Also individuals jealously guarding their privacy, actually get isolated, and hence increasingly anxious about their safety and security. Remember the old adage "there is safety in numbers"? However, it is also now an accepted fact that the haphazard burgeoning numbers, in urban settlements, actually make people more insecure and isolated, while simultaneously pushing people into a frenetic search for identity. The tightening network of legal rights and laws also does not in many ways, ensure safety and security of either individuals or communities.  

Rural settlements of the earlier order, where everybody knew everybody else, ensured accountability, imposed workable moral checks and allowed for a pace of life which made for more peace and security in general, but there is no doubt, that it could sometimes be unbearably claustrophobic for some.  

The intricate dynamics of modern market practices of developed urban societies, promotes faceless infringement of individual rights, and the collective economic might of the corporate sector is always beyond the purview of the average consumer, if and when accountability is required by the consumers from them.  

How are we as consumers to enjoy the benefits of technological and scientific advances without having to trade in our health and safety? How is 'convenience' a better value than more control over one's resources? Why are paradigms of sustainability not working in favour of the consumer? All these questions now increasingly pop up for the likes of us, who are constantly watching out for consumers. One is beginning to understand that this maybe, because sustainability has two dimensions.

One, for the urban market economy of the developed countries, and the other for the natural resource-intensive developing countries, like India . Market economies to become sustainable, currently require an overhauling of their production, consumption and disposal processes, and a non-interfering approach towards the southern patterns of sustainability. This can be done at the minimum, by not invading forests and fields with unsafe biotechnology, or load water resources with toxic effluents and/or poison air and soil.   Come to think of it, we in the South don't need to do anything except continue with our sustainable good practices. It is the North which needs to learn, change and to modify its existing skills and approaches to life.   I was recently told by a Swede friend, of how robots, or rather one robot, can go forth and conquer whole forests, meaning it can cut down an entire forest in a matter of hours and reduce it to ‘packageability'.    

This to me appears a very strange and blind way to handle a living entity like a forest teeming with biodiversity. Forests are our primordial resource base alive with unimaginable range of living organisms. How can one leave it to a machine? Trees are not just wood. They are the earth in its micro-avatar; and objects of worship. But then that is incomprehensible to people of other cultures and climes.  

These are some musings for the year ahead, and on another front...     We need to share with our readers that VOICE has entered the new year by moving into a new location, which we hope will be able to accommodate our growing needs. In the last two years VOICE has grown in several dimensions and has widened its vast portfolio in the service of the consumer, to include several new activities. We have put all this on record in our Annual Issue, along with 15 of our Comparative Tests. It will be available to our readers, at the affordable price of Rs. 50 along with our January-February 2003 issue. Please order your copy directly from our new address. The details are given elsewhere in this issue.

We wish all our subscribers a very consumer-friendly year ahead and hope that you all will continue to be with us in all our work for you ALL.