Professor Anil Gupta, scholar and social sector activist, has travelled all across India and has a bag full of stories that speak of creativity shown by people in every part of the country. From the living tree root bridges of Meghalaya to the stitch-less Kurtas of Bargarh district in Odisha, he tells tales of people who combine creativity with craftsmanship and extraordinary zeal.
“There is not a place where we haven’t found people who haven’t surprised us,” Mr. Gupta said, talking to the audience gathered at the third edition of the Green Lit Fest in Bengaluru.
He recollected an instance when he was in Meghalaya.
The indigenous communities of Khasi and Jaintia hills in Meghalaya have been building the living root bridges for centuries. These bridges, which found a place in the UNESCO tentative list of world heritage sites, are made by guiding the natural growth of pliable roots of Ficus elastica tree to achieve the desired bridge structure over the course of time. The process takes several years.
When Mr. Gupta asked the people why they build bridges this way, they responded saying they wanted to build bridges in a sustainable and durable way without causing harm to the nature.
“Science is like alphabet, technology is like words, institutions are like grammar and culture is like thesaurus,” said Mr. Gupta, adding that minds on margins are not marginal but generate completely unexpected solutions to problems that others may have learned to live with.
GLF event. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL AARANGEMENT
Rising above barriers
Nagaraja Prakasam, mentor of several social enterprises, echoed similar sentiments. He told the story of Abdul Razzak, an innovator from Madurai who has studied only till matriculation but holds around 20 patents to his name.
“In IIMs separate coaching is given for filing patents. Whereas Abdul Razzak who doesn’t speak English and has no PowerPoint presentations have around 20 patents to his name,” pointed out Mr. Prakasam, who is also a mentor at NRSCEL, the incubation arm of IIM Bangalore.
Mr. Prakasam has invested in several social enterprises including Saahas, Carbon Masters and GoCoop among others. Nativelead Foundations, a Madurai-based angel investing firm helmed by Mr Prakasam, aims to promote rural entrepreneurship.
“We always talk about the 250-300 million English speaking population. But my Bharat is about the 1 billion that we don’t know,” said Mr. Prakasam who is also the author of the book Back to Bharat.
GLF event. | Photo Credit: SPECIAL AARANGEMENT
Funding challenges
While talking about the importance of green enterprises, the panelists also mentioned the challenges faced by such social ventures.
“We tried to set up a macro venture innovation fund in 2003 and then again in 2020. We still haven’t found a durable mechanism of funding which provides risk capital to these innovations at early stage,” said Mr. Gupta.
He noted that many of the innovations offered solutions for local problems and there is a need to bring them into the larger market by building better design around them.
“We need more designers to work with these innovators from rural lands. We’ve got great support from scientists for validating the solutions and from IP lawyers for filing patents, but design community is something we’re still looking forward to. They have not yet come forward in large numbers to support these innovations,” he said.
Noting that scale shouldn’t be the enemy of sustainability, he said that many problems that modern science and technology institutions and large corporates couldn’t address have been addressed by local innovators.
“We need not necessarily replicate the same design everywhere, but the same underlying principle can be replicated. We are trying to propagate this philosophy that the model of a certain innovation can be scaled up rather than scaling up only the solutions. Every society should find their own solutions,” he said.
Business of green books
Discussing an evolving market for green books, R. Sivapriya, publisher at Bloomsbury India, said that today there is a niche market whom publishers can specifically target while bringing out green books.
Sharing some interesting anecdotes, she remembered how, around eight years ago, Amitav Ghosh, who was then working on The Great Derangement, wrote to individual writers encouraging them to bear witness to what is happening to the planet and the environment.
“You can’t necessarily tell writers what to write. But I think what he was trying to say was if you are a writer of this generation you have to talk about what is happening,” she said.
Mr. Sivapriya also recounted meeting some French publishers while she was executive editor at Juggernaut Books which was then into digital publishing.
“It was six to seven years ago and the French publishers had shelves of climate fiction. I had never heard of this genre seven years ago. But today if you look at any SFF (science fiction and fantasy) list, half of them are climate fiction. So, in some sense, I think green fiction has happened,” she said.
Livelihoods in the wild
Speaking on the otherisation in cinematic storytelling, Devashish Makhija, who has directed films such as Oonga and Joram, said that a tribal’s inextricable existence with the jungle is something which most people in the city do not consider important enough to be part of a discourse.
“When we are living unsustainable lives it comes at a cost and people in the city don’t want to think about it, talk about it and see it in their stories. Stories today are meant to entertain. I try to not entertain as much as possible,” said Makhija whose film Oonga was later published as a book.
Aparajita Datta, scientist at Nature Conservation Foundation, noted that there is a need to look at things with better understanding of communities and the landscapes they live in.
“It is not just about saving wildlife. I’m a wildlife biologist and I want wildlife to be saved . But you also have to look at how people are living there. They are not privileged like many of us; They are from those landscapes and they need the land for survival,” she said.
Like indigenous communities from other parts of the country, those living in the Himalayas too have been victims of displacements and political conflicts. But, the vulnerable communities in the mountains are being threatened by increased militarisation, pointed out Stephen Alter, author of books such as All The Way To Heaven and Wild Himalayas.
“The mountains have always had a tremendous amount of migration. No community in the Himalayas was there forever. People think of Himalayas as this statistic eternal landscape. But in fact it is constantly changing; It is a living landscape that is fragile,” he said adding that the destruction caused by the militarisation of Himalayas is critical to understanding the environmental issues in the landscape.
Collaborative efforts
Experts also spoke about how collaborative efforts have proved successful in fights against large powerful entities. Yuvan Aves, an activist who has been deeply involved in the campaign against building a mega port near Pulicat lagoon in Tamil Nadu spoke of how the campaign, which is still ongoing, has been a collaboration of all kinds of people.
Pulicat lagoon is India’s second largest brackish water body and a subsidiary of the Adani group, in 2019, applied for environment clearance to expand the port from 330 acres to 6,111 acres. Mr. Aves notes that the port was within 2.1 of a bird sanctuary which is an ecosentitive zone and would erode a thin barrier island which protects a sheltered marine space.
He described how the campaign witnessed some great documentation, storytelling and citizen science.
“E-bird checklists have been far more helpful than one could guess. Counter mapping of spaces to refute what has been given in the EIAs is another example. All of them came together to animate what is inanimate in the minds of government,” said Mr. Aves.
