Re-Purposing Universities for Sustainable Societies: The Integrated Sustainability Model at Ashoka

Traditionally, universities’ role was primarily to educate young minds and offer them ample opportunities to use their potential for self-growth and well-being. Considering the relevance of Sustainable Development, this perception has evolved gradually to include environmental management, public participation, community development and social responsibility in university teaching, research and other activities. Today, universities across the globe are giving increasing priority to the challenges of sustainability, encouraged by a variety of drivers and societal pressures.  

The Indian higher education sector’s size and scale highlight its importance in addressing the nation’s social, economic, and environmental sustainability. A sustainable campus is one that maintains a balance between economic prosperity, environmental conservation and social and economic justice. In most Indian universities, sustainability education and issues are confined to specific courses, often isolated from research, and are unlikely to be linked to campus operations. Thus, universities in India possess a tremendous opportunity to improve their sustainability performance and role as agents of change. Moreover, sustainable development should look beyond the narrowed definition of environmental aspects and broaden their roles to exert social and economic perspectives.

Given the complex nature, sustainability education must pursue an integrative approach to modelling sustainability in the university’s core functions and systems. While it is challenging to implement changes in older systems, Ashoka is managing things differently as a new-aged university and has attempted to integrate education, research, and operations to address sustainable development issues. 

Environmental Aspects: The university has made efforts to follow environmental sustainability drives in and around the campus. Energy-efficient buildings, green energy production and consumption, biodiversity, water management, waste reduction and recycling, resource conservation, healthcare, sanitation, promoting environment-friendly transportation (within the campus) are significant initiatives led by the university to reduce carbon footprint. The university conducts regular energy audits and has involved green building consultants working with architects, planners, and policy makers to emphasise environmental sustainability.

Sustainability Teaching and Research: Courses such as ‘Agriculture, Food and Sustainability’; ‘Environment and Social Exclusion’; ‘Exploring Life in the Neighbourhood Lab’; ‘Environmental Economics’; ‘Cities, Ecology and Equity’ are closely linked to the concept of sustainability. Programmes such as Young Scholars Programme (YSP), Young India Fellowship (YIF), Ashoka-X offer many packages and learnings on sustainability in all its dimensions.

Many research projects at Ashoka are addressing sustainability issues in fields ranging from history, anthropology, sociology, economics to environment and basic sciences. The university is making efforts with its experienced faculty to develop new initiatives and research centres to expand its horizon and scope of research and teaching in sustainability fields. As an immediate step, Ashoka has started its new Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability (3Cs)—to strengthen collaborations in this field, enhance education, research and awareness on climate change, and build a strong climate action community.

Community engagement and Social Justice: The university faculty and students are carrying out several projects and programmes to engage the local communities. These initiatives address local issues such as streamlining the implementation of government’s policies in education, women’s safety, health and sanitation, e-governance etc. Concurrently, the university also carries out social engagement and public participation through various unique centres (CSIP, CSBC, CSGS, CMGGA). These centres are trying to entrench sustainable development principles, including social justice, equity, democracy and religious tolerance, significantly relevant to Indian societies. 

Ashoka runs scholarship programmes to ensure quality education accessible to deserving students, irrespective of their socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicity, gender, gender identity or disability. The university has provided need-based financial aid of USD 34.2 million to over 3000 students in the last ten years. In 2020-21, nearly USD 8.4 million aid has already been granted by the university, and over 51% of undergraduate students at Ashoka are studying on financial assistance. Regarding diversity: students come from 18 countries, 27 Indian states, and 236 towns and cities; women comprise 56% of the student body; 18 Languages spoken on campus. Taking cognisance of the stakeholders with certain disabilities, the university has focused on constructing ramps in all building entrances, braille signage and accessible campus facilities. The university offers care for students with learning disabilities or psychological support through special centres such as the Office of Learning Support (OLS) and the Ashoka Centre for Well Being (ACWB). These are unique initiatives in the Indian context and need to be popularised and encouraged as essential and mandatory supports. 

