Every day should be treated as Environment Day: Sunita Narain

Would you like a cola and some chips,” we asked. To her credit, Sunita Narain, India’s best known environmental activist and a leading campaigner against junk food, laughed out loud. “The only thing I have in office is filtered ground water,” said Narain, director, Centre for Science and Environment. “And do you test that?” we asked. “Oh yes,” she replied. “In our office, we put the sewage back in the ground. So we make sure to test our water regularly.”

Narain was in the TOI office to discuss the World Environment Day issue, of which she was Guest Editor. “I’m usually sceptical about such days,” she said. “I think some of the worst polluters celebrate it most enthusiastically. There is just too much tokenism. As far as I’m concerned, every day should be treated as World Environment Day.”

But she plunged into the discussion with gusto, returning often to the link between water and sewage. “It’s my grand obsession. I constantly ask people the same two questions: ‘Where does your water come from, and where does your excreta go’?” she chuckled. The answer, invariably, is ‘we don’t know’.

That would be amusing, except that it shows up a serious lack of vision in the way cities are planned in India. “Look at all this frantic development. No one has figured out where the water is going to come from, where the sewage is going to be put,” she pointed out.