How do you communicate big ideas that stick and spread in local communities?  Listen in. Sustainability communication is one of the many talents of my guest on this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World, Chhaya Bhanti. Chhaya is the Founder and Director of Vertiver– a women-owned, Indian social enterprise full of designers, storytellers, artists, researchers and passionate environmentalists.

They create engaging campaigns to cultivate positive change around issues of waste, forests, biodiversity, climate action, ecosystems conservation, water, and sustainable agriculture – also through Iora Ecological Solutions

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Download this list of 10 of Morag’s favourite books.

Morag’s 4 part introduction to permaculture video series.

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Chhaya was a brand designer living the high life in New York when she woke up to the inherent waste and destruction that her industry and own work were creating. She returned home to India, took time out to reacquaint with her country (riding her bicycle down the Himalayas from Ladakh!), and then set up her own communications company to be a positive influence in the world. Chhaya’s advocacy work supports policy change and community empowerment affecting millions of people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iToi0qopJc8

Click here to listen to the Podcast on your chosen streaming service.

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Read the full transcript here.

Morag Gamble:

Welcome to the Sense-Making in a Changing World Podcast, where we explore the kind of thinking we need to navigate a positive way forward. I’m your host Morag Gamble, permaculture educator, and global ambassador, filmmaker, eco villager, food forester, mother, practivist and all-around lover of thinking, communicating and acting regeneratively. For a long time it’s been clear to me that to shift trajectory to a thriving one planet way of life, we first need to shift our thinking. The way we perceive ourselves in relation to nature, self, and community is the core. So this is true now more than ever and even the way change is changing, is changing. Unprecedented changes are happening all around us at a rapid pace. So how do we make sense of this? To know which way to turn, to know what action to focus on, so our efforts are worthwhile and nourishing and are working towards resilience, regeneration, and reconnection? What better way to make sense than to join together with others in open generative conversation. In this podcast, I’ll share conversations with my friends and colleagues, people who inspire and challenge me in their ways of thinking, connecting and acting. These wonderful people are thinkers, doers, activists, scholars, writers, leaders, farmers, educators, people whose work informs permaculture and spark the imagination of what a post-COVID, climate-resilient, socially just future could look like. Their ideas and projects help us to make sense in this changing world to compost and digest the ideas and to nurture the fertile ground for new ideas, connections and actions. Together we’ll open up conversations in the world of permaculture design, regenerative thinking, community action, earth repair, eco-literacy, and much more. I can’t wait to share these conversations with you.

Over the last three decades of personally making sense of the multiple crises we face. I always returned to the practical and positive world of permaculture with its ethics of earth care, people care and fair share. I’ve seen firsthand how adaptable and responsive it can be in all contexts from urban to rural, from refugee camps to suburbs. It helps people make sense of what’s happening around them and to learn accessible design tools, to shape their habitat positively and to contribute to cultural and ecological regeneration. This is why I’ve created the Permaculture Educators Program to help thousands of people to become permaculture teachers everywhere through an interactive online dual certificate of permaculture design and teaching. We sponsor global Permayouth programs, women’s self help groups in the Global South and teens in refugee camps. So anyway, this podcast is sponsored by the Permaculture Education Institute and our Permaculture Educators Program. If you’d like to find more about permaculture, I’ve created a four-part permaculture video series to explain what permaculture is and also how you can make it your livelihood as well as your way of life. We’d love to invite you to join a wonderfully inspiring, friendly, and supportive global learning community. So I welcome you to share each of these conversations, and I’d also like to suggest you create a local conversation circle to explore the ideas shared in each show and discuss together how this makes sense in your local community and environment. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land in which I meet and speak with you today, the Gubbi Gubbi people and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.

I’m really delighted to share with you this episode. I’m in conversation with the amazing Chhaya Bhanti, the founder and CEO of Vertiver and a co-founder of Iora Ecological Solutions. We’ve recently met as co-presenters during the American Industrial Design Association’s event focused on life-centered design, and we immediately clicked. So she’s based again in India now, after a long stint in New York, focusing on brand strategy, but she’s come home to reimagine, reconnect, reset, and focus on work for the regenerative world. She’s dedicated to locally accessible projects and communicating the change that we need in the world that is accessible both at a government level, at a corporate level and at a community level that can help us to accelerate the action that’s needed for climate change, for circular economy, for sustainable agriculture and the restoration of biodiversity. It’s such a great opportunity for us to have a chance to talk together and I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation. So welcome to the show, Chhaya, it’s an absolute delight to have you here today. For those of you listening, Chhaya and I only met recently and we were on a show together, uh, run by a friend Basak Altan which was, it was called Life-centered Design, and it was run for the American Institute of Industrial Designers. And so I had a chance to speak and then afterwards Chhaya had a chance to speak. And I think my smile was just wrapping up around my ears while I was listening to you speak. And so I reached out to Chhaya and invited her to join me on this show to talk about the kind of work that she’s doing in bringing about positive change at local communities to address things like sustainability, to address things like climate change, but focusing on farmers and women. And you’ve also worked with youth before I understand as well. So, and it’s, and the reach is phenomenal. The amount of people that Chhay works with is just phenomenal. She’s based in India but it’s not just the spread you have that is remarkable. It’s also about how you work in so many different levels simultaneously. So working at a policy level, working at a community level with awareness change, working with farmers and women who were doing work on the ground. So welcome to the show so I’m so excited that you’ve joined me here today. Thank you for being here!

