Mumbai,  24^th  January – Listen to the latest episode of the Quint podcast ‘Land of a Billion’ which sheds light on the various challenges that deny women farmers access to land rights.

In this podcast, “Why Do Women Farmers Still Lack Access to Agricultural Land Ownership”  Shipra Deo, Director of Women’s Land Rights at Landesa India and Pranab Ranjan Choudhury, Researcher and Founder, Center for Land Governance, Associate Director, Intellecap , talks about the various challenges that deny women farmers access to land rights and the hurdles they face in being recognised as farmers. 

The 2011 census suggests that four out of five women workers in rural India work in agriculture as owner-cultivators or wage workers.

However, women farmers continue to be disadvantaged when it comes to access to agricultural land ownership, compared to men. This often denies them their rightful recognition as farmers which, in turn, inhibits them from accessing the welfare benefits that are entitled to farmers.

Lack of reliable data and poor policy framework are some of the key factors contributing to the disempowerment of women farmers.

About the Podcast

 ‘Land of a Billion’ brings you expert conversations about the most contentious of the holy roti-kapda-makaan trinity – the makaan over our heads – and the larger ecosystem that governs it.

From administrative tussles to understanding the conflicts on ground, catch these episodes every alternate Friday for a rundown on the latest charcha around land and property rights in India. In case you missed it, you can also catch up on Season 1 of this series here.

Hosted by Bhargavi Zaveri, a researcher interested in land and access to finance, Land of a Billion is a fortnightly podcast series produced in association with the Property Rights Research Consortium.

About the Guests

Shipra Deo leads Landesa’s work for gender-equal and inclusive land governance in India. She is passionate about the gender dimension of social development and specialises in designing and implementing gender-responsive strategies and programmes, including those related to land. In recent years she has done intensive research on inheritance by women and gendered aspects of land laws.

Pranab is a researcher and consultant on natural resources management and governance, with more than 25 years of experience. First, as a land use scientist with the Indian Council of Agriculture Research and, later, as an independent practitioner, he has worked with governments, donors, NGOs, and communities across South Asia, across landscapes, uses, and tenures. He also founded the Center for Land Governance in 2015. He presently works as an Associate Director with Intellecap.

Mumbai,  13 January – Read the article, ‘Towards Gender-Inclusive Investing: A Co-Design Approach’ Co-Authored by Amar Gokhale, AVP, Intellecap with Jona Repishti, Social Entrepreneur Manager, MIT D-Lab and  Saida Benhayoune, Programme Director, MIT D-Lab.

This article is the first of a 2-part series that captures learnings from a ‘co-design’ exercise conducted with investors in India to help the move from intention to action on gender-inclusive investing. The co-design exercise comprised of five 3-hour sessions conducted virtually in October 2021.

Gender Inclusive Investing, or Gender Lens Investing (GLI), is an approach to investing into companies, organizations, and funds that takes into consideration gender-based factors across the investment process to advance gender equality and better inform investment decisions.^[1] Many of the funds deploying capital with a gender lens — approximately 65% of them — are newly established first-time funds (Project Sage 4.0). To close the gender financing gap, we need to bring larger pools of money, more quickly into this space. Activating well-established, mainstream investors to integrate gender into their work holds an opportunity to accelerate impact.

Could co-design — a method of bringing together users and stakeholders to generate more equitable solutions — play a role in building the field?

Inspired by MIT D-Lab’s 15-year track record in organizing design summits around the world and a small grant from Aspen Network Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE), the authors of this article went on a listening tour. We interviewed 20 impact investors and 12 ecosystem actors in India looking to learn: What incentivizes fund managers to build gender equity in their work? And also, could we leverage collaborative methods to help them unpack the challenges they face in the very early stages of their gender lens adoption journey?

Bridging the chasm between intentionality and action

We discovered multiple investors in India that were actively experimenting and trying to customize strategies for becoming more gender-inclusive. Despite growing demand, progress was slow. The reason? Creating a gender lens strategy and then leading internal reform can be time-intensive, expensive, and complex. Even the most well-intentioned and well-connected gender-pioneers struggled to bridge the chasm between intentionality and action.

Additionally for new entrants in the gender-inclusive investing space, there is a paucity of Indian role models and actionable guides to draw from. Between the DIY option of using case studies and reports, and the pay-for-support option of working closely with technical assistance providers, there is not much to draw from if neither option worked for you.

D-Lab realized that there was a unique window to use co-design to deliver value to fund managers looking for learning opportunities, actionable toolkits, and peer networks.

We teamed up with Intellecap^[2], a catalytic ecosystem player in India, and organized the Co-design Sprint: Towards gender inclusive investment practices in October 2021. We invited six impact investors: Aavishkaar Capital, UC Impact, Acumen, Villgro, Omidyar India, and Accion Venture Lab, to join us. All six investors were in the process of exploring how to develop more inclusive gender investing practices, and we spotted an exciting opportunity to open up their process to participatory design frameworks and creative collaboration.

