Centre for Science and Environment (CSE)

The scenario today demands using knowledge to bring about change. In other words, working India’s democracy. This is what it aims to do.

The challenge, it sees, is two-pronged. On the one hand, millions live within a biomass based subsistence economy, at the margins of survival.

The environment is their only natural asset. But a degraded environment means stress on land, water and forest resources for survival. It means increasing destitution and poverty. Here, opportunity to bring about change is enormous.

But it will need a commitment to reform – structural reform - in the way we do business with local communities.

On the other hand, rapid industrialization is throwing up new problems: growing toxification and a costly disease burden. The answers will be in reinventing the growth model of the Western world for ourselves, so that we can leapfrog technology choices and find new ways of building wealth that will not cost us the earth.