Supriya Sahu has been leading Tamil Nadu’s fight to stop the devastating results of excessive climate, and he or she has been placing girls on the entrance traces of these battles.
| Photo Credit: Supriya Sahu
Tamil Nadu is one of the largest and most urbanized states in India. It can be one of the states most threatened by climate change. Since 2019, Supriya Sahu, 54, has been leading Tamil Nadu’s fight to stop the devastating results of excessive climate—and he or she has been placing girls on the entrance traces of these battles.
Sahu was appointed Additional Chief Secretary to Government, Department of Environment, Climate Change following many years of public service that included intensive expertise in coping with environmental points. Meeting these challenges is now extra vital than ever; a Tamil Nadu authorities report has named Tamil Nadu as one of the Indian states most vulnerable to excessive climate, together with recurring cyclones and droughts.
In 2022, the southern state was the first in India to launch a climate change initiative with particular targets and focus areas. The Tamil Nadu Green Climate Company (TNGCC) has three missions: enhance forest and tree cowl, handle climate change and preserve wetlands.
Sahu chairs the TNGCC, overseeing an all-male board—an uncommon scenario that she takes in stride. The knowledge journalism initiative IndiaSpend has reported that only one,527 of the 11,569 Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers—about 13%—who entered the civil service between 1951 and 2020 are girls. Asked about particular challenges that include working in a male-dominated subject, Sahu says that in each job, you need to show your self, irrespective of which intercourse you might be.
Her confidence could stem from her upbringing as the daughter of an IAS officer in addition to previous skilled successes. Her tenure as the District Collector in the Nilgris, an ecologically delicate district alongside the border of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka, was an necessary section of her profession that “left an indelible mark.”
“It was in Nilgris that I realised that at the district level, people have more faith and confidence in women officers to better understand their problems.” Sahu’s workforce banned the use of single-use plastics throughout the district—a feat documented as greatest apply by the United Nations Development Programme after discovering that animals corresponding to elephants and bison had been consuming plastic discarded by vacationers. “We implemented the ban on single-use plastics 23 years ago, when no one even thought of their impact on the planet.” She attributes the programme’s success to the involvement of locals and girls’s self-help teams.
Sahu is satisfied that ladies deliver a sure sensitivity and understanding to points, particularly these round climate change. “When you go outside, just look at what’s happening around you. It’s all about women. You go to fields, they work as farmers, they tend cattle, take care of children. They are the people who cook. But they are considered labourers, not farmers. It’s the woman who should be at the center of climate change initiatives. Otherwise, it will be climate injustice.”
A United Nations report states that ladies are extra susceptible than males to the impacts of climate change, primarily as a result of they symbolize the majority of the world’s poor and since their roles, duties, decision-making skills, entry to land and pure assets, alternatives and wishes are very completely different.
Sahu says that climate actions taken in Tamil Nadu are designed round the concept that they have to profit girls. In March 2022, for instance, the state authorities launched a Green Fellowship programme to interact youth in environmental coverage design and implementation.
“This is the first such fellowship in India, and we are going to have 40 fellows working on climate issues for two years,” says Sahu. “We’re going to put a lot of emphasis on selecting women fellows.”
A second initiative is the state’s climate literacy programme, which includes creating academic movies and social media posts on climate change in the Tamil language. “Most of it is going to be directed at women,” Sahu says.
Yet one other program that works for girls and the atmosphere is Meendum Manjappai, which inspires the use of eco-friendly yellow material buying luggage as an alternative of plastic. “I went to the outskirts of Madurai where I met a group of 15 women working at a small tailoring center, stitching bags of various sizes and models. We gave them orders to produce manjappais (the yellow cloth bags), and they are making decent money from that work.”
Because girls’s work is usually invisible, Sahu says that many initiatives inadvertently find yourself being a burden to girls. “That is why the world has to think about how to equally share a woman’s burden.”
