Social entrepreneurs can help cut climate risks

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: Our subcontinent has given birth to many great social entrepreneurs. The names of towering figures such as Mohammed Yunus and Verghese Kurien stand out in illustration. Yet, one figure endures in our collective memories as the person who first championed the cause of the weakest as the focus of development, whose strategic and tactical business plans were unsurpassed, and who changed forever not only the fate of hundreds of millions but also the way we would look at development itself—Mahatma Gandhi.

Does it stretch the definition too far to use this modern term about him? I do not think so. His approach was intensely practical and innovative and for using market based approaches. It was he who pioneered the use of Swadeshi and who championed the cause of village-based industries. Countless social entrepreneurs have been inspired by his ideals, his bottom-up perspective and his community-based methods.

I often wonder what he would have done if he had returned to India today? And I cannot help thinking that there would be one issue in our present time that Gandhiji would have taken up—the cause of the progressive environmental collapse of our nation and the world as a whole.

Gandhiji believed, above all, in the truth. He would not have hidden from it. He would have seen what is there for all of us to see if we have the courage. That in sixty years, India’s population has grown over from 8 crore to 110 crore; India’s forest cover has plummeted from 80% to 12% of our total area; the very water table is collapsing and our rivers are so polluted that they are no longer able to support life in many areas.

Most of all he would have seen, clearly and with profound courage, the truth about the greatest challenge of our time: climate change. Sadly, the issue of climate change is not just a negotiating strategy of Western countries to suppress our development as a country.

As a social entrepreneur focused on development, Gandhiji would have seen that the issue of climate change was not an issue used to constrain our country’s economic and social development by the North but rather an issue critical to solve, to allow India to become a country without poverty and deprivation.