WEF 2024: 'Food, fashion, lifestyle cause major emission, focus should be on re-generative economy,' says social entrepreneur Neelam Chhiber

Social entrepreneur Neelam Chhiber on Wednesday said everyone thinks that there are huge emissions due to fossil fuels, but actually the largest contributor is consumption - food, fashion, and lifestyle. "What are we buying? What are we wearing? What are we eating? 60 to 70% (emissions). And therefore, we believe that the backbone of India's green industrialisation could be decentralised, re-generative, and creative economy - also called the social economy," said Chhiber while speaking to Motwani Jadeja Foundation's founder Asha Jadeja Motwani during Global India Dialogues at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos.

Chibber, who is an industrial designer from the National Institute of Design and has worked in remote villages such as Bastar, said India has more than 200 million artisans. "India has 140 million smallholder farmers, the largest in the world. And it's deeply critical that we retain these skills because this is the foundation and backbone of the green economy. That is what India should strive for."

The entrepreneur said the way China has become the factory of the world and helped meet the MDG goals because it pulled millions of people out of poverty, but on the way, it spewed a lot of carbon. "I think the future for India is to build a huge force for green industrialisation," she said during the session powered by Motwani Jadeja Foundation.

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"A lot of purists don't like the word green industrialisation because they consider it to be an oxymoron because industrialisation is polluting and green is not supposed to be. But we call it a regenerative economy. So essentially, what we do is we work with women's collectives in rural India, and we help them enable them to work on circular economy production and supplying to global supply chains," she said.

Chhiber said that women's participation in labour force is falling because they cannot migrate for work. She said her organisation, which works with self-help groups, is trying to address this issue by having them stay in the rural areas and give them economic activity around farm and non-farm. "The creative economy is the non-farm and farm. Also, we're talking about moving them into carbon-sequestering value chains like bamboo. It could be linen flags. Cotton is not a huge carbon sequestering plant as much as linen is."

She said India imports all the linen from the UK and Europe - all the linen that we wear in India. "Why do we need to? We can grow our own flags. So there are things like this that we are looking at. Seaweed is hugely carbon sequestration. We have one of the longest coastlines in the global south. So there is a lot of opportunity when we are looking at climate financing. So not just government schemes, but also taking global climate financing and trying to say that women are not just going to be victims of climate change, but women can also be mitigators of climate change."