Chhaya Bhanti: 

Thank you so much. I would say the same exact thing for you when Basak was talking to you. I was just filled with so much excitement about what you’re doing and I can’t wait to have you speak to our communities here as well about your experiences.

Morag Gamble:

Yeah, that’d be great. So, maybe we could just start a little bit by, so you’re the co-founder and creative director of Vertiver. So maybe we could start there. Maybe you could just tell us a little bit about what that is and what you do. Yeah!

Chhaya Bhanti: 

Sure. I’m actually the founder so I was just thinking this yesterday, when we went with the farmers, someone asked us why we named ourselves Vertiver. And that always is my favorite story, because it is literally a metaphor for how each of us needs to think of ourselves because I come from, I mean, my early experience in life, both in luxury branding in New York. So there was a little bit of a taste for making sure that something is branded well, and it has an aspirational quality to it. But when it came back to India and I sort of started looking at different roles that vetiver plays, vetiver was always my favorite fragrance. And I kind of saw what it actually does for soil erosion control and what it did for natural cooling in terms of you know, even being able to drink it as a drink during summers, these sheets made of vetiver grass that are woven that we grew up with all across India that we used to be, you know, used as blinds. So this vetiver grass has so many purposes and it actually has like a direct market linkage. It is sold as very, very expensive perfume, one of the most expensive. And I realized that, when we think of restoring ecosystems, which is always something that I was completely dedicated to once I decided to shift my career, I thought of finding a metaphor that really symbolizes both the beauty of it, you know, whatever represents this kind of fragrance, beauty and elegance, but it also represents some very solid ecosystems restoration work. So that’s why I’m always kind of going back to the beginning, which is that we are of the many, many, many ways in which we could have named ourselves. We thought of ourselves as a vetiver, as a grass, as this grass, which happens to be in India, it’s from India, a native grass from India, and really kind of going back and seeing that it is lost all around us. We don’t see the vetiver anymore. What would it take for us to regrow that? And what would it take in terms of a metaphor to create those ecosystems that would hold us together convergently, not in an isolated way. So it’s something that, because I’ve worked in many fields in the US before, I worked in branding, I worked as a brand strategist, a designer, a filmmaker, and then finally a sustainability advisor and working in cleantech and the carbon market. So there was this whole spectrum of experiences I had in the US move. So I wanted to bring all of that and sort of bring it into one place. And that to me seemed like the perfect platform to do that.

Morag Gamble:

So before we go on and talk more about the work that you’re doing with Vertiver, can you just speak a little bit about where that transition happened, to actually come back to India from New York and to focus from branding into having sustainability at the core of your work?

Chhaya Bhanti: 

