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Abstract: 

For the past 7 years, Siddharth, a trained aerospace engineer from IIT Kharagpur, has walked across India and along its rivers, learning of social and environmental challenges. He has also worked with networks and coalitions that work at the policy level. He will share lessons learnt from his journeys, and how impact driven action needs a blend of grassroots knowledge, simple yet powerful methods like walking, and advanced technological tools like machine learning. One component of his work (India Sand Watch) aims at building environmental accountability in India, with the current focus being on the pan India issue of river sand mining, where revenue losses can be in the 1000s of crores every year.

Bio: 

Siddharth Agarwal has been walking across India and along India's rivers, attempting to document and bring stories of marginalised communities and the environment into the mainstream. Since 2014, he has walked over 6000kms on these trails, including the lengths of the rivers Ganga and Ken. This simple method of learning by walking has proven to be very powerful, and has since been institutionalised at Veditum India Foundation (www.veditum.org) - an organisation founded by Siddharth soon after graduating from IIT Kharagpur, in the form of the Moving Upstream project (www.movingupstream.in).

Outputs like the documentary (https://youtu.be/3ak283B__Ns ) from the 3000km walk along the River Ganga have traveled to festivals, schools, colleges, exhibitions, and communities across the world. Other on-ground documentation has led to inclusive decision making in court cases, and has been used to support critical cases for the conservation of India's environment.

The Moving Upstream fellowship, at Veditum in partnership with the Out of Eden Walk has seen 24 fellows walk the lengths of three rivers - Betwa, Sindh, and Luni since 2019. The most recent iteration of the fellowship along River Luni was conducted in partnership with the School of Public Policy at IIT Delhi. Based on the learnings through 1000s of kms of walking along rivers in India and through collaborative exercises, a new environmental accountability project - India Sand Watch (www.sandwatch.in) - has been initiated to bring accountability in the river sand mining sector in India.
Siddharth is also a steering committee member at India Rivers Forum, and has convened the annual India Rivers Week conferences since 2020.

Additional note: Veditum India Foundation is hosting an open data sprint in Delhi on Sunday, 17th March 2024, as part of its India Sand Watch project. Those interested in environmental governance, open data, and / or conservation are invited to register and join us for a day long effort at digitally archiving public records related to rivers of North India. Registration can be done at this link: veditum.org/delhisprint and queries can be sent to sandwatch@veditum.org