Down to Earth: Spreading the environmental message

In 1992, Agarwal started Down to Earth, a fortnightly newsmagazine on environment which brings news to challenge its readers to think about sustainable development. It inspires and encourages its readers to become more environment-friendly.

The magazine’s readers are few in number compared to the size of India, just about 75,000, but all are very serious people, and mainly young. Young industrialists, teachers, civil servants, politicians, activists, scientists. Just the kind of people who will change India tomorrow. For this reason, Down to Earth is widely respected and read. Despite its small readership, the magazine has an enormous reach. It reaches out to more districts of India than any other publication except for India Today, the country’s most widely read newsmagazine.

In addition to the above activities CSE organizes training programmes for fresh graduates in environmental management, programmes for schoolchildren and teachers, and has organized India’s finest documentation centre on the environment. It has a pollution monitoring lab which provides affected communities with hard scientific data. Today nearly 100 people work in the organisation which also attracts numerous volunteers.