- Lived:
- born 1961, New Delhi — and Delhi, remarkably, is where almost the whole life has happened: the city is her office, her laboratory and her longest-running case (living, as of September 2026)
- Field:
- environmental research and campaigning — Centre for Science and Environment (director general), editor of Down To Earth, standard-bearer of the "environmentalism of the poor"
- The Big Idea:
- In a poor country, the environment is not scenery to be admired but survival to be secured — clean air, safe water, standing forests are the working capital of people who own nothing else — and the way to secure them is evidence: test, publish, drag the findings to committee and court, then stand guard over the result.
- In their words:
- "environmental colonialism" — the two-word charge she and Anil Agarwal levelled, in 1991, at a global climate accounting that counted a poor man's rice paddy and a rich man's car as equal sins (as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- A small Delhi laboratory that no one had heard of tested cola and diesel exhaust, published what it found, and twice forced the world's biggest companies and India's own government to change — proof that in a democracy, measured truth loudly told is a form of power.