page_title: Mohit Ray
section_title: Environmental activism
hierarchical_section_title: Mohit Ray / Environmental activism
caption_attribution_description: English: Mohit Ray speaking on the occasion of Human Rights Day on 10 December 2011 at the podium in front of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kolkata
context_page_description: Mohit Ray is an Indian environmental and human rights activist based in Kolkata. He has campaigned for saving the Adi Ganga, Bikramgarh Jheel and other water bodies of Kolkata. His seminal work in this field is the extensive research on the water bodies and heritage ponds of Kolkata. His work has been published by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation and Ananda Publishers. He has also published a number of papers in technical journals. He writes regularly on environmental issues in different journals including The Statesman, a national daily, in Anandabazar Patrika, Ei Samay and Bartaman, the Bengali dailies. He has also campaigned for a long time against the persecution of minorities in Bangladesh and the citizenship rights of the Bengali Hindu refugees.
context_section_description: Mohit has remained in the forefront of environmental activism in Kolkata for last two and half decades. He been associated with a number of NGOs involved in environmental activities and he leads a small non-funded group named Vasundhara. He has been an active participant or adviser to efforts like restoring water bodies, saving Adi Ganga, questioning concreting the water bodies to rights of bicycle riders as a non-polluting vehicle. The discovery, identification and documentation of 48 heritage water bodies of Kolkata and environmental and social details of several thousand water bodies of Kolkata constitutes his seminal work in this field. Ray believes that the possibility of serious water and environmental crisis due to diminishing numbers of water bodies in the city can only be addressed by better management of the existing water bodies through technological innovations. For Ray, environment cannot be delinked from peoples’ livelihood concerns. So he emphasizes environmental improvement, along with development.
caption: Dr. Mohit Ray speaking on World Human Rights Day, 2011
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