So I’ve always, I mean, the key inspiration of when we were growing up is you know, I grew up in Rajasthan, my mother was a very dedicated, is a dedicated social worker and I was very much exposed to going into the fields with her while on her field work, especially with rural women and children. So that was just part of the DNA. We were really exposed to that. Both my parents had a connection with sort of the land in Rajasthan and we were very exposed to the rural areas. Then when I got to the US and you know, built a career in using communications, I was very interested in using communications to express oneself. And I started in advertising in the nineties, there was always this huge disconnect between the amount of material one needs to print and produce to attract people to the next set of fashion. Right? So I worked at a company, this is particularly hit strong when I worked at a company that was every season creating millions of square feet of plexiglass or printed vinyl sheets, billboard, shipping them for all across, not just the US but all across India, sometimes a world putting it on transport. And just this for one season, I mean, it’s gone in two months, you see it on window cases and you see all these great images and all of this production goes into it, and there’s designers involved and there’s millions of dollars worth of shoots happening. And all of this translates into this material that has only, you know, the staying power of a couple of months. And that really bothered me. It used to bother me a lot. And in fact, I was very lucky at that time to meet with my mentor, Paul Hawken, he’s an environmentalist in the U S and I remember in the early two thousands, I met him and he said, okay, let’s work on the solution together. So I remember sort of, you know, I think it was show carpets if I remember correctly, like, you know, really working with, actually, it wasn’t shaw carpets. I’m sorry, I’m forgetting the name of the company. We tried to work out whether there was a way to recycle that plexi, whether there was a way of doing take-back and waste circularity before this whole kind of wonderful world circular economy came into the picture. So I was always very much driven by wanting to eliminate waste, and it was really a personal journey all along. So it wasn’t, I mean, ultimately when I just had had enough and I realized there is no way I could apply, I was heading actually my, an agency called Assouline Inc. And they were wonderful. I love Prosper, he’s the head of the company, but I saw these luxury goods being promoted like ostrich skin bags and crocodile skin shoes to malls to these. You know, I remember looking at data at one point for Dubai and for Hong Kong. And, the data showed that fur coats in Dubai were selling incredibly well. And there was a huge demand, or in Hong Kong, you know, ostrich skin bags. And I was like, this whole idea that luxury now represents the access to natural resource damage. I mean, you know, to touch huge violence, it’s all happening because of branding. We are pushing that narrative, we’re pushing, you know, consume more of this because you’re going to be great. And I couldn’t, I was like, I’m not applying my mind for this, and I have to stop immediately because you can only do so much when you’re within the industry.

Chhaya Bhanti: 

So I left, then that’s where I met Basak, I moved to San Francisco for this sustainability graduate school. And then, had a wonderful chance to work with Paul Hawken and Janine Benyus and, you know, at a solar, like a third-gen PV solar company that they’d started and sort of really helped develop that and be part of the core team. And when I was in San Francisco, I also realized as much as I love the US because it’s really given me a lot in terms of teaching me so many things, I realized also that there is a little bit of a disconnect between like funds and large money that wants to make a huge difference and the insights on the ground, really, they base it all on, you know, there’s very easy to, I’m sorry to say this, but it’s very easy to spin the human story element for people who’ve not been here in India. You can show up, you know, suffering farmer and you can state the problems and you can say, we need this money. And you hope that that money goes to the right place. And you think that that will create a solution, but we all know the sustainability, the issues are so incredibly complex that even if money ended up there, we need that right capacity, that right enabling environment on the ground, to make sure to bridge that connection. I really wanted to play that role on the ground and not just in money. I actually, we don’t, we haven’t taken money per se from any funders or anything like, abroad, but our work then tends to be about identifying where we see a problem and where I see a huge problem and of course, everyone’s now talking about it as behavior change across various things, right? So we need to change the behavior when you talk about change, but changing behavior, you talk about systems change, you talk about thought change. And so you get to work on so many different things at the same time. So you have to work at the policy level, at the institutional level, you have to work with these tools of design, which I had collected in my past work. And you really just apply everything you can, your strategic mind to developing a model that can, as coherently as possible, offer a way of moving forward. I honestly am a very big pessimist, I would say, because things have gotten much worse as we all know, the data says things are much worse. So I would not laud my efforts or anybody else’s, I’m sorry, Morag, because I, that the work that relies of us is so incredibly huge and the time is so little now that we, I just feel that we all have to work exactly in this manner and find ways to scale it up. So I’m always kind of waking up literally everyday with this thought, we’ve got a little time left. We can’t, we’ve got to get this work going.

Morag Gamble:

 

Chhaya Bhanti: 

