Highlights of Sunita Narain’s speech at IDS Conference in UK

Sunita Narain, director general, Centre for Science and Environment—a Delhi-based public interest research and advocacy organisation—was one of the panelists at the two-day conference on ‘States, markets and society in a reconfigured world’ held at Brighton, UK. The Institute of Development Studies, a global institution for development research based at the University of Sussex, organised this conference starting July 5, 2016.

Here are some of the observations she made during her lecture on sustainable development:

• She argued in favour of bringing together the discourse on environment and development in the next 50 years
• According to her, pollution cannot be seen as a commodity to be fixed
• She asserted that the world cannot succeed in environmental management unless we achieve inclusive economic growth
• She also cited the political economy of defecation as an example of how the State is subsiding to excrete in convenience
• She emphasised that affordable sanitation is critical for sustainability and it’s a key challenge in cities
• According to her, politics is succeeding by polarising people
• Biggest issue for next 50 years, according to her, is giving voice to the voiceless
• She also observed that solutions have to work for the poor, if they will work for the rich

Some of the quotes

• “We confront a very insecure future. We need to look at what we are doing wrong”
• “We believe that we can practise unsustainable growth and then just clean it up—but that has never worked”
• “The only solution to tackling urban pollution is to reinvent mobility”