Blogs

The chat on #FairFashion was organised by Fairtrade India on June 11, 2015. The premise was my #FairFashion piece, 'Green will be the next black.' The article on sustainable fashion, which had appeared in Fibre2Fashion magazine's February 2015 issue, can be seen here http://bit.ly/1JD4gN9. I tweeted from the Fairtrade India account that evening. The chat ran for two and half hours. What follows below is a curated collection of some tweets that went under #FairFashion.

For a business to keep operating legally, the process is not as easy as it may sound. Businesses must comply with a number of requirements regarding the company’s transactions, labour practices, safety procedures and of course environmental obligations. Compliance regulations can be internal or external, with environmental compliance being of the latter kind. What is unfortunately true in India is that most businesses, especially smaller ones, don't have the faintest clue about what actually...

One might remember the biofuel craze of a decade-and-half back when it was thought that this was the panacea for all climate change problems. But as it turned out, there were innumerable studies which cast aspersions on the emphasis of biofuels as an eco-friendly energy alternative. A 2011 study on palm oil plantations confirmed what activists were fearing: plantations were causing deforestation and hurting biodiversity. Researchers from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich and the...

For all the environmental degradation that Bangalore is made to endure, the city still has considerable biodiversity left to talk about. Here, it is easy to miss the forest for the trees. The biodiversity is there, breathing right under our noses, not exactly teeming as it might have been till even a few decades ago, but it's there. Biodiversity is a subject that rarely finds itself making it to the headlines. In fact, the International Day for Biological Diversity just went by (on May 22). How...

The “encounter-killing” of over 20 persons by a state-level task force for allegedly smuggling red sanders from the Seshachalam forests near Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh stayed in the media limelight in early April for being a case of extra-judicial killings. There was enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that the incident was indeed an “execution,” but in the din that followed, the issue of red sanders itself flickered away from the media glare. The forest was decidedly missed for the trees...

It's more than six months away, but the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP21 or CMP11, which will be held from November 30 to December 11 this year, remains in the news. But, it's all about businesses and governments, and murky deals in the background. It's rather ironic that with climate change itself remaining in the news for one reason or the other, the role / contribution of the individual in the entire process remains underplayed – the individual is left out in the cold. The role...

The more it becomes obvious that the state of the environment is a cause for concern, the more one hears of buzzwords in business circles. One of these that has been gaining currency over the last few years is “natural capital” – one that safely assumes that nature is capital. To say that the concept has been getting wider acceptance of late does not mean that the concept itself is new. The broader concept is that of ecosystem services (ESS, in parlance of environmental economics), one that...

Whenever one hears of 'sustainable food', the mind invariably conjures images of heavily-priced, smartly-packaged organic stuff at swanky departmental stores. Or maybe, ritzy stand-alone stores that sell such items. In many ways this image trivialises matters since sustainable food is more than just that. One cannot have an idea about sustainable food without having a world vision. The world’s agricultural system is today facing a tricky balancing act that it must anyhow enact. By 2050, this...

The talk about sustainability has been on for a while. And the responsibility, to a considerable extent, of moving towards a sustainable world lies with businesses. But are corporations ready for the cleansing act? Are they willing to change themselves so that the world too changes in the bargain? On the face of it, apparently many industry leaders are rising to the sustainability challenge. At least, they assert so. Corporate leaders now are definitely more persuaded of the value of...

India's latest mega-monstrous fad is that of building 100 smart cities. Building cities is not a sinister idea in itself, given the country's rate of urbanisation. The Indian urban population in 1901 was merely 11.4 per cent. This increased to 28.53 per cent in 2001, and is 31.16 per cent now (PDF). According to the UN's State of the World Population 2007, this percentage will increase to 40 per cent in 15 years. There is, of course, a need for more urban spaces; but the 'smart cities'...