Synopsis Development discourse had a spectacular and long career. But the rarely comes across a short overview of this in non-technical language intelligible to scholars from different disciplines, policy makers, bureaucrats and concerned citizens. This book which constitutes the texts of three lectures delivered by a sociologist fills this gap. Tracing the conceptual history of the discourse on development the author locates the cognitive blackouts’ common to all the approaches to development namely, disparity, displacement, distress and discrimination and suggests that to remedy this deficit we need to put development pluralism on the agenda. This is the argument of lecture I. Development is intended to address deprivation. Paradoxically the ongoing process of ‘development’ not only deepened but also widened deprivation. The explanation of this paradox is sought in terms of the changing structure of deprivation and the new victims produced by the successive social revolutions. The need to stress the dialectical interwining between the nature of the system and the unfolding deprivation is highlighted in lecture II. Lecture III critically examines the two routes prescribed to get out of the impasse created by development. Through an examination of the role of technology in human lives it has been demonstrated that technology has been both an oppressor and an emancipator. Therefore, technological pluralism which recognizes different levels of technology appropriate for different context and sectors in the way out. After unfolding the inherent contradictions contained in viewing ‘development as freedom’, it is suggested that for rapid material development freedom may have to be restricted at the initial stage but for sustaining high quality of life in the long run freedom is an imperative.