are to-day fully aware of these issues and have taken serious steps, in spite of the enormous burden of effecting basic economic development simultaneously with introducing sophisticated and costly environmental safeguards. This is along the lines of "the eco-industrial revolution" that Mr. Maurice Strong had advocated, an industrial revolution that integrates environment into the economic life and developmental process. Ultimately, as he has argued, this will vitalize our economies and open up" an exciting new era of opportunity for innovation and creativity." But it is a painful process for every country and insupportable for poor developing countries, unless sizeable flows of technologies and finances from the North to the South take place.

The problems confronting the world in the field of development and environment are not merely financial and technological. Mr. Maurice Strong himself has once said that "We are on a course leading to a tragedy", unless the North dampens its consumption of resources and the South escapes from poverty. Indeed, over-consumption of resources and goods in the developing world and poverty and over-population in the third world has posed a challenge to mankind that is economic as well as spiritual. The galloping consumerism in the world has engulfed the developed countries and is invading even the poor South. Mahatma Gandhi pointed out the danger of this ceaseless craving of the human being for more and more, and said "I make bold to say that the Europeans themselves will have to remodel their outlook, if they are not to perish under the weight of the comforts to which they are becoming slaves".

This was not the view of an ascetic kill-joy. Gandhiji readily admitted that "a certain degree of physical harmony and comfort is necessary". But he said: "above a certain level it becomes a hindrance instead of help. Therefore the ideal of creating an unlimited number of wants and satisfying them seems to be a delusion and a snare. The satisfaction of one's physical needs, even the intellectual needs of one's narrow self, must come at certain point to a dead stop before it degenerates into physical and intellectual voluptuousness". Thus it seems that no kind of financial and technological solutions would by themselves meet the challenge that faces mankind without some abatement of "the physical and intellectual voluptuousness" into which modern technological civilization is advancing or rather sinking.

Mr. Maurice Strong, has in modern and scientific parlance, exposed and posed both sides of this problem. From Stockholm to Rio, indeed throughout his fascinating career, he has worked unceasingly to expound the challenges involved and to evolve a global consensus among governments as well as people's organizations to deal with them. It has been a task that demanded enormous devotion, persistence and statesmanship. At Stockholm and Rio he emerged as a "a friend of the earth" and an extra-ordinary planetary negotiator. He is now looking beyond Rio to implement some of his ideas in the practical management of the mega project, the Ontario Hydro, and is involved in the new initiative of an Earth Council in order to develop a global constituency for his noble ideas. For his valuable contributions in promoting international understanding on issues of paramount importance for the "common future" of mankind the Jury of the Jawaharlal Nehru Award has decided to bestow this prestigious Award on Mr. Maurice Strong.               

May I now call upon the Director General of Indian Council of Cultural Relations to read the citation of the Award, and request Rashtrapatiji to confer the Jawaharlal Nehru Award on Mr. Maurice Strong.

Thank you