“We really do not have a lot of time left, and we need to think about the environment now” – Anjali Dalmia
Highlights:
- What is Anjali Dalmia?
- What is Yugma Network?
- Project PLANT
Who is Anjali Dalmia?
A 20-year-old, student and Environment Minister at Ashoka University, Anjali Dalmia is absolutely winning all the hearts by her initiatives to save the environment. Co-founder of Yugma Network, Project Amara and Project Plant, Anjali is now representing the country at MockCOP26.
Mock COP 26 is a is an online initiative which will be from November 19th to December 1st, in an expression to fill the void of postponed COP26. The event will be run by youth climate activist who will be delegates from different countries and Anjali is one of them.
Anjali is absolutely a pro-environment person, her journey in social work started with her co-founded the initiative, project Amara which works on sustainable and equitable menstruation for all women. In the recent past, with the coming of the EIA Draft 2020 this year, Anjali being the Environment Minister of Ashoka University, came to know about the problems with the draft and furthered to work out collective activism by connecting with the Students union of more than 70 colleges making the Yugma Network.
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What is the Yugma Network?
Anjali tells us that “Yugma Network is a pan-India youth initiative which works towards achieving ground-level environmental justice by contextualizing the discourse through local languages. Yugma basically aims to bring the conversation in the public domain in their own language, as what they felt was that the conversation, that should reach to the locals is not actually the reaching them because of the language barrier.”
The idea of Yugma, as she puts it is “involving more and more people, who are not yet involved till now by talking to them in the language. The activism against yugma started with letter sending, and from where we realized that other unions and youth groups should also get involved.
After doing this letter sending, we realized that a lot of conversation around EIA is in English, and it was not really getting connected with the local issues as it appeared to be an abstract concept to the locals, so, we began translating the content in different local languages and started involving people who quite involved and making in access to them using languages and ways in which they can easily understand.”
Presently, they are working on the farm bill and acts, air pollution issue and stubble burning issue. A section associated with them, who are law students help in filing PILs, give legal education to people, work for representation etc. Along with that, a part of yoga precisely lookout to know environmental stories of locals and what environment, as a broad idea means to them.
Project PLANT
Anjali is also the co-founder at project PLANT: People’s Living Archive of Native Trees and is working with SAPACC Maharashtra & Youth (South Asian People’s Action on Climate Crises). As a final note, it is very obvious that we don’t have a lot of time left to save the environment, it is high time now and we need to act upon it. For the people who get wish to get involved, they can join Yugma or can look forward to any of the organization working for the environment and sustainable development, as they every such organization is looking for more hands to help. You can get involved with Yugma here.
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