Social Entrepreneurship and the challenge of Climate Change

Our subcontinent has given birth to many great social entrepreneurs. The names of towering figures such as Mohammed Yunnus and Dr 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, who marshalled resources on an unprecedented scale, whose strategic and tactical ‘business plans’ were unsurpassed, 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 intensely innovative and as for using market based approaches; it was he who pioneered the use of Swadeshi on a national scale, who championed village based industries, who reenergised khadi. 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? Perhaps Gandhigiri in 2008 would have focussed on eradicating corruption, or on standing up to violence with love and Ahimsa. Perhaps he would have focussed on healing the pain between communities, or in standing up against injustice. Of course he would never have stopped focussing on the poorest and the weakest, fighting to give the most disempowered, lives of security and dignity, championing their social and economic development. Yet, I cannot help thinking there would be one issue in our present time, more than any other,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 crores to 110 crores; that India’s forest cover has plummeted from 80% to 12% of our total area; that the very water table that is the crucial foundation for food production for our people is collapsing and that our rivers are so polluted that they are no longer able to support life in many areas.

Most of all he would have seen, I believe, 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. It is not an exaggeration when Al Gore spoke of the devastating impacts on the planet and it is not a problem that faces countries only after they have developed.

The sad truth is that our country is among the most vulnerable to climate impacts on the planet. Rising sea levels are likely to create devastating floods with Tsunami-like impacts across our low lying coastal regions, creating massive dislocation and national security problems. Shifts in the pattern and timing of the monsoon are likely to make the rain fall in the wrong places and at the wrong times, upsetting food security, flooding populated regions and turning rain-fed regions like Punjab into arid deserts. Finally and most alarmingly, recent evidence suggests that our glaciers, which are melting and retreating at an ever increasing rate, are much thinner than we had previously imagined and could disappear in thirty years. This will mean a period of powerful flooding…and then the Ganga and Yamuna and all the other great rivers fed by the Himalayan glaciers turning into streams, threatening the water security of many hundreds of millions of us.

As a social entrepreneur focussed 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. I believe he would have risen to the challenge, as only he could, with tremendous power and conviction, mobilising every resource to take up the opportunity as a ‘social entrepreneur’ and of letting India lead the world in creating a much cleaner and more sustainable economic development path.

Gandhiji’s spirit lives today in innumerable lives and in many walks of life. But it also informs the work of many contemporary ‘social entrepreneurs’. At the policy level many great Indians have engaged with this field. We must recognise the tremendous passion, energy and sincerity of figures like Anil Aggarwal and Ashok Khosla during the Rio Earth Summit among many others (some NGO leaders, some social entrepreneurs), and from then till now, the inspiring, charismatic leadership at the highest global level of Nobel Laureate Dr R.K. Pachauri.

At the grassroots level in India, there are also outstanding examples of social entrepreneurship. For instance, the winner of the 2007 Social Entrepreneur of the Year, Harish Hande and his solar power company have had a huge impact on the quality of life of thousands of rural Indians whilst also ensuring that development and energy provision do not have to be bad news for the climate. Another group of entrepreneurs, S.Rajgopalan and Svati Bhogle has established Technology Informatics Design Endeavour (TIDE) to promote sustainable development through locally replicable, technological innovation as well as rural entrepreneurialism. As Bill Drayton, the chief executive of Ashoka an organization that supports social entrepreneurs likes to say, such people neither hand out fish nor teach people to fish; their aim is to revolutionize the fishing industry.

In a quiet way, the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation in partnership with the Schwab Foundation, UNDP and the CII has sought to recognise and promote such powerful social visionaries through the Social Entrepreneur of the Year Awards. We believe that they uniquely combine and bring together the critical dual imperatives of social and economic development on the one hand, and tackling climate challenge on the other.

These social visionaries, like Gandhiji, have acknowledged, this great truth—we cannot develop without simultaneously fighting climate change. They have brought together powerful entrepreneurial strategies and organisations to resolve this issue. They, like Gandhiji, know that, so long as we strive from our deepest and most truthful selves, there is no challenge we cannot address as Indians and as human beings. In congratulating them we urge that many thousands more social entrepreneurs should emerge to follow their example. People who, like Gandhiji, believe that holding on to the truth is the most important virtue, even when that truth is difficult and painfully ‘inconvenient’.

An edited version of the article appeared in the November 17, 2008 edition of the Financial Express. © 2008: Indian Express Newspapers (Mumbai) Ltd.