Accelerating GLI innovation and equity with co-design

Bringing co-design – the collaborative and creative process of convening a diverse set of actors to unpack complex challenges and ideate together – into the GLI space is quite new. Since GLI work at the fund level has multiple entry points, we focused on three themes: how to improve sourcing, due diligence, and gender data practices. Co-design offers a unique set of advantages for unpacking these challenges:

Inclusive: Co-design brings in diverse voices and perspectives fostering a deeper understanding of the barriers, richer ideation, and more suitable solutions.

Agile: Sprints hinge on a disciplined, facilitated, experiential process that is suited for breaking down complex problems into manageable and addressable challenges, encouraging quick experimentation and iteration to shorten the learning curve towards concrete outcomes.

Collaborative: In addition to solutions, co-design helps build relationships, incorporate different perspectives, and allows for cross-pollination of ideas – all with a focus on building understanding, fostering adoption, and community buy-in along the way.

The Co-design Sprint experience

Over the course of 5 sessions, our co-design summit welcomed 100+ participants – gender lens practitioners, entrepreneurs, investors, and thought leaders – from around the world to support our investors in the design and development of solutions. The workshop series validated that co-design delivers unique benefits to investors that are new to the GLI space:

Seeing the forest and the trees. Most of the challenges to GLI adoption stem from the difficulty of grappling with deeply rooted societal norms, unconscious biases, and long-established industry practices. Our co-design sessions focused on building mindsets for empathy, bias awareness, creativity, optimism, and openness as prerequisites to exploring challenging themes around power dynamics, privilege, and implicit biases. A participating investor noted “[because of] this workshop, I got a very different perspective on GLI and I realized how many conscious and unconscious biases are embedded in investing practices that I wasn’t aware of…” By inviting cross-pollination of different perspectives and a beginners’ mindset, co-design can offer a holistic yet disciplined approach to help fund managers detect and manage blind spots – both internal and external to the funds – in a progressive and systemic fashion.

Finding the needle in the haystack. It is not always easy to know where to start and where to focus reform efforts when you have never done such work before. The challenges and barriers that GLI advocates uncover are complex, interwoven, and systemic. This explains the analysis paralysis that many fund managers face in moving from intention to action. By emphasizing problem framing over solution ideation, co-design can help investors visualize what to prioritize first (among many possible points of entry) and discover different pathways for intervention. One investor noted: “When we started the whole exercise, the ideas were very jumbled; and now when I am seeing everything in a structured manner, it makes it easier to pick where to focus on first.”

It will take a village. After the co-design sprint, one investor noted: “My biggest takeaway is that there are many others in the ecosystem dealing with similar questions on gender and that we can get a lot more done from working with each other.” Whether it is by pooling gender performance data to build a stronger business case for GLI to LPs, co-developing industry standards for gendered due diligence processes, or collaborating on building pipelines of female-led and gender forward businesses, impact investors realized that they could reap additional benefits from taking a collaborative approach to GLI. By continuing to position forward-thinking fund managers within networks of like-minded peers and ecosystem actors, we can maximize the returns on their individual efforts and accelerate the pace of GLI adoption.

The way forward

Sometimes, co-design feels like a big upfront investment in terms of planning, coordination, and time commitment, but time and time again, we have seen that it pays unique dividends to those that engage in it. Co-design sprints may be less suitable for delivering ready-to-implement gender lens solutions, but they can serve as enriching and generative exercises that build a strong foundation for catalyzing change at both the fund and the ecosystem level.

To move the needle on GLI we should continue to leverage inclusive, disciplined co-design methods that bring industry champions together to build confidence, gain new insights, and build relationships for addressing some of the most complex challenges.

[1] As defined by the Gender Lens Investing Initiative, GIIN (Global Impact Investing Network)

Mumbai, 16th December– In yet another significant milestone Circular Apparel Innovation Factory got an extensive coverage on a detailed and in-depth story around Circular Economy and India by ET Prime .

The detailed article quotes Circular Apparel Innovation Factory with insights and perspectives from Venkat Kotamaraju, Director, CAIF and also features their Partners and Collaborators with inputs from Dr. Rachna Arora, Team Leader, GIZ, Marine Litter & EU-REI among other experts and industry leaders.

Synopsis : For a country where reusing and sharing of products isn’t new, India has been unable to streamline or organise the unstructured secondhand market. Such a move will have environmental and economic advantages that can help multiple industries.

In 2007, Rohan Gupta, then a techie with SAP Labs in Bengaluru, decided to upgrade his laptop to one that can keep up with his hectic work requirements. But he didn’t know how to discard the used one in a data-secure and environment-friendly way. So, he called his older brother Nitin, who was doing an MBA from the Stern School of Business in New York, for help.

