Anjali Dalmia: Uniting Young People for Action 🇮🇳

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Summer 2020: the Start of Confluence

The power of young people has long been understated. Yet in the past few years alone we've seen miracles happen when students work together to address issues that adults won't face. From the global Fridays for Future movement to the American indigenous Standing Rock protests, it's clear that when young people come together, great things can happen. But what does it take to spark passion within so many youth and bring them all together — especially in an Asian country?

Recently we had the pleasure of speaking with Anjali Dalmia, the co-founder of the Yugma Network, a pan-India youth initiative working towards ground-level environmental justice. Currently a second-year student at Ashoka University studying sociology and environmental studies, Anjali started the Yugma Network this June to address the Indian government's draft Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), a new proposal that would give much more freedom to corporate development projects and essentially "destroy the ecosystem." After hearing about the potential consequences of the EIA, Anjali — Ashoka University's Environment Minister — realized she had take action. Yugma, which means 'confluence' in Sanskrit, started as a student campaign to protest against the draft EIA 2020 Notification and increase general awareness around this draft. Over the next few months, it worked to connect regional and intersectional environmental issues with the EIA 2020 in various Indian languages.

It was the first time Anjali saw so many students coming together over an issue, and she worked hard to make it accessible to all Indian students by creating materials in several different languages. "That's why it blew up all of a sudden — we woke up the next morning and it was a huge thing," she laughed. "We didn't really expect it to go there." Their strategy clearly worked: their first volunteer form received so many responses that they had to close the form after just eight hours!

The Yugma Network now contextualizes the environmental discourse by: involving youth from across India who are not yet in the discussion through a storytelling and action platform; working at all levels from policy-making to neighborhood clean-ups; and broadening the definition of the ‘environment’ to transform it into a mainstream socio-cultural issue in India. Currently, it has a language society working in over 12 Indian languages, an Environmental Justice Clinic run by law students, and a team of 20 members tasked with the responsibility of facilitating the daily functioning.

Yet the Yugma Network isn't Anjali's first try at activism — back in 2016, she also co-founded an organization called The Project Amara, which aims to educate girls across India about sustainable menstruation, a heavily-stigmatized topic. With The Project Amara, Anjali has hosted workshops and sessions in a variety of areas. Her biggest takeaway from her experience was that communication tactics are key. She recalled one time when she was teaching a lesson in a rural village where menstruators were afraid to even say the word 'period.' She remembered how, through the discussion, the menstruators realized how a beautiful and essential process menstruation was, stating, "so, our blood isn't dirty, our thought process is".

"That was extremely powerful. I didn't expect that at all. And it made me understand the importance of talking to people. A lot of the environmental discourse today is shouting at people and saying 'you're wrong.' This is not getting us anywhere."

Anjali (second-most right) teaching a Project Amara session.

Anjali is currently also a member of SAPACC Maharashtra (South Asian People's Action on Climate Crises) and a UN Millennium Fellow. She is also working on a project with two friends called PLANT: the People's Living Archive of Native Trees, that aims, over many years, to build a comprehensive, accessible, multilingual, and crowdsourced archive of indigenous knowledge, stories, and medicinal uses of flora in India.

Globally Connected, Locally Rooted

Given the scope and magnitude of her work, talking and connecting with people has become an essential part of Anjali's strategy to mobilizing for climate action. But recently she's seen Indian protests adopting a Western framework, which is not a sustainable model for a country as diverse and different from the west in every socio-cultural, economic, political and environmental way. It alienates the true stakeholders from the discussion and results in short-term mitigation strategies which are not well integrated with the needs of the Indian people. "Because of this, environmentalism is being perceived as 'elite,' which is not seen as intersectional and hence is not able to gain mainstream traction," she said.

So while international learning and support is wonderful, she believes that it's also important to stay focused on your home area. "Globally connected, locally rooted" has become a sort of mantra for her, especially when working in Asia, where so much of the economy is based on the environment and environmental issues generally impact local and indigenous communities more. For instance, fights for farmers' rights and land protection, although focused on protecting societies, are also inherently supporting environmental justice and sustainability.

"I think from that perspective of things our social movements aren't really considered to be environmental movements, but they are," she discussed. "And that's why it's important to work with more people in Asian countries, because we bring an important and contextual understanding of the environment to international and national discussions."

Activism in Asia

Anjali thinks that this interconnection between society and the environment — and the impossible separation of the two — means political action is necessary. "In Asia, I believe one of the major ways to solve the environmental crisis is for young people to get involved in policies, politics, and grass-roots level understanding."

But youth still have several hurdles to overcome before they can start to influence government actions. "Policymaking just seems so inaccessible. A lot of young people don't have avenues right now. And so a lot of those avenues actually need to be created; we need to make that space for ourselves. This does not need to be at a national level, but can be in our neighborhoods as well; policies can operate and be created at any level." Anjali also touched upon the cultural reverence for elder wisdom, which means that young people are more often seen as naive. "That is a big barrier in Asia: to make ourselves be taken equally as seriously as other people," she added.

But she also explained that Asia has a "beautiful storehouse of knowledge and practices which are inclusive, equitable, and ecologically sensitive" that young people can and should draw from.

"Asian countries have a lot of philosophy with a lot of wisdom. And I think it's really important to draw out the right things from that and base our movements on thinkers from Asia."

Forging Onwards

In the coming months, Anjali will continue building the Yugma Network and increasing youth voices in India's political conversation. She also wants to establish Project Amara as a pan-India movement to spread awareness about sustainable menstruation. Most importantly, she wants to learn from experts, be it academics, local groups and people, activists, or her colleagues, who have worked in this field for many years.

In the long term, she wants to contribute to changing the discourse around climate change and including more local, bottom-up, perspectives. She wants to make politics more people-and-environment-centric and to redefine who the phrase 'expert' truly means. She would like to work with communities and other youth to rethink India's economic system and change the classic definition of profit. And although these are hefty dreams, with her unifying skills, we have no doubt she can make it work.

Written by Ariane Desrosiers