Anil Kumar Agarwal (54) was the founder of the Centre for Science and Environment, India’s leading environmental NGO. Agarwal, graduated as an engineer from one of India’s leading engineering colleges in 1970, but gave up a promising technical career to become a science journalist in order to explore the country’s scientific and technological needs of its poor people. He joined Delhi’s leading daily, Hindustan Times, as a science correspondent in 1973 and soon discovered India’s most evocative environmental movement known as the Chipko Movement in 1974. This was the first report of a people’s movement in India or probably anywhere else in the developing world to protect the environment. The women of the Himalayan village, Reni, threatened to hug the trees if the government allowed them to be felled.

The reportage of this movement not only led to a nationwide interest in environmental conservation but also brought home to Agarwal the importance that the environment and its natural resource base hold for the local village economy and for meeting the daily needs of village people in terms of water, firewood, fodder, manure, building materials and medicinal herbs. This was still a time when the leadership of the developing world still believed that economic development must take precedence over environmental conservation.

But this understanding of the relationship between the poor and their environment soon turned Agarwal into a lifelong environmentalist and a reknowned environmental analyst and writer. Agarwal has widely argued that because the poor of developing world are so heavily dependent on the health of their environment, economic development in the developing world must go hand in hand with environmental conservation. He argued that development of the Gross National Product is as important as the conservation of the Gross Nature Product. In other words, economic development and environmental conservation must go hand in hand in developing countries. This argument provided the social rationale for an environmental movement to grow within a poor developing country like India and slowly influenced the civil society across the developing world.

In 1987, Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland in her report, Our Common Future, captured this concept to give it the name of ‘sustainable development’. Today, Agarwal has more than 20 books to his credit. In 1986, the arguments contained in the two citizens’ reports on the State of India’s Environment, conceptualised and co-edited by him, attracted the attention of the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi who asked Agarwal to address his Council of Ministers, a rare invitation for an Indian writer.

Agarwal has spent a lifetime advocating policies that involve the people in natural resource management and learn from India’s own traditions. He also has a deep interest in the management of pollution, especially air pollution, and the threat that environmental change poses to public health. At the international level, he has argued for equitable arrangements in dealing with the global warming problem.