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India’s Crisis is Faecal:
No More Time to Waste

Raj Liberhan

Chair: Yatish Rajawat

r ms liberhan director,india habitat centre

Tue. 18 August – 7:00pm | Gulmohar Hall – India Habitat Centre, New Delhi

Many people talk ‘shit’: a difficult situation is ‘being in deep shit’, an irreversible predicament is ‘being up shit creek without a paddle’. But nobody talks about the real thing because that is not conversation. Excreta is not polite talk anywhere. Waste of any kind is a waste of time for the average person. In any case, the perception is that somebody will clean things up, the streets, the office space, the house and who cares as to where the waste ends up, so long as it is not in my backyard. Really, it is time for all of us to wake up and smell the coffee, for decency’s sake, and not the other thing, because we are generating about 40 million tonnes of municipal solid waste and barely 10 percent is being recycled and processed. The rest is dumped anywhere and everywhere. Our urban story will soon be a disaster, if we do not come with answers to managing our waste.

Raj Liberhan is a senior administrator and institution builder. After serving the financial services of the Government of India for thirty years, Raj Liberhan moved to the non-governmental sector to become the first Chief Executive of the India Habitat Centre, a position he held till 2014. Under his leadership, IHC premiered a unique institutional model combining the strengths of all the professional fields working in, for and towards the construction and sustainability of habitats. He has conceived and set up economic and financial solutions for large organisations, budget formulation and management, contract evaluation and negotiation, economic viability, identification of audiences, etc. Raj Liberhan also made of IHC a hub bringing together in one space academics, intellectuals, and citizens for progressive debates and collective ideations, and he is himself an acclaimed writer and speaker on contemporary questions.

Yatish Rajawat 03-150Yatish Rajawat will chair the lecture and moderate the discussion. He is policy commentator, writer, business strategist and speaker based out of Delhi. He writes for Firstpost.com, Businessworld magazine, Forbes India and several Hindi and Gujarati publications. He is a regular policy commentator for various public broadcasters. He is part of the urban think tank Livable Habitats that works in the area of urbanisation. He is also a fellow at the Institute of Competitiveness, India, the Indian knot in the global network of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School.