This study examines a particularly successful rural development program: the partnership of the Aga Khan Rural Support Program (AKRSP) and the small farmers of northern Pakistan. The Aga Khan Rural Support Program was established in 1982 to act as a catalyst for the development of rural people living in the high mountain valleys of the Himalayas, Karakorum, and Hindu Kush. The experiment is based upon the premise that rural people can improve their economic and social status through organization at the village level. This experiment in regional development--affecting the lives of nearly 500,000 people--has been outstandingly successful and should provide a model with generalizable lessons for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers in economic development. The World Bank has concluded that the Aga Khan Rural Support Program continues to be remarkably successful . . . [and] provides a hopeful prospect that rural development can be made to work. The authors demonstrate that the organizational model found in the AKRSP is sustainable provided prospective beneficiaries participate fully, and that the AKRSP experiment can be used successfully in other rural underdeveloped areas--that the rural poor can be organized to promote their own economic and social development.

It is a historical narrative of human progress, in which the author has included his own experience on three continents. The first part of this book focuses on the emergence of the 'Modern Age' in the West. In the second part, the author describes the arrival of Muslim invaders, Arabs, Afghans and Turks, their conquest and long rule in India to provide a contextual background for the evolution of an Indo-Muslim culture. The third part includes a description of the conditions of India in the eighteenth century, including the disintegration of Mughal Empire and the contest for power and territory among the native regional groups (Afghans, Marathas, Sikhs, and Jats) along with the European trading companies. It was during this period that two of the author's ancestors migrated from the Roh (hills in the north-west) to the Gangetic plain: Rohila settlements in the Gangetic plain were the foundation for his family's march of progress. The fourth part comprises an account of the arrival of Europeans in India, rising power of the East India Company, consolidation of the British Raj, and the events leading to the partition and independence of India in 1947. It was during the British rule that the ideas of progress imported from the West were grafted on to a very diverse cultural and social landscape of India. Paradoxically the British imperial rule laid the foundation for modernity in India. In the final part of the book, the author writes about his family's three migrations, the first two of his ancestors on the sub-continent and the last his own to Canada via the Netherlands. The narrative ends with optimism about the future, given the experience of progress so far and the great potential that humans possess.