Since its inception, Ashoka has implemented strategies and taken initiatives directed towards ensuring affordability and access, well-being and welfare, diversity and inclusion, as well as outreach and engagement. The pedagogy, courses, curriculum, activities at the university have been designed to promote sustainability in exchanging knowledge, communication, research, teaching and operations. The university is consistently paying more attention to adopting global best sustainability practices. More formal approaches in specific areas and external audit processes are needed for future developments. 

The author is the Director, Research and Development at 51˛čšÝ. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect that of 51˛čšÝ. 

51˛čšÝ

Aniket Aga wins the Bharadwaj-Wolf Prize 2019-20

Congratulations to Dr. Aniket Aga, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at 51˛čšÝ on being awarded the Bharadwaj-Wolf Prize 2019-20 for his article The marketing of corporate agrichemicals in Western India: theorizing graded informality.  

"I am honored to receive the Bharadwaj-Wolf 2019-20 prize from the Journal of Peasant Studies. I am indebted to the farmers and marketing agents in Nashik, whose generosity allowed me to undertake this research. Let me also use this opportunity to note that the late Professor Krishna Bharadwaj's daughter, Sudha Bharadwaj, the committed trade unionist, lawyer, and human rights activist, is in prison for over 1000 days. She is among several activists, students, academics, and journalists jailed without bail or trial," said Aga on his win.  

The Krishna Bharadwaj and Eric Wolf Prize is awarded biennially for an outstanding paper published in the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) by a ‘young scholar’, defined as someone who either is a graduate student or has held a Ph.D. degree for no more than four years when the paper is submitted to the journal. The Prize, which comes with an award of ÂŁ1000, commemorates two long-standing and distinguished members of the JPS Editorial Advisory Board: the political economist Krishna Bharadwaj (1935–1992) and Eric Wolf (1923–1999). The Prize Committee consists of three members of the JPS editorial team.  

An excerpt from the Journal of Peasant Studies states: Aga’s careful ethnography of pesticide marketing in Maharashtra covers new empirical ground on an issue of growing international importance, demonstrating the role of private pesticide marketing in mediating changing social, ecological, and market conditions as the state has retreated from its Green Revolution era role in knowledge production and extension. Theoretically, the piece discusses how gradients of informality breach the boundaries between the state and corporate capital, its implications for caste in India specifically and for informal labor relations more generally. The complete announcement can be viewed on the .  

You can read the prize-winning article 

51˛čšÝ

#AshokaBookTower – ‘Uncivil City’ – Written by Prof. Amita Baviskar, the book echoes environmental politics unfolding in Delhi

Synopsis: 

As cities become habitat for most of humanity, the question of their ecological capacity to sustain lives worth living becomes ever more critical. Yet, when we listen to debates about city planning and governance, and observe urban environmental campaigns on the ground, we notice that they have little to do with ecology or justice. To examine this contradiction, Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons in Delhi looks at two decades of environmental politics in Delhi—across homes and workplaces, ordinary streets and extraordinary spectacles, and the river and the Ridge. It argues that the terms of the discourse—what is an environmental issue, who is authorised to speak, and which modes of action count as legitimate—are partial, particularistic and perverse. ‘Bourgeois environmentalists’, who claim to speak in the public interest, for nature and society, have made the city what it is: unfair and unliveable. Only citizenship and civility will save the commons—air, water, space and trees—upon which cities depend for survival. 

In conversation with the author, Amita Baviskar, Head of the Department of Environmental Studies and Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology and Anthropology, 51˛čšÝ.

What was the inspiration behind writing Uncivil City? 

This book grew out of my difficult love for Delhi, a city that charms, confounds and infuriates me, a city where I’ve lived for fifty years.   Writing Uncivil City was my way of making sense of urban space and nature, topics that weren’t on the radar of environmental scholars in India in the early 2000s, when I first started studying the subject. The changes that I saw around me led to focus on a new phenomenon that I call ‘bourgeois environmentalism’ and to follow its effects on the ground.    

What were the challenges in writing the book?

It’s hard to study a city that’s changing all the time. Processes unfold with astounding speed and it’s difficult to detect patterns, and to make sense of what’s going on. I felt as if I had to constantly look over my shoulder to not be overtaken by the rush of events. That is why I have taken so long over it: to make sure that my words withstood the test of time. 

