Centre for Science and Environment

The Centre for Science and Environment is one of India’s leading environmental NGOs with a deep interest in sustainable natural resource management. CSE’s strategy of "knowledge based activism" has won it wide respect and admiration for the quality of its campaigns, research and publications which are trying to bring about change in an extremely difficult situation. For nearly two decades now, CSE has tried to educate a whole nation, from many of its top political leaders to its numerous rural activists, about the importance of sustainable development, especially for the daily survival of the country’s poor and its rural women. CSE has provided advance warnings, perceptive analyses and intellectual leadership in the field of environmental management. CSE’s insistence on respect for democracy, people’s participation, traditional knowledge and modern science make it different even from most environmental organisations.

Its publications, especially its citizens’ reports on the state of India’s environment, have always been the combined product of excellent readibility, networking and consitutuency-building and intellectual leadership, because of which they have received national and international acclaim. The first citizens’ report published in 1982 tried to resolve the then ongoing debate that developing countries need to worry about development before environment. Arguing that the two must go together, otherwise the poor will be the most affected, the report became the flagship of the country’s environment movement and received a rare two page review in The Economist. Its second citizens’ report carried the first report in the developing world on how environmental destruction affects rural women and received nationwide attention to a point that the then Prime Minister invited CSE in 1986 to address the nation’s Council of Minister and the Parliament on the importance of sustainable development. The fourth report on India’s millenia-old traditions in water management has started off a nationwide interest in community and household-based water management. CSE is today leading a campaign against the growing threat of pollution in the country. The President of India, Shri K R Narayanan, is today a patron of the Centre. The Centre is well-respected for its editorial independence and integrity.

CSE’s research and publication work is consistently combined with advocacy and network building and this combination has generally succeeded in challenging entrenched mind-sets. Currently, only a few groups in India have the capacity to undertake serious and high quality policy research in natural resource management and pollution management. Its publications like the fortnightly magazine, Down To Earth, and the children’s supplement Gobar Times (Cowdung Times) help inculcate concern for the environment across the nation. Down to Earth has a subscription base of only 10,000 which is small for a country of the size of India but it reaches out to more nooks and corners – 400 out of about 500 districts of the country – than any other newspaper or magazine, except for the mass-circulated India Today.

Today when India faces double environmental threat – of ‘ecological poverty’ and extensive land degradation, on one hand, and rapidly growing toxification and pollution arising out of industrialisation and economic growth, on the other – the Centre is trying to advocate solutions to deal with both the problems. Apart from its work on natural resource management issues, it has major campaigns on air and water pollution, on the threats posed to public health by the changing environment , and a highly innovative project to bring about transparency in the industrial sector by rating the environmental performance of Indian firms. The project is expected to lead not only to increased transparency but also to reduction of corruption in pollution control inspection.

For more information, please visit www.cseindia.org