The Citizens’ Report: background

Anil Agarwal conceptualized and edited the first citizens’ report on the state of India's environment.  Published in 1982 by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), this document presented, for the first time, an overview of India's ecological problems. Afterwards, the Citizens’ Report became a landmark of the ideas and proposals raised by civil society and played a significant role in the civil society meeting on the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The death of Anil Agarwal at the age of 54 on January 2, 2002 was a loss to the environmental movement in India and the world. He was an activist whose passion, vision and prodigious energy brought environmental concerns from the margins of the public sphere into the mainstream. By asserting that ecological sustainability and social justice are two sides of the same coin, Agarwal made a powerful case linking ecological degradation to economic and political inequality.