After some basic research, the brothers were disappointed to find that India had no electronic waste recycler. This led them to set up Attero Recycling in 2008.

Today, the Noida-based Attero collects and safely disposes of e-waste from over 1,400 cities in India. It has tied up with electronics manufacturers such as Samsung and LG and automobile manufacturers such as Hyundai and Maruti Suzuki to process used devices and parts — either to recycle or dispose of these safely. It wouldn’t be imprudent to call Attero one of the pioneers in formalising the circular economy in India.

Circular economy involves reusing, recycling, repairing, refurbishing and sharing of products. It encourages reusing or recycling a product instead of throwing it away and causing pollution and triggering climate change events. This practice has become a necessity in today’s world. A 2018 FICCI-Accenture report said, “Given the current resource constraints, business-as-usual is not sustainable and there is a need to decouple growth from resource requirements.”

Apart from mitigating environmental problems, the circular economy can also give the country’s economy a boost. The report said that $0.5 trillion ($500 billion) worth of economic value can be unlocked through circular economy business models in India — and $4.5 trillion globally — by 2030. For example, reusing and recycling will help India get access to good-quality raw materials that the domestic industry can use, reducing the dependence on imports.

Potential in Sectors

Giving a glimpse into the potential economic benefits of a circular economy, the study says India can generate $1 billion worth of gold from e-waste. In plastics recycling, it can create 14 lakh jobs and present a $2 billion economic opportunity. Steel recovery from end-of-life vehicles can give 8 million tonnes of steel in 2025, representing a $2.7 billion opportunity.

For Attero Recycling, all this translates to good business potential and also becoming an earth[1]friendly company. The company claims to extract pure gold, silver, copper, iron, aluminium and others, and putting these back into the market for reuse. “More than 90% of the quantity is extracted from Li-ion batteries, and more than 99% from e-waste. Which means that from one gram of gold used in a product, we extract more than 0.99 gm of gold,” Gupta says.

Textiles — a segment where the country is a leading global player — can gain a lot by embracing a circular economy. A research by Water Footprint Network showed it takes 22,500 litres of water to produce 1kg of cotton in India; the global average is 10,000 litres. The fashion industry produces 10% of all humanity’s carbon emissions and is the second-largest consumer of the world’s water supply, according to the World Economic Forum. No one is going to stop buying clothes, and most of the discarded clothes end up in landfills. This makes textiles a prime candidate for a circular economy.

There is increasing awareness and a gradual rise in the interest of apparel waste recycling by fashion and lifestyle brands, experts claim. However, sustainability can be challenging, as the sector has several unstructured and informal players. In India, firms and organisations such as the Circular Apparel Innovation Factory (CAIF), Apparel Export Promotion Council and Canvaloop have been working with MSMEs, suppliers, manufacturers and other stakeholders to help them transition towards a circular economy

CAIF — which has tied up with some big apparel players — is focussing on decarbonising the industry and getting to zero-leakage of textiles waste. Venkat Kotamaraju, Director of CAIF, says they are trying to build circular textile waste management models that focus on building skills and capacities among waste collectors. The project is expected to create over 5,000 green jobs, while saving at least 20 million kg of textile waste from ending up in landfills by 2026. While waste collection already happens in textiles, he says they want to create and train a team of informal and underserved waste workers to responsibly collect and segregate waste. The whole aim is to make use of the waste as an input in the upcycling ecosystem.

Surat-based firm Canvaloop is also on a similar mission. It develops fibres by using agro waste and plant materials such as hemp. Canvaloop, founded in 2017 by Shreyas Kokra, claims its fibres require minimal water and have no pesticides or insecticides. It also claims to process around 30 tonnes of agricultural waste every month.

Ship recycling is another segment with immense potential. Maersk, for example, has an initiative in Alang — the world’s biggest ship breaking yard — to collaborate with shipowners and other stakeholders to explore opportunities and incentivise a circular economy. Prashant Widge, Head of Responsible Ship Recycling at Maersk, explains that India has about a third of the global ship recycling market. “About 80% of a ship is steel and 20% is equipment, machinery, the engine, spare parts, etc. A large chunk of the steel is melted and turned into ingots and steel rods, which are then used in domestic construction. This is marine-grade steel. Even after being in the sea for 20 years, it is still strong enough to be reused,” he says. Materials from the rest 20% of the ship are also refurbished and reused. Widge says they use skilled workers to remove hazardous materials and transport these to a downstream waste management facility.

MSME Centric

A circular economy cannot be functional without the participation of India’s 60 million MSMEs and ancillary units. The model is meant for small businesses and MSMEs, claims Manoj Kumar, founder, Social Alpha, an incubator for social entrepreneurs. While large businesses and corporations only drive linear businesses, there are endless opportunities and employment potential among small businesses for circular business.

