Centre for Environment, Sustainability and Health - CESH

The Centre for Environment, Sustainability and Health (CESH) is an organisation which brings together young professionals from diverse fields, to move towards a common goal of sustainable development. The initiative has a novel approach, as it recognises that most the developmental issues that our world face are multidimensional and warrants intensive inter-sectoral cooperation. It accepts that narrow minds and tubular vision are not the means to find out the solution to the problems of this world.
Centre for Environment, Sustainability and Health (CESH) brings together professionals from the field of Public Health, Environmental studies, Transportation planning, Urban sustainability, Public policy etc. to a common platform, and provides them a suitable microenvironment to discuss and find cost-effective solutions to our developmental problems. CESH’s focus is on finding practical solutions to problems, using the human resource which is available locally. Currently, the organisation is singularly focussed on the developmental issues in India, and aims to create sustainable models which can be replicated in other resource constrained settings.
The Centre for Environment, Sustainability and Health (CESH) is based in Thiruvalla, a mid-level town in the Central Travancore Region of Kerala state. This region is unique as it has the highest literacy rates, highest income levels and lowest birth rates, in the whole of the country. The location offers us a unique advantage as it enables the study of the historical and other reasons behind this region’s remarkable socio-economic progress in the last five decades. It also gives us an opportunity to look at the improvement in human development indices, in this area which had high population density and relatively low soil fertility. We believe that development researchers should look and study successful models, and not try to create/experiment with new models (akin to re-inventing the wheel)