Ashoka Green Plan-It Unconference, aimed at mobilizing the youth towards environment-friendly initiative and lifestyle in their campuses and outside was held at the beautiful campus of SAP Labs India campus. ThinkChange India covered the attended by between 300 to 400 people from different background – students as young as 12 and teachers from academia, emerging social entrepreneurs, representatives from non-profit organizations and social media scribes, the unconference can be characterized as an instant success at least in terms of the response that it evoked from its  intended target community.

The event was designed to be predominantly lecture-based on Day 1 to provide insight on environment and issues and predominantly activity-based on Day 2 to allow the attendees to put their lessons learnt to action. The pre-lunch session was conducted by experts representing Ashoka’s primary associates in the event Centre for Environmental Research and Education.  Dr.Rashneh Pardiwala, an ecologist, first talked about climate change and its impact on water resources, food security, human health  and economy. Later in the pre-lunch session Dr. Rashneh also talked about five areas of sustainability amidst climate change namely Energy, Waste, Water, Bio-diversity and Community. She provided statistics to highlight the wastage in all these areas. However, the remedies that she provided was notable, not because they were unique, but because they were commonplace. Her presentation emphasized the fact that the oft-shared pieces of advice such as switching off electrical appliances when not in use and taking a bucket bath instead of a shower makes a huge difference.

Following the session on climate change, the attendees were given a short activity of making connections between various sub-causes and effects of climate change ( such as erratic rainfall pattern, agricultural productivity loss, mass-migration, health hazards), drove home the point that the sub-causes and effects are numerous and inter-connected. To inspire the student community to change their respective college campuses into an all-round green campus, CERE presented the “Green campus concept”, that outlined the various possible green initiatives in academics, research, campus life and physical operations to constitute a holistic approach towards environmental sustainability. In addition, Mrs. Kitayun Rustom, environmentalist from CERE presented a collection of successful models of green campuses in various schools and institutions across India.

In the post-lunch session, Poonam Bir Kasturi of Daily Dump talked about “Growing your own Ecological Intelligence”, overtly taking inspiration from Daniel Goleman;s ideas, in which she emphasized the importance of knowing about the origin-to-end journey of the ingredients of the products they buy so that so that business is gradually mobilized to be environmentally friendly. She mentioned that the current profound lack this knowledge is because the data is boring and there is a need to present this data in an interesting manner.

Suresh Pai of IndusInd Bank next took over the stage and presented the case study of his bank’s Green Banking project under the banner “Hum Aur Hariyali”.  He outlined the company’s energy efficient computing, paperless initiatives. The contents of  his speech are better outlined  in this article. But the highlight of their green initiatives is the installation of solar powered ATM, the first of its kind in Mumbai. Mr. Pai mentioned that they aim to install a 100 ATMs by march 2012.

Following Suresh’s talk, the youngest presenter of the event at 23, Kuldeep Dantewadia of Reap Benefit talked about his journey to becoming a social entrepreneur. In his talk he pointed out that youngsters shouldn’t be too worried about the idea of sustainability of their initiative and that they would be able to find a way to sustain it eventually if. Further he mentioned that to the first client, “you should keep knocking, you may not get a response. You break the door open, you may still not get a response. Then you should try knocking the next door”.

As the last session of Day 1, Christ University’s Centre fo Social Action presented their working model of “Zero Waste Campus” initiative in their campus. Their well rounded working model including campaigning, educating stakeholders like shopkeepers and house-keeping staff, and setting up hand-made paper recycling unit was truly inspirational.

Pre-luch session of Day 2 was a set of marathon parallel sessions conducted by experts from different social enterprises including Water Literacy Foundation, Saahas, Daily Dump, Waste Wise Trust, SELCO, Reap Benefit, CERE and ATREE.

ThinkChange India attended the “Water Warriors” session conducted by Ayyappa Masagi. In his session, Ayyappa Masagi presented the solutions that Water Literacy Foundation offers to farmers, industries, institutions, apartment complexes as well as individual houses. For example, even though drip irrigation saves more water than flooding, he notes that 40% of the water in drip irrigation is still lost due to natural evaporation process. For this, he has used plastic sheets spread over the pipes that deliver the water which allows the water to condense on the sheets back to the soil. For the urban population, he emphasized simple things like fixing a leaking water tap, using a bucket for washing cars and taking bath would save a lot of water. He also recommends rain water harvesting and grey-water harvesting (water from the bathroom and wash-basins). He mentioned that with proper harvesting one can recharge the ground water table in a matter of a few years. In his own drought-ridden hometown where the water is not available till a 1000ft, he mentioned that he could get water at around 60ft in his bore-well, because of his recharging techniques.  After the session, Ayyappa Masagi spoke shortly, but exclusively to ThinkChange India a non-verbatim transcription of which will be published soon.

Following the parallel sessions, the attendees were asked to present the lessons they learnt  from the experts and present them to the rest of the attendees. With skits, videos and slide-shows the presentation themselves had variety. But it was inevitably diluted because a two-hour direct interaction with the expert was sized down to a ten-minute third-party presentation. However, the experts were available for questions after each presentation. At the post-lunch session, after the Managing Director of SAP Labs, Ferose spoke about synergies between business entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship, the attendees were divided up into groups, and each group coordinated by the experts  worked towards a plan to finding a solution to their problem.

The two-day un-conference  was a very enriching experience because of the diversity of expertise and audience it brought under one roof and set a momentum to act not by just facilitating a series of talks, but also by providing a platform for attendees to work with the experts hands-on. Apart from that, this also acted as a great platform for networking between people with a wide variety of  backgrounds, from school students, to social entrepreneurs and green reporters.

Following this article, ThinkChange India will publish the  interview with “Water Gandhi” Ayyappa Masagi. Stay tuned.