Well, I mean, I’m discovering it more for myself. So I can’t claim to say that I’m making it happen, but I can definitely share some examples of the work that we try and connect. An example is a project that we are doing on waste management in East Delhi, which is a very densely populated area and huge problems with the landfill. As I said, one of the largest landfills in Asia is Gazipur, which is right at the edge of East Delhi. So how do you solve a problem, like behavior change in a dense community where there’s low income populations, who, you know, there are many socioeconomic factors that are not going to connect them to the idea of making my neighborhood better. So this is a project with the principal scientific advisor to the government of India’s office. And I must really credit them, them and their scientists. I work with someone named Dr. Sanjay Gupta and the vision to know that you’re a scientist and you know, that you can bring in large machines to possibly like trommels and that separate the waste. And they make them into nice little bundles and send them off for RDF. But they had the vision to say, no, we need a community-centric approach. We do need some behavioral gender alongside otherwise, no matter what science we bring in, it’s actually not going to last. That’s where we came in. We were brought in as the partner and although much of our work has happened during the pandemic, because this is three-year long, we started this three years ago, we were able to create a 360 model. We mapped it out and we said, okay, we need to, of course, collect data. We need to understand what’s happening door-to-door, but we also need to engage these communities at a level that they understand. You know, there are many ways, firstly, there’s social capital that’s missing in this community, right? How do you build that social capital? You connect people to each other. How do you connect people to each other? You give them that kind of incentive to perform, to come out there, to be able to show their commitment to something greater, something other than what they’re used to every single day. And of course you work with women. So this is something, these are things that we went in knowing and planning that we are going to have this 360 approach, which is first going to start with this piece of research, those insights, those behavioral insights are going to tell us where the pivots can happen. When we know where the pivots can happen, what are the tools that you require? There are some design tools, there’s some policy tools. There are some institutions where you’re required to do that. You’re going to require the implementation. You know, you’re going to, who’s going to implement, who will these communities listen to when they own this model? You’re going to need pilots, you’re going to set up these pilots and that’s going to be a feedback mechanism. You come back and do this. You’re going to collect the data. You understand how that’s happening, you iterated again. And then you kind of like come back to it, right? So you develop this model and that’s how we approach everything. I like to, you know, every, because that is how a problem has to be approached, but that problem in the sustainability space is everyone works in these silos. You’re only working on one part. And then by the time the two of you talk, we’ve lost time. So in this project we’ve been working, we started working in a very participatory way. We didn’t even name the project until the communities were fully on board with us and they named project. In some ways we made sure to keep going on and engaging them in FGDs and just sitting there and saying, okay, this is the vision. This is what we hope to achieve, we’re going to clean our canals. The canal leads to the Yamuna river, it’s only one of the many canals that leads into the Jumna river, but just the one canal represents lakhs of people. So let’s try and change the mindset that gets you to throw things into this canal, right.

Chhaya Bhanti: 

So that’s where we started. You know, is it a problem for you? You feel it needs to change even when you don’t see whether this is a problem for you, what are your other problems? So it turns out for example, that their machines, because of the methane, because the gas emissions from the canal, the refrigerators and their ACS don’t perform as long, right? They performed for a year before they need heavy servicing again. So they’ve been able to connect the gas, the emissions from there to the machine. So you hear this out, you’re reading between the lines to making correlations that they may not have made or have made. And then you try and work at a solution that they can really feel they can, they want to do, it’s not something you tell them to do. It’s not a top-down thing you say, would you like to do this? Let’s solve it together. You don’t come in so forcefully, but you definitely come in very consistently. And you come in with a strong sense of caring and commitment. I’m with you, we’re going to solve this. What do you think we should do? So we’ve worked on this process and I would be very, I’m very happy to say that in what was perceived to be a pretty hostile environment. And you know, people, like I said, like total lack of social capital there, we’ve connected hundreds of women, we started by showing them the advantages of making compost at home. Now these are tiny balconies. Some of them don’t even have a balcony. Some of them have roofs, but not all of them have roofs. So certainly we’re not working with a hundred percent of the people, but the ones that can, when people realize that you can make compost at home, it’s such a simple thing. We made a little video and like 17,000 women saw it. You know, it’s just, we got these views and we didn’t even expect it. You’re like, you would think people just know how to make compost. So we led them through that process and women are so excited and in our WhatsApp groups, they keep sharing what the quality of the compost did. And they immediately connected it to the idea of growing plants and small urban gardens. So they’ve created these. Some of them have actually made investments in creating these little sweet kitchen gardens on top of their roofs from the cart that they had is a word for compost from the cart that they make themselves. The next thing we did was we started mapping institutions where the waste was coming out. So temples have surprisingly, we didn’t expect this, but we discovered it, that a small temple, for example, can have like two to three kilos of flowers that people are bringing in as an offering. But a large temple can have a hundred kilos every day, you know you’ve got tons of flower waste. Now there are companies that work with transferring flower waste into different objects, but they’re not so present that they can actually utilize this. So there’s definitely a disconnect there. The thing about sustainability spaces is there are solutions. It’s not as if we are inventors of a solution and there are problems, but there aren’t enough people to map the problem in a volume enough and do the work that’s required to connect it to the solution right? And that’s just boring work in some ways, for some people it’s not glamorous enough, it doesn’t get you invited to conferences to speak about, so a lot of people don’t do it. So we kind of started working on connecting those things together. So at the temple, we convinced the temple, and this was a huge long process to help us to let us put biodigester drums on the premises, convincing them that they would not, it wouldn’t smell, it would be this sacred flowers could be converted into a beautiful sort of rich quality compost that women can take away for free. It would be managed by the community members. We created this whole name [inaudible] the idea of being someone who offers their gift of labor for cleanliness, right? This concept. So we got women to start doing this and it became where women really were into it. And then that evolved into let’s convert the flowers into Holi, the colors that we play at Holi festivals. So women started this entrepreneurial program and they themselves really took off. And that we provided the training to them, started selling the gulal, and it became really well to the point that women formed groups. And they were like competing on who’s going to sell the most, et cetera.

