by Aditi Mukherji

Aditi Mukherji is the first ever winner of Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application given by the World Food Prize. In this article, she tells us about her work which won her this award.

by Anab Jain

By 2030, 40% of India’s population will live in cities. That’s the equivalent of 590 million people, up from 350 million in 2010.

Clearly, the combination of internal migration and population growth will place a unique stress on India’s urban infrastructure. Already, plenty of work has been done on the resilience of physical infrastructure: the channels of water supply, sanitation, and power. But what of the city’s ‘soft’ infrastructure; the immaterial flows of data and social relations?

As plans for the digital augmentation of our cities gather pace, we find ourselves wondering how such schemes might be enacted in an Indian context. Given the complex, chaotic and often illegible nature of its urban landscape, and stepping back from the top-down masterplans of Masdar and New Songdo, what would a ‘smart’ Mumbai look like? What might it be like to live there?

by Kristine Pearson

Lifeline Energy is a non-profit social enterprise that provides on-demand access to education and information to vulnerable populations. Lifeline Energy designs, manufactures and distributes solar and wind-up media players and radios for classroom and group listening. It also provides clean energy LED lights to support night-time learning and women‟s empowerment.

Lack of access to radio and reliance on poor quality batteries are other forms of energy poverty. Dependency on disposable batteries along with firewood, kerosene, charcoal and candles – energy sources of the poorest – all contribute to environmental degradation and poverty. Since 1999, 500,000 of our radios and media players have provided learning access to an estimated 20 million listeners, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Kerosene use by the poor remains a perilous issue across the developing world. Renewable energy products and services are making in-roads, however, kerosene is still the primary light and cooking source for much of Africa, where Lifeline Energy mainly works.

by Peggy Liu

The China Dream initiative will re-imagine prosperity and reshape consumerism in China. The goal is to catalyze a new aspirational lifestyle that is innately sustainable for the emergent middle class in China.
The consuming class in China is exploding from 300 million today to 800 million in 2025. For this emerging middle class, the “China Dream” provides an alternative to the unsustainable conspicuous consumption lifestyle of the West.

JUCCCE, an NGO accelerating the greening of China, is the central convener of a growing cross-sector and global coalition of contributors around a three-year plan to reshape social norms through branding of a new lifestyle story and to guide consumer behaviour through policies.