Bahar Dutt

Bahar Dutt

Bahar Dutt is trained as a conservation biologist- and has worked for the last twenty years in India and abroad on key environmental issues. She has worked as an Environment Editor with India’s leading English news channel CNN-IBN and has won over 12 national and international awards for her reportage on green issues. Her reportage has helped move environment reportage from an obtuse segment on television to prime time news space. She worked for ten years with a community of snake charmers on a project initiated by her helping them find alternate livelihoods that were not in conflict with wildlife laws. She is the author of two books ‘Green Wars- Dispatches from a Vanishing World by Harper Collins and ‘Rewilding in India’ for Oxford University Press. She is currently Associate Professor at Shiv Nadar University and runs a youtube show called Earth Talks with Observer Research Foundation.

Session

Environment

Overcoming the clear & present danger
This session lays down future blueprints for two of modern-day’s most pressing concerns - accessing clean air & water!
 
Air pollution is humanity’s clear and present danger and automobiles are the worst offenders. Solutions like ‘odd-even’ only have a temporary effect and cause inconvenience to the most vulnerable stakeholder, people who do not have odd or even numbered cars suffer while the rich, likely possessing both, are unaffected. In our focus is Altigreen’s NEEV, an electric 3-wheeler (L5 cargo), currently in series production & available in multiple variants, powered by a 11 kWh battery, and ARAI-tested at an unprecedented 180 km range. It is already in use by leading e-commerce and FMCG companies like Amazon, Flipkart, Zomato, Delhivery, IFB. The innovator behind Altigteen is Amitabh Saran, who has enabled products that can allow India to become fuel-efficient while causing negligible damage to the environment. The question, as we look into the future, is what are the scope and scalability of such devices? In focus are also water conservation models, as we talk to Professor Pradeep of the IIT, Chennai, who is steeped in developing safe and affordable technologies for drinking water purification. His pesticide-removal technology is estimated to have reached about 10 million people and his arsenic removal technology, approved for national implementation, is delivering arsenic free water to about one million people every day.