The Hindu Business Line : Contains facts... no fizz

She took the fizz out of cola giants and stood her ground against polluting vehicles. As Director of the Centre for Science and Environment, Sunita Narain puts her faith in knowledge-based activism.

You can't blame Sunita Narain, who was picked one of the 25 most powerful women in India by Business Today, for being short on time. When approached for an interview, she says, "Why don't you interview me on the phone?" As Director of the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a dozen matters await her attention.

Just a few years ago, Delhi was so smog-ridden that the late Anil Aggarwal — Sunita's mentor, hero, and CSE founder — set up battle against the Government. Marshalling an impressive array of statistics, Aggarwal and Sunita proved that car manufacturers were to blame for Delhi's poisonous air. They were using fuel-inefficient engines, which released dangerous particulates that found their way into people's lungs.

Aggarwal and Sunita launched a public campaign, which resulted in cleaner air for Delhi. The courts ordered that commercial vehicles should run on compressed natural gas (CNG). They also directed carmakers to manufacture Euro-compliant engines.

But the petite, 43-year-old Sunita isn't one to rest content. Her life revolves around the CSE, which has grown from a one-room office to an outfit that employs 120 people, 40 of them volunteers. She has the tenacity of a bulldog. She shook Coke and Pepsi in India by carrying out tests that proved their cola bottles in India contained pesticide, while they didn't in Europe and America. It was Sunita and CSE's way of saying that Coke and Pepsi did not care for the health or lives of Indians. The CSE findings had Coke and Pepsi running scared, trying to prove that truth had been misrepresented. But the diminutive Sunita demolished their arguments in a series of TV interviews.

Sunita is a private person. If you ask her why she isn't married, she doesn't like the question. All she says is that she has a married sister who lives with her in-laws. "I haven't chosen anyone. Maybe one day I'll regret that I never got married," she says. One reason is that she's married to her work. Right from her college days (she did a correspondence degree course), she worked with NGOs for environmental concerns. She did short stints with Viksat, an NGO run by Kartikeya Sarabhai, and another NGO in Mumbai before joining Kalpavriksha in Delhi.

In 1980, she joined Aggarwal's newly started CSE on a salary of Rs 800 a month. The proximity to Aggarwal changed her life. He was thorough in his work and would always ask, "Where are the facts", recalls Sunita, "and tell us to dig them out because everybody was interested in hiding them. The industrialists, the government, car lobbies, even NGOs with vested interests. I would write a report and he would tear it to bits, saying my homework was inadequate and I needed more facts to prove my point."

It was knowledge-based activism at its best and CSE shook the country. When it started an anti-diesel campaign, saying diesel polluted the atmosphere, the Tatas sent a legal notice seeking damages of Rs 100 crore. But CSE wasn't intimidated. Thanks to CSE's campaigns, Delhi has reported a 24 per cent drop in ambient respirable particulates. This has been stated by none other than a government body -— the Central Pollution Control Board.

Sunita maintains a demanding schedule that includes a lot of travel, administration, and advocacy. "It's exasperating to deal with the Indian bureaucracy," she says. "Nothing moves. Your representations go from officer to officer. Nobody gives you an answer. Every problem you try to highlight gets buried in files."

But good things do happen... with the right kind of persistence. CNG-run vehicles became a reality despite every lobby arguing against it. And the cola pesticide episode warned all of India that no company, however large, is safe from being challenged if it violates environmental norms.

Her work has fetched CSE funding from the Sir Ratan Tata Trust in Mumbai and the Ford Foundation in Delhi. Programme grants have also come from Germany, United States, Sweden and Holland. In addition, there were project grants from the Rajiv Gandhi Mission for Watershed Management in Bhopal, and from Caritas India in New Delhi. In 2000-2002, CSE earned Rs 80 lakh from its publications.

In the last five years, CSE's income from grants has been Rs 6 crore, and its expenditure slightly less than that. "Suddenly, a lot of Indians have begun to talk of water-harvesting. They ask why half of India is flood-prone while the rest dries up through droughts. We as a society are becoming water-illiterate," complains Sunita. She says one of CSE's top priorities is to look at ways and means of conserving water in agriculture, industry, and at home. "People talk about protecting the environment. What we should look at is using the environment as a source of employment generation."

A happy workaholic, Sunita says her two greatest pleasures in life are swimming and sleeping. While giving nightmares to those who are environmentally irresponsible, naturally!

Picture by Kamal Narang

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