| Anil Agarwal: A Profile Anil Kumar Agarwal (54) was the founder of the Centre for Science
and Environment, India’s leading environmental NGO. Agarwal, graduated as an engineer
from one of India’s leading engineering colleges in 1970, but gave up a promising
technical career to become a science journalist in order to explore the country’s
scientific and technological needs of its poor people. He joined Delhi’s leading
daily, Hindustan Times, as a science correspondent in 1973 and soon discovered
India’s most evocative environmental movement known as the Chipko Movement in 1974.
This was the first report of a people’s movement in India or probably anywhere else
in the developing world to protect the environment. The women of the Himalayan village,
Reni, threatened to hug the trees if the government allowed them to be felled.
The reportage of this movement not only led to a nationwide interest in environmental
conservation but also brought home to Agarwal the importance that the environment and its
natural resource base hold for the local village economy and for meeting the daily needs
of village people in terms of water, firewood, fodder, manure, building materials and
medicinal herbs. This was still a time when the leadership of the developing world still
believed that economic development must take precedence over environmental conservation.
But this understanding of the relationship between the poor and their environment soon
turned Agarwal into a lifelong environmentalist and a reknowned environmental analyst and
writer. Agarwal has widely argued that because the poor of developing world are so heavily
dependent on the health of their environment, economic development in the developing world
must go hand in hand with environmental conservation. He argued that development of the
Gross National Product is as important as the conservation of the Gross Nature Product. In
other words, economic development and environmental conservation must go hand in hand in
developing countries. This argument provided the social rationale for an environmental
movement to grow within a poor developing country like India and slowly influenced the
civil society across the developing world.
In 1987, Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland in
her report, Our Common Future, captured this concept to give it the name of
‘sustainable development’. Today, Agarwal has more than 20 books to his credit.
In 1986, the arguments contained in the two citizens’ reports on the State of
India’s Environment, conceptualised and co-edited by him, attracted the attention of
the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi who asked Agarwal to address his Council of
Ministers, a rare invitation for an Indian writer.
Agarwal has spent a lifetime advocating policies that
involve the people in natural resource management and learn from India’s own
traditions. He also has a deep interest in the management of pollution, especially air
pollution, and the threat that environmental change poses to public health. At the
international level, he has argued for equitable arrangements in dealing with the global
warming problem. |
