Homegrown Sustainability Webinar

Homegrown ideas are crucial in the struggle to mitigate and adapt to climate change, and are a symbol of decolonialization in many countries. This is especially true for indigenous and local solutions, which provide useful insights into dealing with climate stresses and adapting to their irreversible impacts. Such knowledge can provide an important foundation for community-based adaptation and mitigation strategies that would strengthen resilience at the global, regional, and local scales. It is therefore pivotal to embrace homegrown ideas to include the most adversely affected and often marginalized communities, as well as ensure the creation of efficient solutions that are adequate for post-colonial countries.

This TDTM discussion series aims to provide examples of homegrown ideas and their contribution towards a sustainable society, linking them with decolonialization and the importance of indigenous and local knowledge. We aim to do this in an easy and accessible way that can be understood by everyone to hopefully initiate valuable conversations. We will be joined by Kirti Poonia and Chandan Mundhra.

Kirti is the co-founder of a circular fashion tech company called Relove (www.relove.in). A technology that allows brands to host their own peer to peer thrift shop, ensuring circulation for their brand. Over the last 6 years she built one of India’s largest Apparel & Lifestyle Marketplace for rural artisans to directly sell to customers www.Okhai.org, she scaled from 350 to 27,000 artisans and 10x in Revenue. A part of TAS (Tata Administrative Services) Kirti has worked across 6 Tata Companies across functions and geographies.This year Kirti won the Business World Women Entrepreneurship Award - 2021 for her Impact at Okhai. Kirti has also been acknowledged by Niti Aayog as the Top 100 women transforming India.

Driven by the desire to bring a positive change in the environment through automobiles Chandan followed his passion to build Electric Vehicles and moved out of his family business of textiles and started working on his vision of manufacturing indigenised Electric Vehicles and paint the mobility sector green and thus born Savë (Save Environement). He initially focused on making commercial electric 3 wheelers and made multiple variants to build usecases for every industry and it worked well. These EVs are economical, environment friendly and have low cost of maintenence. Multiple clients have reported an increased earnings and the environmental benefits that comes along with it is an addon. Savë has recently associtated with Common Service Centre an initiative of Digital India in taking its distribution pan-India and enabling lakhs of self-employment opportunities.