Remembering Anil Agarwal : The visionary environmentalist who predicted our future 

When Anil passed away in the year 2002, he left behind a void which has been difficult to fill. But he also left behind a vision, and he injected in all of us that same incredible passion and drive which he was known for.

Today, as we receive yet another applause for all that he and CSE have stood for and continue standing for, we cannot but feel proud that we were led by someone like him in our formative years.

Anil Agarwal, the founder-director of Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), was a man unmatched for the sheer fire in his belly, and for his commitment. Anil had 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 1974, as a science correspondent in New Delhi with Hindustan Times, one of the country's leading dailies, Anil discovered India's most evocative environmental movement -- Chipko. His story was the first reportage on a people's movement to protect the environment, in India or probably anywhere else in the developing world.

In 1980, he founded CSE, one of India's first environmental NGOs to analyse and study the relationship between environment and development and also to create public consciousness about the need for sustainable development.

In 1982, the Centre -- under his guidance -- published the pioneering Citizens' Report on the State of India's Environment, which provided the first-of-its-kind overview of the level of environmental degradation in the country and its impact on the people of India.

The publication of the second Citizens' Report in 1985 caught the eye of the then Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, who asked Anil to address his Councilof Ministers, a rare invitation for an Indian writer.

In 1992, Anil launched Down To Earth, the fortnightly newsmagazine on science, environment and development. Five years later, in 1997, came his exhaustive study on traditional water harvesting systems of India -- Dying Wisdom - which went on to become one of most acclaimed and respected works on the subject.

For Anil, life began and ended with work. When you think back, it is truly amazing how much he managed to do in the years as he battled cancer.

I remember when we first found out that he had a rare and possibly fatal lymphoma, which had spread to his brain, his spine and his eyes, his only response was, "Is there a possible treatment?" He took the horrendous chemotherapy so calmly that being with him, you would think it was a simple stomach pain.

Knowledge was his biggest passion and he never assumed that he had learnt all there was to know. This, to me, is his most endearing message. Till the end he listened to people, travelled and read, as if he was a cub reporter. It is because of this, his intellectual legacy is enormously rich. In the 1980s

the fledgling environmental movement

got its basis as he established the need for poor countries to be concerned about the environment.

Environment for the poor was not a luxury but a matter of survival, he wrote. He conceptualised the alternative economic paradigm of the poor, arguing that the rural poor lived within what he called, "the biomass-based subsistence economy". That is, they lived on the environment as all their basic survival needs, from food to firewood, was collected and used.

He mocked our economists who measured welfare in terms of the Gross National Product and demanded instead that poverty should be measured in terms of Gross Natural Product and indicators like the number of hours it takes women to collect water or firewood, should be used to calculate the improvements in our economy.

Today, all this is common knowledge. But for someone who has journeyed with him, I know how difficult each step was.

In the late 1980s we wrote a book, Towards Green Villages, which outlined how rural regeneration was more to do with decentralisation and devolution of power than with planting trees or smokeless stoves (which were in fashion then). Again, this is well accepted today. But as our correspondence over this publication will reveal, many people disagreed with us, and violently.

Every period of his life was a new chapter of discovery. Our book, forced us to fight the most powerful research institutions of the industrialised world. The campaign on

air pollution made us take on the powerful automobile industry. But Anil never ever let us, even for one moment, feel that we were less powerful.

This is because his faith in democracy was total. As long as we were absolutely sure about our facts, we could challenge the world.

"If we have good knowledge and we have social capital -- friends and experts willing to cooperate with us -- we can work Indian democracy," was what he said again and again to us.

For Anil, democracy was not a "good idea" to paraphrase Mahatma Gandhi in the current context of Indian politics, it was his way of life. It is because of this belief that Anil was able to find the balance in the challenge: markets were important as much as participatory democracy at the village level.

Anil was honoured with the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan, two of the nation's highest civilian awards, by the Government of India. Anil chaired the Environment Liaison Centre — the world's largest network of environmental NGOs based in Nairobi (Kenya). In 1987, the United Nations Environment Programme elected him to its Global 500 Honour Roll.

Anil spent considerable travelling to various parts of rural India to document community-based environmental regeneration efforts in villages. His reportage and writings helped Indian policy-makers understand the importance of involving people in environmental conservation and natural resource management.

Anil also had a deep interest in the management of pollution, especially air pollution, and the threat that environmental change poses to public health. At the global level, he argued for equitable arrangements in dealing with the global warming problem.

