Author archive: Ashish Kothari

Ashish Kothari is a founder-member of the Indian environmental group Kalpavriksh, and helps coordinate Vikalp Sangam and the Global Tapestry of Alternatives. He taught at the Indian Institute of Public Administration, and served on the boards of Greenpeace International and Greenpeace India.

The Flower of Transformation

With growing news of war and conflict, ecological and climate catastrophe, stark inequalities, health crises related to both poverty and affluence, the authoritarianism of governments, and the increasing stranglehold of mega-corporations in all aspects of our lives, it is understandable […]

What does self-reliance really mean? Amazing stories from India’s villages

Not so long ago, Dalit women farmers in Telangana used to face hunger and deprivation. Today, they have contributed foodgrains for pandemic relief. Farmers on the Tamil Nadu-Karnataka border have been sending organic produce to Bengaluru even during the lockdown. […]

We will survive the Coronavirus. Will we survive ourselves?

What an astonishing slap in humanity’s face, this coronavirus. But the silver lining is that it is also a rude wake up call. I say ‘silver lining’, for at the centre of this is a massive humanitarian crisis of illnesses […]

From Livelihoods to Deadlihoods

In India, economic development and modernity have transformed livelihoods into deadlihoods. They are wiping out millennia-old livelihoods that were ways of life with no sharp division between work and leisure, and replacing them with dreary assembly line jobs where we […]

Towards Alternatives: Radical Ecological Democracy (Part 2)

Local resources, locally managed Localisation, a trend diametrically opposed to globalisation, is based on the belief that those living closest to the resource to be managed (the forest, the sea, the coast, the farm, the urban facility…), would have the […]

Towards Alternatives: Radical Ecological Democracy (Part 1)

The third in our Planet Local series, this article is excerpted from Globalisation in India: Impacts and Alternatives by Ashish Kothari. Kothari will be speaking at the Economics of Happiness conference in Bangalore, India on March 15th. Readers can learn more […]