Article

Five Voices, One Regenerative Future

2026-11-10 · By Pushpanath Krishnamurthy, Climate Justice Campaigner, Fairtrade Activist and Author

Pushpanath Krishnamurthy explores how community-led climate solutions across South India are strengthening resilience, livelihoods and ecosystems. Drawing on voices from farmers, artisans, social enterprises and knowledge holders, he argues that businesses and investors can accelerate regenerative development through fair procurement, patient finance, climate adaptation and partnerships that share power with local communities.

As leaders gather for COP31 in Antalya, I am listening to people some 8,000 kilometres away. In Chennai and Hyderabad, and across the connected landscapes of South India, I have encountered not a shortage of solutions but an abundance of intelligence: knowledge accumulated over generations, ideas tested in difficult conditions, imagination turned into enterprises, and invention born of necessity. The missing ingredient is too often not inspiration. It is the patient capital, public policy, market access and respect that allow such work to endure and grow.

For seventeen years, since walking from Oxford to Copenhagen in 2009, I have walked, listened and learned—more than 45 million steps. I call the people I meet the Unreasonable Regenerators. Six distinct efforts and voices now offer a practical agenda for the Business Fights Poverty conversation: resilience, shared prosperity and partnerships that shift power, not merely resources.

1 | Chennai: Aram Thinai Teaches a City to Read Water

Karthik and Benisha of Aram Thinai take me through the edges of Chennai, tracing ponds, canals, floodplains and the route towards the Bay of Bengal. The city was once fluent in the language of water; concrete and speculative development have made it forget. Wetlands treated as vacant land are in fact vital climate infrastructure. Block their channels and the costs return as flooding, heat, lost livelihoods and displacement.

At Perumbakkam, we heard from residents and housing-rights advocates about families relocated from riverbanks in the name of flood safety—only to find themselves living in a vulnerable wetland landscape, far from their work and social networks. Aram Thinai’s response is not simply protest. Through community mapping, exhibitions, children’s learning, citizen engagement and its Chennai Foodscape market connecting city consumers with producers in drought-prone districts, it is making ecology visible and actionable.

Its COP31 message: fund community-led watershed knowledge and restoration; make wetland protection integral to city investment; and never call an adaptation programme successful if it transfers flood risk and poverty to people with the least voice.

2 | The Organic Market as a Movement: Anantha Sayana

In an Adayar new shop, Anantha Sayana—Anathoo—sits on the floor with his laptop, fresh from travelling across India to promote organic food, regenerative farming and handmade livelihoods. His network of more than fifteen modest stores has grown around trust, affordable safe food and relationships between producers and customers. His Tula clothing initiative and work to strengthen the Indian Handmade Collective extend the same ethic into natural dyes, textiles and craft.

He is not advocating an endless chain of megastores. His imagination is cooperative: many well-run enterprises, different generations, shared learning and public institutions that give small producers confidence to invest. He argues for governments to reserve at least 20% of public purchasing for organic and safe food, linen and clothing—a proposal for debate, not an existing policy. The precise mechanism needs design, but the principle is compelling: purchasing power can create dependable demand for regenerative production.

His COP31 message: stop mistaking individual consumer virtue for system change. Governments must use procurement and enabling policy; businesses must help build reliable markets; and the handmade economy must grow without losing its human scale.

3 | Hyderabad: Sudha Mallupadi Puts the Artisan at the Centre

Through Abhihaara, Sudha Mallupadi has helped handloom and craft makers—especially women—carry inherited skills into contemporary markets. Her warning is immediate: extreme heat makes home-based weaving harder; erratic rains and water shortages disrupt natural dyeing, washing and drying; shifting agricultural conditions raise the cost and uncertainty of fibres and dyes. A delayed production cycle is not a statistic. It is income lost in a household.

Sudha refuses the false choice between protecting tradition and building a modern economy. Handloom can be part of a regenerative, circular future—but only if makers receive fair prices, decent conditions, reliable buyers, water-efficient processes, renewable energy and adaptation finance.

Her COP31 message: businesses should replace occasional charity with durable purchasing partnerships and invest in climate-resilient artisan clusters. The measure of success is not merely a beautiful product, but whether a woman earns independently and a young artisan can see a future in the craft.

4 | Andhra Pradesh and Telangana: Dr Sivaramakrishna Defends the Knowledge We Erase

Dr Sivaramakrishna of SAKTI, an anthropologist and linguist, asks a disarming question: what happens when planning cannot even name the landscape it is transforming? Local vocabularies distinguish soils, wetlands, fisheries, forests and seasonal water patterns. Words such as beela and tampara carry ecological distinctions that may disappear from official maps and development decisions. At Pentakota, fishing communities have mapped marine resources, fishing grounds and pollution through their own knowledge.

