Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group

Chintan is a gender-responsive Circular Society Do-Tank improving lives, livelihood and leadership, committed to advancing sustainable consumption and Read more equitable waste management to mitigate pollution, improve air quality, and address climate change.

Chintan vision is: To be the enabler of systemic changes for a healthy, equitable environment and life for all via actionable research, capacity building, thought leadership, piloting of new ideas, and data-based interventions.
Chintan mission is: To create a world where every individual has access to a clean, safe, and healthy environment, and to safe and dignified livelihood

Chintan evaluates all its work through the prism of environmental benefits, livelihood benefits to the poor and gender justice. It conducts trainings with its teams on both some SDGs and environmental issues per se, to ensure organizational culture reflects this ethos.
Goal 1: No Poverty
Chintan has organized over 17,000 wastepickers for identifying collective opportunities for fighting poverty, being represented in policy and creating constituencies of support. An association, Safai Sena, was created and incubated by Chintan for this. 50% of the leadership of Safai Sena are women.

Chintan has upgraded or/and created at least 3200 livelihoods for wastepickers in waste and plastic collection and running MRFs.

Goal 2 and 3 : Zero Hunger and Good Health and Well Being
Chintan’s approach to hunger is anchored in Gandhiji’s vision of self-reliance as well as in building nutritional resilience in the fact of climate change for women and girls. Our initiative, Kyari to Kitchen, trains over 6000 women in slums to grow their own food across Delhi and UP, with learning from local uptake and nutrition kits for young children on a regular basis. Empowering women is key to our approach to health and well-being.

Goal 4: Quality Education
Chintan’s Gen Next initiative combats child labour in green sectors like waste picking, by providing access to education, life skills and networks for a better future. 67% of these beneficiaries enrolled in Chintan’s learning centres are girls. Not a single girl was married off and not a single child dropped out of our education centres even during the pandemic. Chintan has impacted 10,000 children till date.

Goal 5: Gender Equality
With its participatory research and implementation work, Chintan provides opportunities for safe work to women at Material Recovery Facilities, Dry Waste Centres and though training them as farmers to feed themselves. Chintan’s internal policies empower women to play leadership roles in Chintan, and make the workplace safe and equal for women. Chintan was awarded the first US Secretary of State Innovation Award for the Empowerment of Women and Girls in the year 2012.

Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
Chintan has created over 3200 green jobs till date in the waste, plastics and climate space. This enables ULBs to divert over 50 tons of waste into save handling for free. These initiatives reduce exposures to toxicity from e-waste, injuries and walking in the heat. Overall, Chintan’s initiative, Pick my Trash, also enables wastepickers and other urban poor to enhance their income from low value plastics and e-waste by selling it to authorized recyclers even in low quantities. Chintan was awarded the Mention Speciale Human Rights Award from the French Government

Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
Chintan’s work on reducing waste going to landfills, empowering citizens groups to reduce their consumption and promote sustainable products by the poor are all part of our work in SGD11. Chintan was awarded the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award in 2014 for Project on New Delhi Railway Station

Goal 13: Climate Action
Chintan has been working on climate change through outreach and implementation. Working with Facebook, Chintan created a wildly successful campaign sharing key aspects of science with the public in Hinglish. Over 1 million persons read these. We have trained the urban poor to find ways to protect themselves from key aspects of climate change, such as air pollution. Chintan is identifying occupation-based strategies to reduce air pollution exposure. Working with urban poor women, Chintan is using AI, technology and capacity to reduce the impact of cold, heat and air pollution on them. Chintan was awarded the UN Climate Solutions Award, 2015 at COP21, Paris

Goal 14: Life below Water
Key to our work on life below water is ending micro-plastic leakage into oceans and rivers. Chintan has worked on diverting plastics from rivers and ultimately oceans by building capacity of municipalities, stakeholders from civil society, informal sector and other influencers in four states. Chintan’s research, such as the widely influential Plan the Ban have pioneered the notion of a Just Transition from Plastics. Chintan’s partnership in Uttarakhand along with the Forest Department has empowered women’s self-help groups in 10 villages to eliminate key plastics entirely, market previous products in refillable containers and converted a tourist destination into a Zero Waste destination.