Tuesday, January 8, 2019

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




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