Industry leaders must invest in a better-informed future: Meera Jain at ET Awards

Meera Jain, founder of Times Evoke, urged business leaders to consider distributing their resources to projects and endeavours that safeguard the planet. Delivering her special address at ET Awards for Corporate Excellence, she underlined the importance of mitigating the loss of many species that are vanishing due to human action.

"Our success depends on how we gather and disseminate information," she said. "Ironically, in the age of science and truth, we are veering towards an information avalanche of untruth, glorifying trivialities and stepping over the salient."



The moving address, which followed an expansive dance performance, began with Jain highlighting the urgency of the situation that humanity is facing.

"Since 1750, human activities, from agriculture to industry, have released 1.8 trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The surface temperature has increased by 1.47 degrees Celsius since the late 19th century. The earth is now warming at its fastest pace in 10,000 years," she noted.

We live in an age which should have been shaped by rationality and truth. That idealism has much to do with the work of pioneers like Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler who, as Carl Sagan wrote, showed how even the vast cosmos could be understood correctly if people were given truthful information.


Yet that is not how things have turned out.

"Planetary science, which unites us in a shared consciousness and uplifts our view of life, is under-funded and poorly celebrated," she said. "The industry of destruction, a compendium of catastrophes, an assemblage of agonies, is lavishly supported, down to the last bomb. Instead of widening our worldview and deepening our empathy, most media shrinks these through the pursuit of petty politics and personal power games."

This, she said, is made all the more complicated by the rise of technologies like artificial intelligence.

"AI will further deepen this crisis. The tragedy won't just be of outsourcing human intelligence. It will be of eroding our planet and its rich eloquence of life. Intelligence blossoms when information meets judgement-what judgement about life can a mechanism which does not live have?" she said. "The pettiness of information has diminished the grandeur of our planetary existence."

Even as ecology and economics are interlinked, the latter has diminished from showing reverence for nature to extracting from it, something that is impacting the planet. This gap, she underscored, needed to be addressed urgently.

She left the leaders of Indian business, rapt in attention, with one sharp takeaway: "As we confront the Anthropocene, it is imperative upon you, leaders of industry, to invest in a better-informed future."