Morag Gamble:

What was that that you made, sorry, I didn’t quite catch what they made.

Chhaya Bhanti: 

We made flowers like organic, sorry, flower powder for Holi, the festival. Do you know the festival of Holi where you play with colors, so, you know, drying the flowers, crushing them. So these are now organic colors. You don’t need to buy the synthetic ones and women are so proud of that. And they started making other stuff with color that they’re boiling the flowers and making like, you know, the color that can be used for dying, all of this sort of innovation or thinking creatively happened by the communities themselves. We were just there to kind of point out the solution, then work with them on the processes that happened, right? So once what was the great discovery is once you point a little part of the solution to the communities, as you know, Morag, you work a lot in this space, they embraced it. So we’ve had great success of the decentralized waste management level in which we are at a household level, as well as at an institutional level. We’ve started putting in these pilot units just to demonstrate that it is possible to not have to send all this space to a landfill. There is a pretty robust value chain in India of you know, at the municipal level of Rikshawala who pick up the waste and they kind of segregate the valued items and then they take it for themselves. But the problem is that they don’t see value in organic waste, sadly. And even within that other category of waste, they really only pick the most valuable ones that they can sell right away. So there’s a lot of work to be done, which we are working on. So now our next thing here is that we’ve got people to adopt. So we first said, do it at your own house, volunteer at the temple. Now we’re like, okay, adopt your street. So we’ve launched this new program with the municipal council to adopt a street in which we have mapped out literally every single step along the way, and put in incentives for people to collect, segregate, be part of that system so that we can actually, where women want. And now women, just yesterday, I got a woman who said, I want to set up my own plastic collection system because I have a little space in that area. Great. Let’s make entrepreneurs of this. So this is an example, I mean we of course use a lot of awareness tools and wall paintings and animations and newsletters and all kinds of design.

Morag Gamble:

Maybe just tease that out a bit. What are some of those communication tools that you use to bring this awareness into a community like that? You mentioned wall painting?

Chhaya Bhanti: 

First is something called Nukkud Natak, which is a very common street play in India. Or we wrote a street play, on the importance of all of these issues and made it really entertaining and work with a great group of maybe 25 performers who came in and I can share pictures later, but who came in and walked through the streets, you know, kind of in this very loud singing voice chorus of not doing it so that piqued people’s interest. And when we started going in, that was the first point of interaction, you go in and you do that, get people to take a message and you know that it’s happening at a community level. It’s not just being told to them is true to everyone. So people feel a sense of cohesion around that. So that followed by, you know, those people that did have WhatsApp connect them on that and kind of begin to converse with them through messaging. But we did a mural on a temple, outside the temple. We convinced this temple, at a very strategic place where you can see when you drive in, you know, what the messages, we created a newsletter in which we featured the work of the women that was happening. And, this newsletter is a community owned newsletter where we would just feed you all the work that people are doing and distribute it, and they would feel so proud that they were part of it. We did many competitions like painting competitions, slogan competitions, et cetera, with a small prize at the end for them to actually come in and be able to participate, you know, kids to participate as well. We’ve done showcasing, we’ve then worked with women to have their own performance plays. So women have together written songs and performed them. And they’re, so now, as I told you yesterday, they were there willing to perform it in the streets as well. Now these are very, these are women that come from not very liberal homes, for example, I mean the women aren’t really, some women weren’t even allowed to step out of their homes until this project came along. And now they’re so excited that they have this thing that they can do as a purpose. So they are coming together to want to perform even in the streets. So that’s a very exciting step for us. What works here is experiential stuff, visual stuff works as a way to push something forward, but primarily it’s experiential interaction. You go there, you perform, you sing, you are there as a community and then you follow up with a nice little message. During the dynamic we did a lot of zoom calls with the women and surprisingly, all of them figured it out. And we did, you know, online training workshops, we invited experts to talk about their processes. So a lot of just constant feedback about the fact that there’s a lot of change agents around and there are processes that they adopt.

Morag Gamble:

Oh, it sounds amazing. There’s so many lessons in that that I can just, I can hear, you know, people think, oh my gosh, that would make such a difference in so many different places. I wanted to maybe ask you a bit about the work that you’re doing around organic farming.

