What is the point, Mr Bajaj of honouring Gandhian social activists with Jamnalal Bajaj Awards while you yourself cannot follow the principle of trusteeship so ardently advocated by the Mahatma?"

Down To Earth, May 30, 1993

"After decolonisation and national sovereignty, the key political issues of the 20th Century, will community sovereignty become the biggest political issue of the 21st? If, as environmental economists point out, the environment should be valued and not treated as a free god, then automatically the question is: Who should value the environment? Obviously, who better than the very people whose environment it is and who will suffer the consequences of their own decisions? It is best that they decide the trade-off between environment and development and where and at what point they want to balance the two.

If the world economy is to be run by a globally integrated market in which nation-states become weaker and economically subordinated to supranational institutions, then can we leave it to the nation state — even if its governance system is built on principles of representative democracy to manage the environment and determine resource-use patterns?"

Down To Earth, May 30, 1993

"This political economy of defecation is a topic nobody talks about. Sewage systems constitute an ecologically mindless technology. Consider first the large amount of water that is used just to carry away a small quantity of human excrete. Big dams and tubewells are needed to bring this water home leading to enormous environmental problems. Then large quantities of water that get flushed down the toilet pollute rivers and large water bodies.

This…nobody talks about. But it lies at the heart of the river cleaning programme of this country. It is neither rational, just or sustainable. A proper approach would firstly demand that the polluter must pay. If the existing and planned sewer systems are only serving the rich, then the rich must pay the full costs of their ecological depredation."

Editor’s page, Down To Earth, July 31, 1994

"The poor don’t need ‘development’. They need ‘respect’. After respect they need empowerment. In a global situation, full of market failures, where social and ecological costs are externalised, we definitely need state interventions for the good of the majority. I strongly believe that we need a universally guaranteed Global Right to Survival, not through dole, but one of work so that the poor can use their labour to regenerate their destroyed ecology."

Keynote speech delivered at the NGO Forum, World Summit for Social Development, Copenhagen, 1995

"The western economic dream is a toxic dream. And don’t listen to the typical tripe from Indian scientists and officials that India’s consumption and production of toxic substances per capita is zilch compared to Western countries. This is utter scientific nonsense trotted out to make you apathetic. It is the exposure levels that matter, which can be very high in India, because of among other causes, high pesticide residue in our food and low quality of drinking water."