More than 200 years ago, when Thomas Malthus, a British population scientist, wrote that population growth is destined to be checked by natural resource depletion and inevitable human want and misery, he was primarily emphasising on subsistence and food - a topic that hardly features in our discussions around sustainability today. A discourse that was thereafter mostly buried within academics, especially demographers and economists, found prominence only when The Club of Rome commissioned a study to a team led by Donald and Donella Meadows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1972. The team at MIT simulated a computerised world model and entered into it data assuming that population, industrial production and pollution would continue to grow exponentially in the future as they have in the past. They predicted that as of 1972, the limit was only a generation away.