This World Environment Day, I’m not speaking as a farmer, an entrepreneur, or a developer. I’m speaking as a witness.
In the last year, I’ve watched the soil lose its memory. Crops that once stood proud now struggle to grow. Lakes I knew as a child are gasping, and the wind carries more heat than hope.
We often think of the environment as something out there separate from our economy, our politics, our lives. But it is the very ground we stand on. When it weakens, so does everything we build upon it.
India is pushing forward we’re electrifying highways, expanding metros, and breaking records in green energy. But the truth is harder to digest: our natural capital is shrinking faster than our GDP is growing. Our air is poisonous. Our groundwater is vanishing. Our cities, despite their steel and glass, are cracking under their own weight.
The climate crisis is no longer a distant threat. It is a daily negotiation for farmers, for families, for future generations. We cannot solve it with committees alone. We need conviction.
Regeneration is not charity — it’s policy. Restoring land, planting trees, protecting wetlands these aren’t rural issues. They are national imperatives.
This June, I ask you to look around and ask: what will outlast us? It won’t be the buildings. It will be the land — if we choose to heal it.
Invest in ecosystems, not excess. In long-term soil health, not short-term growth.
Because the environment won’t wait. And neither should we.
