Sunita Narain

Sunita Narain, is the Director General of the Centre for Science and Environment, India.

She is a writer and environmentalist, conducts research with forensic rigour and passion, so that knowledge can lead to change. In 2005 and again in 2008 and 2009 she was included by US journal Foreign Policy as one of the world’s 100 public intellectuals. In 2005 she was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian government.

She has also received the World Water Prize for work on rainwater harvesting and for its policy influence in building paradigms for community based water management.

In 2005, she also chaired the Tiger Task Force at the direction of the Prime Minister, to evolve an action plan for conservation in the country after the loss of tigers in Sariska.

She advocated solutions to build a coexistence agenda with local communities so that benefits of conservation could be shared and the future secured. She is a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Climate Change. As well as the National Ganga River Basin Authority, chaired by the Prime Minister, set up to implement strategies for cleaning the river.

Narain began her work in the early 1980s, as a co-researcher with Anil Agarwal, an eminent and committed environmentalist who gave the country its environmental concern and message. In 1985, she co-edited the State of India’s Environment report, which built an understanding in the country on why India is so important for the poor.

With Anil Agarwal she learnt that environment and development are two sides of the same coin and that for the millions of poor, who live on the margins of subsistence, it a matter of survival. In 1989, learning from the successful initiatives of people to manage their environment, Anil Agarwal and Narain wrote Towards Green Villages advocating local participatory democracy as the key to sustainable development.

She has continued to research and write about how environment must become the basis of livelihood security of people in the country. She has also linked issues of local democracy with global democracy, arguing that every human being has an entitlement to the global atmospheric common.