My City My Responsibility - Citizens of Sustainable Pune

Dear All,

This is a formal invitation to all for attending our event on Citizens Charter and Action Agenda for  Sustainable Pune to be held on the 30th January, 2019. See the poster for details. Though the event starts from 6.00 pm onwards, registrations and snacks starts from 5.00 pm.  

I am glad to announce that a few active citizens will be our guest speakers at the event. Below is brief information about the dynamic personalities who are gracefully working at the ground as well as at the top level for making our city livable.  

Shailaja Deshpande - Founding member and Director of Jeevitnadi and a river warrior. She has been working relentlessly for revival of rivers and has been the driving force in sensitizing the society through initiatives like Adopt a Stretch, River walk and toxin free lifestyle products along with Aditi Deodhar and Manish Ghorpade to name a few. 

Ravindra Sinha - Dedicated towards working for community groundwater through his initiative Mission Groundwater and also a founding member of Resident Welfare Association of Baner Pashan link road where he is actively involved in resolving civic issues of the society.   

Sanskriti Menon - Programme Director at Centre for Environment Education (CEE) working on several aspects of the city like education, creating awareness, carbon neutrality and mobility etc.. She has been involved in developing the Pune Bicycle Plan in coordination with PMC. She rides a bicycle for her daily commute to promote sustainable transport that is low carbon, healthy and environment friendly.  

Sathya Natarajan - An enthusiast, committed towards city's environment, greenery, clean rivers and air quality. He has been volunteering tirelessly for several issues in the city, be it chain fasting for our rivers, saving bird sanctuary, wall painting for a cause, SWACH survekshan, cycling and for red dot campaign etc etc and the list continues. 

I an super eager to hear from this package of inspiration about their work, the challenges they face and yet strive to continue playing their roles in a superb way.  

If you are also eager to know them and interact with them, see you at the event!

Please RSVP me for participation in order to make food arrangements.

Pournima Agarkar. 

www.samuchit.com

My City My Responsibility - Citizens meet for Sustainable Pune

Dear All, 

Are you concerned about your city? Do you want to take any action that will help make your city Sustainable? Are you curious to know what all can be done to make your city pollution free, congestion free, green, clean, safe and sustainable?

Then you should attend our event on Citizens Charter, a LIVE document, as mentioned in my earlier blog .We are drafting the same and it will be available to all at our Citizens meet happening on the 30th Jan, 2019 at Sumant Moolgaokar Auditorium, MCCIA Trade Tower from 6 to 8 pm.
Food arrangements have been made for all, hence kindly RSVP me at pournima@samuchit.com for your participation. 

The event will feature engaging and interactive activities, where you get to meet active citizens of the city, who will share their work, which is creating a huge impact in making their community sustainable. Since the document is LIVE, your comments, suggestions are welcome. There will be experts in the event with whom you can share your concerns or any issues that you have been trying to resolve. If would like to be part of this network see you soon!

Looking forward to meet you all.

Pournima Agarkar. 

www.samuchit.com

My City My responsibility - Experience at KVIFF EcoBazaar!

Dear All, 

Word Cloud - Peoples vision of Pune city

In the last week I attended the Kirloskar Vasundhara International Film Festival (KVIFF) organized by the Kirloskar Group. This is a week long festival held every year in the month of January in many cities of India. In Pune KVIFF was hosted from 3rd Jan to 7th Jan 2019. This festival involves film screenings and other allied activities like seminars, panel discussions, workshops on a specific environmental theme. Eco bazaar - an exhibition exclusively for ecofriendly products and innovations - is an important part of the festival. This year the theme of the festival was in line with the UN theme for World Environment Day 2018 i.e 'No to Plastic and Yes to Earth'. This is KVIFF's thirteenth year of creating an environmental protection movement that aims to enrich lives of the citizens of the city. I feel its a great platform for availing information on environmental issues through films and other allied activities.  

Karan Shelar at Ecobazaar

This year at the  Eco bazaar along with our products Deodorizer, Samuchit Steam cooker (upgraded model of Sarai cooker), Sampada gasifier stove, Charring kiln and Self watering pots, we introduced our family carbon footprint calculator, developed by Dr. Priyadarshini Karve and launched as a web app by Pune International Centre (PIC). We also conducted a live poll on Vision for Pune city from the visitors. While Prashant Borate, Supriya Borate and Karan Shelar were involved in presenting the Samuchit products. I was involved in interacting with the people for the carbon footprint calculation and the live poll along with Aditi and Akash from PIC who also joined us. Dr Priyadarshini Karve supported all of us!!! 

Supriya Borate at Ecobazaar

Prashant Borate at Ecobazaar

Dr Karve at Ecobazaar

Calculating carbon footprint

It was good to know that a lot of people were already aware about carbon footprint and why it is important, some people were even scared to know about their footprint since they had a suspicion that it would be high! Yet many people calculated their footprint using our calculator. Unsurprisingly everyone who had an impression that their footprint is less were shocked to know that per capita footprint was either 2.7 or 3 tCO2eq. The whole idea of calculating carbon footprint of urbanities is to understand that though at the country level India's carbon footprint stands well below the norm of 2 tCO2eq. At the city level it is around 3 tCO2eq and above. Our calculator is a tool to measure how much carbon emissions we generate due to our daily activities.

Click here for calculating your carbon footprint using our calculator. Once you get your results, please write to us at pournima@samuchit.com we can guide you on how to reduce your footprint!

Our live poll activity on Vision of Pune city, will be active till this Sunday (13th Jan), you can check out the instructions below for giving your responses. You can feed in multiple responses but each response has to be ONEWORD. The word cloud posted above is the result of the responses received till date, word cloud generated through your responses will help us in policy advocacy for our city and hence your response matters a lot as a citizen! 

Instructions to participate in the live poll

This was my experience at the KVIFF Ecobazaar. Were you there? Did you participate in some way or were you a spectator? kindly share your experiences as well! 

Pournima Agarkar. 

"the power of the people is much stronger than the people in power.”Wael Ghonim

www.samuchit.com

My City My Responsibility - Citizens Manifesto for Sustainable City

Dear All, 

Wish you an Enthusiastic, Sustainable and Peaceful New Year!!!

An Inspiring Action for Sustainability

Last year has been really very fulfilling for me and I am glad to know, meet and have people around me who are motivated and keep motivating everyone to take up acts of Sustainability may be big or small. 

Having met all these enthusiastic people and knowing their initiatives, we thought of preparing a citizens manifesto, where we asked the citizens as to how would they want their city to be by 2030. We have been compiling all these people's perspectives since the last year and have come up with a Citizens Manifesto! This Manifesto prepared by the people of the city can be a guide or a ready reckoner for anyone who wants to work with the people and for the people.

In my last blog I mentioned about an upcoming event and I am glad to announce that on the 30th January, 2019 Wednesday, we would like to unveil our version of Citizens Manifesto to all of you for further comments and refinements. We intend for this to be a 'living' document which will keep on evolving with people's inputs.

Kindly block this date and keep watching this place for more details!!!

Pournima Agarkar.

'the power of the people is much stronger than the people in power.”Wael Ghonim.

www.samuchit.com