Chhaya Bhanti: 

Sure, absolutely. So we’re working on a project on behavior change for farmers and the idea we’re working as a partner to the to shift. And the idea here is to get farmers who are conventional, conventional practicing farmers who are using different kinds of fertilizers. Weedicides, fungicides, pesticides, etc, to transition away to bio inputs that they can make themselves. And they can see the value of that because you see incomes are, they’re driving less and less yields. They’re putting in more and more money into these inputs, chemical inputs. And of course, land degradation is a huge problem until it’s,

Morag Gamble:

What is the big picture of where agriculture is at in India these days?

Chhaya Bhanti: 

Okay. So on one side, I mean, most farmers are you know, most smallholder farmers are still protected in some ways because they can’t, some of them can’t afford any expensive chemicals, but a lot of them, the chemical companies, the agro companies, so to say are the key touch point for information for farmers. So when they are told they need to use a certain input to reduce a certain issue on the farm, they use it. So a lot of farmers are waking up to the fact that they’ve been lied to in some ways, because they can see the quality of the farm. They can see the quality of the soil, et cetera, but because of the small farm holdings, you know, a smallholder farmer is extremely vulnerable. So to convince such a smallholder farmer to transition away into this is a challenge. It’s a challenge because they’re going to run to their local supplier to say, here’s what I’d like to use. So a large agri, I mean, I don’t know what context, agriculture is plagued by the same issues that a lot of the world is. You’ve got water scarcity, you’ve got climate change, rain, rainfall variability, heat, all of which is affecting these, the crop cycles. And there is a major push in the government to move towards climate resilient crops and to look at moving away from carbon and water intensive crops and really trying to create rich soil and soil and water conservation programs have really been a priority. And so people are working on that. There are certainly huge vulnerabilities. There’s a massive work that needs to be done on climate change adaptation for farmers. There are so many changes that are coming down the pipeline across the board that you know, everything from livelihood options to more resilient agriculture, to more access to nutritional food, there are all kinds of things that are connected to the agri cycle that we’re working on right now.

Morag Gamble:

So there’s something about the way that you do the work that you do through communication, like the design of that communications that you share out. And I wonder whether you could talk a little bit about what constructs a really good way to share a message to cultivate this behavioral change that you’re so as well as this ongoing on the ground, but in the materials that you create and maybe to reach. So you talked about how you reach into the community. How do you do the same type of thing to reach convincing a change at a higher level, perhaps in government or policy or business, where are the levers there?

Chhaya Bhanti: 

So policy makers don’t have any time, as we all know, and you have to distill a message to them in the most succinct way possible in order for them to have the bandwidth to register what you’re saying. That’s where visual tools are extremely handy. This is the work that we’ve done for many years, you know, tried to translate climate change, heavy documents and do like a five minutes animation or a e-learning module where you can take people through the steps of climate financing or you make a really attractive visually interesting data visualization, a policy brief that they can read, position articles, et cetera. So, there is a combination of visual tools that are used. And, the key thing here is the domain. You see, mostly, sometimes design agencies don’t quite understand the complexity of the nodes that are connected in order for a policymaker to really contemplate on a potential new direction, policymakers are very, very smart. They understand the entire breadth, but they don’t have the time to think about how each of these is connected and which one is a priority. So you’ve got to do your work. And if you’re a design agency that is working with the researcher, you’ve got to go back and forth a lot to make sure that firstly, you distill the right message in the right direction. Even sometimes, research recommendations are too overarching, even those, you know, even though they’re meant for a policymaker and there’s an executive summary, those too are a little too overwhelming. So figuring out how to visualize this and play with that a lot and look at it. So we’re working on, we’re just working on an animation on peri-urban on the importance of barriers and agriculture for policy. So this is an animation for policy makers to let them understand what it is that should be done within the space of peri-urban agriculture. That’s based on a study by a research Institute. So we have spent, I mean, this is a lot of work. It’s about three months of tinkering at ways to approach it visually. And then once you approach it visually, you wonder whether you need to make it really, really like vernacular. You do need to introduce the elements that will take into account local motives. Sometimes we do that, sometimes we don’t, when it’s an overarching thing, we don’t put so much effort in that. But for example, we did a campaign called Forester Life with a ministry. And in that, every community where the campaign was going to go, we looked at folk art. Then we imbibed those motives in there and we made it into that language and kind of broadcasted that way so that it was very, very context specific. One of the problems with communication design in general is that while it tries to solve the huge problem, it tries to do it in a kind of a one-off approach. It creates one concept and then it pushes it to everybody assuming that everyone relates to it in the same way. And I think, I mean, it’s very, very hard work to try and break that down into context-specific information, and to not necessarily have this cookie cutter visual idea that you think will appeal to everyone, but hopefully in a more participatory way. But of course that takes more time and time is an issue. So we try and work, I mean, our team works really hard to try and counter that issue. But you know, that is the ideal world. The ideal world is that your policymakers should receive something if they’re a state-based policy maker, if they could see something that could broadcast and share with maybe their own departments. And those departments felt that these, we or whoever was communicating really understood their nuance and they could relate to that content and it’s short enough and it’s interconnected enough, you’re going to be able to just at least be at the beginning of a mindset change. Of course you’ll have to interact with them a little bit more to convince them, but that piece of information, if it’s done right, it can really make a huge difference.