"Forensic rigour combined with passion" was how a leading journalist from the UK described CSE's work. This was Anil's key quality and what he has left behind for us to emulate. His last many years went in building up two campaigns — to push for community involvement in water management and to clean up Delhi's air.

My last memory of him — barely minutes before he died — was Anil correcting me about something I was saying to a journalist on the phone about the report of the Mashelkar Committee on the auto fuel policy.

I will miss his guidance. His presence. But I know he will remain with us to keep us on our toes. To keep the fire burning.

For readers of Down To Earth we have a particular promise. It was Anil's dream to start a science and environment newsmagazine. He wrote in its inaugural issue:

"Down To Earth is not the product of a desire to capture a share of the information market. It is the product of a need that we feel within us, a desire to fill a critical information gap."

He worked very hard to bring to you his knowledge and his passion. We will try and keep up the same. We are all clear we can never replace Anil. But we will do our best to be his foot soldiers. Down To Earth will continue to be Anil's strident voice of reason. Today and forever.

LOOKING BACK: 2002

( Extracts from some of the obituaries published in 2002)

Tony Juniper in The Guardian

Anil Agarwal, who has died aged 54 of cancer, was one of the world's most important environmentalists, campaigning from a developing country — India — at a when many of the international debates around sustainable development were dominated by the west.

He established one of his country's most dynamic non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and broadened its campaigning to embrace development and social justice questions. A pioneer who recognised the futility of trading off the needs of people and the environment against each other, he realised that both had to be protected simultaneously. In this respect, he was one of the first campaigners to talk about what became known as sustainable development.

In some respects, that shift in thinking mirrored Agarwal's personal journey. In 1986, he had advised Rajiv Gandhi's council of ministers that it should prioritise rural environmental issues because it was forest and soil degradation that affected the lives of poor Indians. He was to later regret giving this steer to the policymakers, as the effects of western-style development became increasingly apparent in the soaring pollution levels that caused misery to millions of India's city-dwellers.

During the preparatory meetings leading to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Agarwal emerged as one of the leading NGO advocates for a fairer world order. Critical of western governments, their giant corporations and the economic philosophy they stood for, he helped shape a new movement that today regards fundamental changes to capitalism and the economic relations between countries as a prerequisite for environmental security. He sought to convince India and other developing countries that following the western development model would prove costly and dangerous. He believed that one of the greatest dangers facing India was its failure to learn from the mistakes of the West.

David Dickson in NATURE

There can't be many science journalists who, having described the government of their country as a “persistent pest” in need of a “truly deadly pesticide”, have been praised at their death by both the president and prime minister of that country as a national hero.

But Anil Agarwal, whose death on 2 January at the age of 54 ended a long fight against cancer, was no ordinary science journalist. A passionate and articulate campaigner for environmental justice, embracing issues ranging from water quality in rural India to the need for global controls on carbon emissions to limit climate change, Agarwal won respect from friends and enemies alike.

Agarwal spearheaded the creation of a new form of activism. It was based on a commitment to sound scientific knowledge, combined with the idea that worries about the natural environment, and its destruction by the by-products of modern technologies, is not just a luxury of the industrialized world, but a major concern to the poor of developing countries too.

This idea is commonplace today, and forms the cornerstone of the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

Amita Baviskar in Frontline

Agarwal's skill in mounting sustained and hard-hitting environmental campaigns is best exemplified in his work against vehicular pollution. The CSE's 1996 study report titled Slow Murder showed Agarwal at his best, brilliantly dissecting the problem, assigning responsibility and not hesitating to name names.

The CSE pointed out how petroleum refineries, automobile manufacturers and regulatory authorities, as well as skewed transport priorities, have variously contributed to the poisoning of air in metropolitan India. Its analysis was followed by a concerted media campaign which precipitated a series of events that finally led to the Supreme Court's orders regarding the phasing out and conversion of polluting vehicles in Delhi.

The masterly use of evidence in the study embarrassed several corporate firms into cleaning up their act, at least on the surface. While air quality has improved in the national capital thanks in part to Agarwal's initiative, the controversy over whether compressed natural gas (CNG) is the best alternative fuel rages on after the demise of its leading votary.

Agarwal will also be remembered for his compelling intervention in the international debate on climate change. He called the negotiation a case of 'environmental colonialism' that refused to recognise the huge disparity between the North and the South in the consumption of resources, and which nations bore primary responsibility for global warming. The politics of production and consumption, both global and local, was a key theme in Agarwal's work. By identifying unexplored environmental problems and addressing them cogently, he set the agenda for all environmental NGOs involved in research and awareness-building. His opus, and that of the CSE, has inspired and informed an entire generation of environmentalists.