Ashok Khosla wins the 'Environment's Nobel Prize'

Indian scientist and environmental thinker Ashok Khosla has been awarded this year's UNEP Sasakawa Environment Prize. The prestigious US$ 200,000 prize is considered to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in environmental and sustainable development

Dr Khosla is founder and head of Development Alternatives, a member of the Asia Pacific Video Resource Centre Network. He is also a former trustee of TVE.

The award will be presented on November 19 at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. In announcing this decision, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) described Khosla as a man who offered "pragmatic, sensible and life changing solutions" to burning issues.

According to UNEP, which administers the award, "Dr. Ashok Khosla has worked tirelessly to demonstrate both the theory and practice of sustainable development through his teaching and fostering of environment-friendly and commercially viable technologies. These range from village power plants which use agricultural wastes as fuel to mini factories that recycle paper and local enterprises that make low cost roofing tiles." Click here for full text of press release

Much of his recent work has been achieved through Development Alternatives, a group of organizations headquartered in New Delhi, which he founded in 1983, to help bring people and nature directly into the design and implementation of his nation's development strategies.

"Dr. Khosla has been a tireless defender of the environment for more than three decades. His work has had a large ripple effect, not only in India but around the world," said Lord Clinton-Davis, Chairman of the selection committee.

Welcoming the award, Dr. Khosla said: "This award is really for the work of the many, many partners and collaborators with whom I have been privileged to work over the last 40 years. It is a wonderful, if unexpected, tribute to their efforts at the desk, in the laboratory and out in the field, courageously experimenting with ideas and action that were mostly unfashionable and often directly opposed to conventional development thinking".

He added: "We set out to improve life in the villages of India and the journey led us to new ways for creating sustainable livelihoods - jobs that use local resources to produce goods and services for the local market, thus generating purchasing power, satisfying basic needs and regenerating the ecosystem, all at the same time. Mini enterprise was the means we found most effective to create these livelihoods and good science, technology and management support systems the best instruments for helping these enterprises meet their triple bottom line imperatives: financial, social and environmental sustainability."

Commenting on the institution he founded, Dr Khosla said: "The Development Alternatives model may well have wider applicability in other parts of the developing world. One of our latest ventures, TARAhaat.com, the Internet Portal for rural India, is already beginning to pave the path for such worldwide replication of the more successful of our development initiatives".

The Sasakawa Prize, sponsored by the Nippon Foundation and founded by the late Japanese tycoon Ryoichi Sasakawa, has been awarded annually since 1984 to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the management and protection of the environment.

Past winners include: Nobel laureate, Professor Mario J. Molina for discovering a new reaction sequence involving chlorine peroxide, which accounts for most of the ozone destruction in the Antarctic; Chico Mendes, the rubber tapper from Brazil who died leading the fight against cattle ranchers' destruction of the rainforest; Lester Brown, former Director of the Worldwatch Institute, whose writings were instrumental in alerting the world about the threats to the biosphere; Dr. M. S. Swaminathan of India, father of the economic ecology movement; and Ian Kiernan of Australia, founder of the Clean Up the World campaign in which more than 120 countries participate.