Morag Gamble:

Yeah. That’s hugely powerful. I mean, I’m excited to hear you talking about the peri-urban agriculture issue because that’s a huge issue everywhere around the world. And I’m just wondering whether there’s yeah. And from my permaculture background too, I just wanted to ask you, like, where does that sit within the context that you’re in, like the sort of the small scale polycultural community-based type of food systems, is permaculture, something that is known of there is seen as a valuable tool. Tell me a bit more about that if you can.

Chhaya Bhanti: 

Yes I have, there is a very dedicated movement towards permaculture. You don’t hear about it as much in your ongoing sustainability world, but there are, sometimes you get invited to workshops on permaculture and it isn’t, I mean, I would say that there’s a lot of room to talk about permaculture here and to really push that further, but certainly people know about it and people think of it as of course, a very good approach. So I think, you know, if at all you can extend the kind of work you’re doing here in terms of training, engaging the community on these aspects, I think there’s a lot of room to do in India. At The policy level, sadly, you know, there are a lot of sustainable agriculture goals that the government has. And there is a lot of action planning associated with that and biomass, turning biomass into good soil input is very much part of the agenda. There’s, I think the capacity and the knowledge on that could be extended. Of course there is traditional knowledge that already exists that needs to do that, but we’ve, de-linked from the traditionalist so certainly even coming back to that and repackaging that information in a way that equates the value of permaculture to the data, to the kind of fertility that’s associated with it, I think could really be important.

Morag Gamble:

I kind of feel like someone like you needs to be at the core of this because there’s this permaculture, there’s this traditional way of thinking, there’s the policy thing. And it’s the communication of how something like permaculture can be a value and build on what people already know and also link to the directions that your country is going. But also globally, we need to go from a regenerative perspective.

Chhaya Bhanti: 

Yes, very much. We need to connect it. It’s again about connecting the dots from a, you know, Morag, it’s about identifying places that have that biomass input, figuring out the transportation logistics and bringing it back to the soil, because there’s so many areas that are so heavily degraded that are far from places where they have that kind of biomass input. So the logistics, it’s not just about doing that work. It’s about figuring out where the raw material comes from, and then being able to sustain that on the ground, you know, so India has a land degradation neutrality goal. And I think tha looking at whether permaculture can be done at scale or not, because I know it requires a lot of heavy biomass input, you know, how do you connect what may be an existing material? I mean, I always kind of obsess about all this household waste that is ending up in landfills. It’s creating methane, all kinds of other issues. Could we not just put that, you know, make compost, put that in trains, like have it stopped in the middle of nowhere, dump it, you know have all these kind of utopian ideas because there has to be something radical that has to be done. You got all this rich input that’s coming out of the households. We need like a composting revolution so that this can become the soil, they call it, you know, it can kind of add layers of soil fertility again and then you can do leaves and all that other stuff.

Morag Gamble:

I love that idea. I mean, I think you’re absolutely right. Do it, it requires us shifting out of our thinking about sort of tinkering around at the household level, or even just at a local level, which is where you get the shift, the connection happening. But then once we’ve got that, we need to be revolutionizing our way of thinking. And so just as a final thought, you know, like the trains of compost, I think that’s absolutely brilliant. I think that is so brilliant, what are some of the other sorts of big, like, if you could change something and you think that this would make a huge difference. What is your dream? What do you dream of shifting in to make a difference in the world? Because like I said, it’s urgent, it’s huge.

