1. These People Help The Earth By
Making It “Easy For Us” To Be
Good
By Charumati Haran

2. The Reality
• One of the most popular economic sayings is that “There’s no
such thing as a free lunch”.
• Families all over the world follow it in their daily lives and
children are taught to judge every option for its pros and
cons.
• People will not usually help the environment if they cannot
see some kind of benefit.
• For example, when one has a choice between using a cloth
bag which is expensive or using a plastic bag which is
universally available and versatile.
• It is a similar to the choice between using a petrol car versus a
diesel car.

3. One flower makes no garland!
• The truth is, environment friendly alternatives are either
more expensive or harder to obtain.
• Many also believe that because they alone cannot influence
the environment movement and so it would make no impact
whether they alone pollute or protect.
• Especially when one considers that many people may not be
educated or learned enough to understand all the benefits, it
is not surprising that the initiatives to help the environment
do not get as much help as they should.
• The challenge therefore in this day and age is to make
helping the environment economically viable and useful for
the great majority

4. Make it the way people like it
• If helping the environment is adopted by the youth the same
way they have adopted mobiles, internet and facebook,
progress will be much faster.
• The problem here is that many of the admirable initiatives,
sometimes taken by the youth themselves, do not receive
enough publicity.
• So keeping these two things in mind, I would like to share
with the readers 3 initiatives which make it easy to help the
environment.

5. The Citizen Sparrow Initiative
• This is by the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) which tries
to document the population and specially the distribution of
sparrows.
• One can create an account and fill out a simple questionnaire.
• Any citizen can contribute his knowledge of sparrows in a
particular location, how many they remember, when they saw
them and so on.
• A comprehensive database is being formed with member
contributions marked on a map.
• This data will be very helpful to BNHS and the organizations which
are collaborating with the BNHS on this project.
• A similar campaign has been launched by the Nature Forever
Society.
• Their ‘Common Bird Monitoring of India’ programme is on www.
cbmi.in

6. Rural innovations
• The rural areas of India have become a hotbed for innovation.
• Some of the innovations, like the scooter-powered-flour mill
have made debuts (in the film 3 Idiots), but a majority of
these brilliant ideas and products are yet to be recognized
across the country.
• They should be taken up and encouraged by state
governments and central governments through grants.
• The National Innovation Foundation maintains a database of
nearly 1, 40,000 innovations in a number of fields.
• However, because not all are publicized or sponsored, they
do not reach their full potential in the national or
international market.
• This will also be important in economic upliftment of the
poor.

7. Eco-friendly startups
• This is a much more successful version of the above.
• Young entrepreneurs are making waves with startups in
retail.
• The startups themselves are quite varied: Some focus on
selling quirky eco-friendly products for home use
including Haathi Chaap, Bougainvilla Design and DastKari
Haat Samiti.
• Others focus on activities like packaging (HonECOre). Sarga
focuses on textiles, both industrial and textile.
• An example of online retail is MyGREENKart.com.
• Some designers are even using the abundant waste in our
society to create works of Art!

8. Act fast before it is too late!
• Of course, to all of these one can add the more commonly
heard pieces of advice: reuse paper, conserve water and
electricity, carpool, use public transport and so on.
• But one has to analyze deeply to figure out why so many
people do not follow these ideas, even when they can
conveniently do so.
• Personal preferences may be one reason, but many times
people genuinely believe that the current state is better than
switching to an eco-friendly way of doing things.

9. • While the government undoubtedly plays a very important
role in this, the role of the people is to ensure the right
changes are made.
• The most convenient way to do that these days, is an RTI
application, as getting the right information is the first step
to solving a problem.
• A fight against the system may seem personal at first, but
inspiration spreads when someone takes the first step.

10. • Read more on Youth Ki Awaaz at http://bit.ly/WUtjR5