The other challenge that I relished was to write decent prose: to be deeply serious but with a lightness of touch. So much solid scholarship goes unread except by experts because it sinks under the weight of its gravitas. I want this book to be read by everyone interested in cities and ecology and social justice. And to help make the book more attractive, each chapter is prefaced by brilliant illustrations by Orijit Sen, well-known graphic artist.       

Would you like to talk a little about your current and future projects?

I am currently looking at how diets are changing in rural and urban India, across classes, castes, genders and age. I am intrigued by ‘industrial foods’ and how mass-manufactured commodities come to have multiple cultural meanings in India, and how they create new social identities and lifestyles. 

I started with Maggi noodles and now I am looking at broiler chicken, which will allow me to bring environmental dimensions into the picture once again. 

 Anything else you would like to share

I started teaching at Ashoka after ten years of being in a research institute. Teaching and talking to students is such a joy. And it feeds my research in all kinds of unexpected ways.   

You would find some of my interviews interesting. Take a look below!  

Interview: ‘At the Intersection of Environmental Justice and Public Space’ on , 29 January, 2020.

Interview: , 9 April, 2020. 

Interview: , 19 June, 2020.

Interview: , 5 July, 2020. 

To know more about Amita Baviskar, click here. You can also checkout her Wikipedia page .

Reviews of Uncivil City: Ecology, Equity and the Commons

 â€œEthnographic writing in India has come a long way from M.N. Srinivas’s orderly and tranquil prose. This work exemplifies this shift. The reflection that dominant ideas of environmentalism are essentially bourgeois imaginaries, which create a disembodied, noxious adversary, is very relevant. During the pandemic, when there is anguish about ‘migrant labour’, discourses about ‘public interest’, and a smug discussion about ‘pollution control’ because of a lockdown which has devastating implications for the poor, this is a very pertinent read. The Delphic Yamuna gleams surreptitiously in the book, drawing attention to violence, dispossession, exclusion and disaster, and how everyone is implicated.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;–&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč; (September 18, 2020) 

“The book argues that the lives and landscape of Delhi have been undermined by a selective and self-serving rhetoric towards public space and the urban environment.” â€“&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč; (May 25, 2020)  

“How far has green activism by Delhi’s middle class benefited the city? It hasn’t resolved a single problem and it has also marginalized the urban poor. That’s the thesis of this volume by Amita Baviskar, professor of sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth in New Delhi. Her  opinion, and it’s a convincing one,  is that ‘bourgeois environmentalists’ have made Delhi unfair and unlivable. Strong words.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;–&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč; (April 23, 2020) 

About #AshokaBookTower

The newly launched #AshokaBookTower campaign will showcase books written by our faculty and staff. The campaign aims to highlight the rich variety of subjects and intensive scholarship these books represent. An in-depth conversation with the author will also give a glimpse into what went into the writing of the book. This will be a recurring affair and will highlight some of the newest launches as well as the old collection. 

 Do follow us on social media ( |  |  | ) to know more about the campaign! 

51˛čšÝ

Selling Planet Earth: Re-purposing Science Communications for Sustainable Human Wellbeing

51˛čšÝ invites high school students and teachers for the next Scientifically Speaking lecture Selling Planet Earth: Re-purposing Science Communications for Sustainable Human Wellbeing on Tuesday, 13 Oct 2020 at 7 PM. 

Scientists are being encouraged to ‘go public’ with our science, it is less clear as to how our current science communications are effectively addressing the long-term planetary concerns that confront society.  This talk presents the provocative view that scientists - as the interface between the research organisations that produce knowledge and the wider public who could use that knowledge - are akin to marketers in the business world. Drawing from the dominant paradigms that shape business marketing, it re-considers our prevailing models of science communication and their consequent sense of purpose. It argues that addressing issues of long-term sustainability will require not only re-thinking communication practice within universities but also radical institutional regime change towards universities becoming purpose-driven organisations.

Speaker:-
Iain Stewart
Visiting Professor, Environmental Studies - 51˛čšÝ
Professor, Geoscience Communication, &
Director, Sustainable Earth Institute - University of Plymouth   

51˛čšÝ