This is not an argument against science. It is an invitation to make satellite data, technical expertise and lived experience challenge and enrich one another. Nor should traditional knowledge be romanticised. Communities must be recognised as research partners, with rights, agency and a fair say in what is documented and used.

His COP31 message: universities, businesses, foundations and governments should finance equal partnerships with knowledge holders and protect the ecosystems and customary rights on which that knowledge depends.

5 | Forty Years of Fair Trade: Panchu and SIPA Insist on Climate-Fair Trade

In 1986, Dr K. Panchaksharam (Panchu) and colleagues helped establish SIPA—the Federation of South India Producer Associations—on a simple principle: people who create beauty with their hands deserve fair returns, dignity and a future. Over four decades, SIPA has helped connect more than 25,000 frontline craftswomen and men with skills, producer organisations, solidarity and markets, contributing to the foundations of international fair trade. This is not a new pilot searching for a purpose: it is accumulated institutional knowledge, tested across generations and changing markets.

Today climate shocks threaten those gains. Heat strains home-based workers; unreliable rainfall unsettles fibres, dyes and production; water insecurity jeopardises earnings. Panchu calls for cooler and safer workplaces, reliable water, efficient dyeing and drying, clean energy, accessible grants and affordable finance for small groups and women-led enterprises. Crucially, he asks business for fair prices, predictable orders, design partnerships and international market access that protect producers’ ownership and bargaining power. Craft is not an exhibit behind glass; it is living cultural intelligence and a livelihood young people should be proud to choose.

His COP31 message: after forty years, fair trade must become climate-fair trade. Measure progress not only in carbon saved, but in the income, security, agency and dignity of the makers. SIPA’s long experience makes it a bridge between new regeneration experiments and the institutions capable of sustaining them.

6 | Beyond the Metros: The Wider Unreasonable Regenerators

These voices are part of a much wider constellation. Near Srivilliputtur, Rajkumar has regenerated degraded land with diversified natural farming. Near Bengaluru, Vishalakshi Padmanabhan and 16 Doddi Trust support women’s Kai Thota nutrition gardens and collective capability. In Madurai, Kishore Jayachandran is rethinking the relationships between a rice enterprise and its farmers; Krishnan and Gowri link alternatives to plastic with women’s livelihoods. Dibella India’s Sreeranga Rajan connects organic and regenerative cotton with traceable, more responsible textile production.

Their models differ, and none should be flattened into a single miracle cure. Together, however, they reveal a critical mass of practical experimentation spanning soil, food, water, craft, finance, livelihoods and markets. Rural resilience and urban prosperity are inseparable. A city’s purchasing choices shape distant farms; a farmer’s security depends partly on the fairness of the market; and women’s economic agency determines whether adaptation reaches the household.

What Action Should Follow the 12 November Conversation?

First, build resilience with people, not for them: back wetlands, living soils, safer workplaces, diversified incomes and locally designed adaptation. Second, make shared prosperity a purchasing and investment discipline: long-term contracts, fair prices, decent work, traceability and affordable finance—not just green branding. Third, create partnerships that share authority: communities should help set research questions, decide investments and define success.

I propose that Business Fights Poverty convene willing companies, public buyers, investors, researchers and these grassroots innovators around a practical next step: identify a small portfolio of community-led initiatives, agree what support each actually wants, and develop time-bound pilots for procurement, adaptation finance, ecological restoration and knowledge partnerships. Publish what is learned—including failures—and measure livelihoods, women’s agency and ecosystem health alongside emissions. These are proposals for collective action, not commitments already secured.

A Concrete Proposition for Business and Beyond

Let the 12 November meeting initiate a 90-day dialogue with these six efforts, not a top-down programme designed in their absence. Invite each to identify one priority investment and one policy obstacle; match them with willing public buyers, businesses, researchers and patient financiers; and return with commitments, responsible partners and a transparent timetable. Possible starting points include community-led floodplain planning in Chennai; a public procurement pathway for safe food and handmade goods; climate adaptation and reliable orders for artisan clusters; co-produced ecological mapping; and practical support for women-led nutrition gardens and regenerative farms.

Three tests should govern every partnership: Does it strengthen climate resilience without shifting risk onto poorer people? Does it improve fair incomes, ownership and opportunities for women and young people? And do the knowledge holders themselves share decisions, resources and credit? If not, the language of regeneration is merely decoration.

The climate crisis is also a crisis of listening. We have become expert at applauding grassroots ingenuity while leaving the structures that exhaust it untouched. An Ahimsa economy—an economy committed to doing no harm—asks more of us: to replace extraction with reciprocity and admiration with investment. The five voices are not pleading to be rescued. They are asking to be recognised as partners in building the future.

The future is already being made in South India’s wetlands, workshops, markets, villages and forests. On 12 November, the question for business and beyond is simple: will we help it flourish?