Chhaya Bhanti: 

It sounds ridiculous. I mean, I really think it’s it’s household waste. I mean, it really starts there. For me, it starts with household waste because we are, our consumption is destroying ecosystems both in terms of what we take and what we put out. If we stop there, if we can just work on that solution truly, and we can figure out how to not have those two separated, you know, organic in this and, and then lead it to the restoration of ecosystems. That’s huge. And of course, I also obsess about the kind of stuff we’re putting in our water. So water, you know, removing damage into the water, literally sweeping solutions that are, I don’t know if policy can do anything about it, but you know, every time somebody uses a shampoo, like I try not to use, you know, I’m sure you are like, we’re all environmentally oriented. So we make choices that don’t damage the water right?, but then there’s all kinds of toxins that we put in the water anyways on a daily basis, you know, cleaning our dishes and all kinds of things. Like if we could just stop at the household level, we could enact large-scale change because whenever I go to East Delhi and I put together the data. It’s just like just a collection of a hundred households, amounting to tons and tons of waste. And that kind, if you work out all the different emissions and everything that’s associated with it, you know, that if that could be solved, rest of the stuff could actually be.

Morag Gamble:

Yeah. There’s something about what you just said. That is so hopeful because it’s not a massive, great thing to do, is it? It’s not some kind of impossible technological challenge that we face. It is simply centralized. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me today. I know you’ve got to duck off and get on with the things that you’ve got to do today. I’m going to share down below any links that you have to, the work that you do. So please share those and we’ll make sure that that goes out there. I thank you so much and I’m looking forward to continuing conversations around connecting with the work that you do. And I know that when we, one of the connections to that we had at the meeting the other day was around Ladakh. And that was a place that you mentioned that was a huge inspiration for you, as it was for me. I think that was the turning point in my life for doing the work that I do one day I’d like to bring my family over there and share that with them. Yeah, just as a final comment, sorry, what was it about Ladakh that.

Chhaya Bhanti: 

Actually, when I quit my job in New York, I did a bicycle ride from Ladakh to Manali, which is through the Himalayas because I felt that that would be my, sort of the beginning of my connection with India and I wanted to start at the top. I wanted to kind of really reconnect with my country. So I feel that, you know, not Ladakh, of course, there’s so much soulfulness in the landscape and the incredible transition you go through from Ladakh when you come into Manali, there’s this huge sudden burst of green and all kinds of vulnerabilities that are associated in the Himalayan system. You know, now water is such a huge issue all around there. I just feel the Himalayan range represents the biggest wisdom we have as a civilization in the Indian civilization, because there’s so much, a lot of that wisdom is associated with rich, Himalayan cultural and ecological systems. So looking at that as a teacher and seeing where the teachings are, of course in India, it’s so rich and there’s almost a race against time to learn from indigenous cultures. And so many people are still wonderfully preserving things, but the onslaught of pressure is so high. We need to, you know, we need to just, that’s why I was saying last time that we need to be humble in terms of designers, because that is my biggest pet peeve with the design community. Or when I say design community is someone who thinks that they can make a change to the design of ideas, right. Is to think that they have a solution and do not learn from what somebody has not put in the time that you require to learn and work in a participatory way, it’s, that is the most important thing. So our systems are designed in such a way that we give awards, or we have someone’s portrait, that that’s like suddenly on the cover of a magazine and suddenly you feel you’ve arrived and whatever we have such low benchmarks, as far as I’m concerned for giving people accolades, and for making people feel rewarded, that people start sort of run in that space, thinking that that is what they’re working towards because in their mind, a lot of, I’m not saying all of course, incredible people that do the reverse, but the motivations in the industry are to create the most glamorous, most award-winning campaign, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into change. We’ve got to understand what changes, where it will happen, and that requires anonymity. It really requires you to de-link yourself from what people might know about you and just literally tinkering. So that’s what I would like to say at the end, too, if we are talking to a community of change makers, the real change makers don’t care about any of this, but a lot of the people don’t want to transition into change-making and they’re already in their fields, must do so without wanting to be now known as a catalyst of change and the change agent of the year, or most meaningful career of the, whatever, none of this matters.

Morag Gamble:

You become in service to that.

Chhaya Bhanti: 

And indigenous cultures in Australia here, all of them teach us, you know, there’s wisdom in the collective, wisdom in animity, nobody needs to own any ideas. You just do it for the greater good. Just do it. So, yeah.

Morag Gamble:

Thank you. That’s a perfect way to end. Thank you so much again for your time, Chhaya. It;s a delight to have you on the show.

Chhaya Bhanti: 

Aww. I look forward to having you speak to our communities as well. We’ll meet, we’ll arrange that very soon.

Morag Gamble:

Okay great, Take care. Bye. That’s all for today. Thanks so much for joining me. If you like a copy of my top 10 books to read, click the link below, pop in your email, and I’ll send it straight to you. You can also watch this interview over on my YouTube channel. I’ll put the link below as well, and don’t forget to subscribe, leave a comment. And if you’ve enjoyed it, please consider giving me a star rating. Believe it or not, the more people do this. The more podcasts bots will discover this little podcast. So thanks again. And I’ll see you again next week.