The challenge is getting them all on a platform to share knowledge and resources. That is what German development agency GIZ is trying to address, in association with the European Union’s Resource Efficiency Initiative (India) EU-REI. Rachana Arora, the leader of the team at GIZ that is involved in the initiative, says, “Small businesses are usually struggling with compliance issues, bureaucracy, etc. But if they actually get a platform where they can actually innovate, create products that are much more efficient, then there is an appetite for this.”

GIZ already works with the Automotive Component Manufacturers Association (ACMA) — which has a lot of SME suppliers in smaller cities — to share the tools for cleaner production practices. A global inclination to reuse and recycle is pushing the auto sector SMEs towards a circular economy. Arora says ACMA came to them and said global auto companies were asking vendors and suppliers about their supply chain and manufacturing practices. “What are the kinds of primary or secondary materials they are consuming? How do they validate their supply chain? There are also questions regarding the greenhouse gases’ mitigation potential. ACMA is working with us on that part, because they would like their SME or suppliers to adopt these practices,” she says.

Even apparel brands, says CAIF Director Kotamaraju, are helping their supply chain partners by giving them access to low-carbon technologies. This way, suppliers avoid the huge cost in acquiring the know-how and there can be a significant reduction in carbon emissions, too. It also makes them a preferred supplier of European brands.

Thriving Informal Market

India has an inherent advantage when it comes to implementing a circular economy. Reusing and sharing of products and a frugal culture are not alien to us. There are several thriving secondhand markets across the country selling reused and refurbished products, from electronics to clothes. Some of these unstructured markets are actually doing very well, says Arora, pointing to Delhi’s Mayapuri as an example. “You can see people coming from across the country to buy a particular part for an old vehicle.”

However, a structured circular economy cannot take root and thrive in the country unless we address some issues. Companies may say they will use a percentage of scrap in production, but that is easier said than done, says Arora. “A lot of industries would like to just go and collect

used materials in the wake of policies like the scrappage policy. But they will require trained manpower to handle those equipments. We need to look at those processes.”

SMEs have to learn to address the occupational health risk before a circular economy can take root. This is because in a passenger vehicle, for example, 75-80% of material can be recovered, but 15-20% of it is toxic that has to be handled in a specialised way.

Attero’s Gupta says the internationally accepted Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulation ensures that companies manufacturing and selling products are made responsible for collecting end-of-life waste and making sure it is recycled right. Prior to this and even right now, he claims, a large portion of electronic waste is recycled in the informal sector using hazardous and non-scientific processes. “The average lifespan of people working in the processing of unscientific ways of electronic waste is less than 27 years. Typically, they’re women and children. They’re exposed to cyanide, sulfuric acid fumes, lead fumes…”

But the code has its loopholes. “EPR was passed as a regulation in 2013, but there were no targets fixed. So even if, let’s say, Apple collected one cell phone back, they were compliant. If they collected 100,000 cell phones, they were compliant,” he adds. In India, EPR was made mandatory and targets were rolled out in 2018.

CAIF’s Kotamaraju points out that there is no EPR policy for textiles, though it is the second largest employer and the third most polluting industry in the world. “We need a very considered and well-articulated policy around EPR for textiles.” The lack of policy framing and advocacy is the biggest obstacle in faster adoption of the circular economy, says CAIF’s Kotamaraju.

Kokra says there are infrastructural challenges as well. These can only be solved at an institutional level and not at an individual or a company level. “You cannot go to a farmer and say do like this and give him a contract. You have to be with them.”

People Matters

CAIF is in conversation with industry stakeholders to create visibility on how waste is flowing across the ecosystem. Kotamaraju says it is important to look at how these transitions will affect people.

In Alang, the focus is more on health hazards as ships have a lot of toxic material. Maersk’s Widge explains the company had to take many initiatives including creating a standard framework around ship recycling. While the company has a downstream waste management facility, not all hazardous materials on a ship can be handled at the facility. There are gaps and lapses that need to be fixed. “But having said that, I also know that the Gujarat maritime board and the Indian Red Cross are working on a hospital. I also know that the pollution control board is working on trying to fix these findings. So, there’s work in progress in this regard from the Indian authorities, which is encouraging,” he adds.

Apart from the focus on reuse and recycle, it is time to take the circular economy up by a notch. Developing non-toxic materials such as biodegradable plastic and recyclable textiles has to be a priority.

We don’t live in an idealistic world, so we have to ensure things are balanced well. Fast fashion, for example, is not going to go away, says Canvaloop’s Kokra. “People will always want to buy new things. What we can do is make it more sustainable, more circular. We can sell the same piece of clothing three times by recycling it, by making it biodegradable, by getting into secondhand fashion.”

In short, it is time that all industries become greener if we all want a rosier future.