Hansika Singh - Forum for the Future
By Nishtha Singh
Hansika is a development professional based in Bangalore, India and has 8 years of managerial, consulting and research experience with international brands, nonprofits and advocacy groups. She graduated in June 2018 from Azim Premji University, with a Masters in Development Studies specialising in Sustainability. She has over 6 and half years of prior experience, including a three year stint in India & Sri Lanka with the Swedish retail giant H&M, a year long engagement as Head of Merchandise in the fundraising arm of Bangalore-based non-profit Make a Difference, and over two years of entrepreneurial experience in Bangalore running a small business, and consulting with handloom and organic cotton clothing brands. She had also started community based initiatives in Bangalore around conscious consumption and brought to the city the international networking event for sustainability professionals.
She is currently working full time with a Social Impact Monitoring & Evaluation firm and leads their M&E work, CSR consulting work and business development work.
I got in touch with Hansika, through a mutual friend when I was looking for sustainability opportunities in India. She is that rare passionate individual and I am grateful that I know her.
Nishtha: Tell us about your journey into your current field of work (educational background, work experience, people who inspired you)
Hansika: I was always fascinated with clothes and the production process behind it. Hence, I decided to join National Institute of Fashion Technology, Delhi. After graduation I joined H&M and as part of my job, I visited a lot of manufacturing plants. I realised the social and environmental cost of making clothes. But then, I visited Sri Lanka and saw a really sustainable clothes manufacturing factory. That made me quit my job and embark on an exploration for a few months.
In 2013, I came in contact with an organisation called ‘Make a difference’ in Bangalore and became a part of their team as the head of the ‘Dream Tee’ project which was selling t-shirts to educate children in shelter homes. I did that for about a year. While working in Bangalore, I came in touch with a lot of like-minded people and we thought that Bangalore was the ideal ground back then to have conversations around waste/waste management, consumption, lifestyles was happening everywhere. So, I think I was just at the right place at the right time. We started an initiative called ‘Ecofolk’ where we would do workshops with adults, children, school kids. We were invited to conduct these workshops in other cities as well. Ecofolk was meant to be a non-profit thing and our model was we would try to build some momentum and then maybe register an NGO and raise funds etc.
During this process I realised that awareness building is great but maybe changing the consumer-producer dynamic is not enough to cause a huge dent in the system. A part of what led to this insight was that I was trying to make money through other sources as well. So, a friend of mine and I put our life savings into creating a store in Bangalore which was a usual garment shop but we had a line of organic clothing for babies. We both had enough garment industry contacts to purchase good clothing material at a reasonable price so that we could make a budget and a more sustainable clothing line and make people move towards sustainable buying. During this time, I was also working with a cluster of weavers to launch a more sustainable fashion brand. I sold in some flea markets for around a year. So I was simultaneously working for the Dream Tee project, Ecofolk and the garment store. It is then that I realised that the problem is bigger. It seems to run deeper and I don’t think I am attacking it at the right symptom.
This is when I came across a few professors of Azim Premji University (APU) talking about problems of public transport, buses, ecology, lakes. For example, there is a lot of activism around Lakes in Bangalore. So, I interacted with a lot of them, watched their videos, looked at the courses offered by APU and came across their Masters of Development programme which had the option of concentrating in Sustainability. So, I ended up writing an exam. At this point I had no plans of further studies but this course seemed very interesting to me and it was in Bangalore where I was based so the idea was that I will do this masters and continue with my other engagements. By this time, Ecofolk had pivoted into this ‘Sustainability Drinks Bangalore’ to connect all Sustainability professionals in the city. We were successful in building a community of 2000 strong professionals through Sustainability Drinks Bangalore and we did it for 12 editions. I continued with the initiative till 2017 till my masters got very overwhelming.
The masters in APU was an eye-opening experience. I think it gave me the right sociological grounding and understanding of what development really means and in that context, what sustainable development means and how that ties to sustainability. During that phase, I was thinking about an internship or a research project as part of a mandatory module that we had to do in our third semester. I started working with the bus commuters rights group. We were lobbying to get more buses in Bangalore. Bangalore’s pollution is largely caused by cars and it has some of the worst traffic congestion in the country. But the bus system, although regarded as the best in the country, is quite expensive. So, this particular group lobbied for more accessible and affordable transport and a better bus transport system. I could really relate to the cause, because it felt like somebody was finally talking about a systemic change for a sustainability problem rather than a more individual change driven narrative. I worked with that group for about two years and I also did a research project through them with a wider network called ‘Sustainable Urban Mobility Network’ which was a research project between five cities and my job was to understand how Bangalore city corporation spends money on various modes of transport. The year that I studied the expenditure for was 2016-17, and the city corporation spent zero on public transport, a very small percentage of their total money was spent on low carbon modes, like building footpaths, cycling tracks etc and most of their expense was on road widening, road building and building flyovers. It was very clear through data that the city’s priorities weren’t at the right place.
By the time I finished my work and masters in APU, I was sure that I wanted to work in sustainability which was closer to social side of things. I was so converted by this point of time that I thought I could take a purely social impact job but not purely environmental job. That led me into more independent consulting mode where I worked on a gender project with APU for 6 months. We were looking at sexual harassment in the informal sector – domestic workers and street vendors were the core groups we focussed on. This was again a very eye opening experience towards a systemic form of discrimination and violence. It was quite a learning experience. I still talk about it, and get super uncomfortable because the project brought out a trauma that I had kept aside.
After this project, I did a social audit gig with a CSR consulting firm which ended up making an offer to me for a full time job and I joined their company afterwards. This was 6 months after finishing my masters. In that job, I did a lot of strategy work for American multinational corporations where we used to advise them about what kind of social impacts projects to put money on, how to look at a programme, how to evaluate impact, These projects were mostly education projects.
By this time I had worked on a range of issues -fashion, urban governance, mobility, gender, impact evaluation, education. I think all of this gave me a very broad necessary outlook towards understanding how key problems of sustainability are extremely interlinked.
N: What are the key lessons you learnt in your journey? Do you think these lessons would have been different if you were not working in Sustainability ?
H: The key lessons that I learnt in my journey was the nature and interconnectedness of the problems and how some of these problems only arise because of the super hyper-specialised approach that humanity has taken for the last few years. I think for any sustainability professional, there is a dire need to bring a trans-disciplinary lens. Of course you are going to become specialised in one discipline but it’s very important to look beyond your discipline and acquaint yourself with the fundamentals of other disciplines so that you know at any point of time what different forces could be acting on a problem. Say, the problem of education - there is a part of government funding, there’s also reservation and caste-based discrimination, then there is the problem of nutrition. Early childhood education is so much linked to lack of proper nutrition below the age of six, and the reason these kids don’t get enough nutrition is due to ecological degradation - traditional ways of people to get nutrition have been eroded by the way we are going about our development projects. So, if you can bring this kind of lens, you can most likely get to the root of the problem and you can communicate with the right people to solve the problem. And that I think is a very important skill for any sustainability professional.
N: How have the opportunities changed from when you started to today ?
H: I think there are more opportunities in the market, but I also think it is a lot more competitive now. I have also been a recent job seeker as I finished my masters in 2018. Before that my career was self-motivated exploration which got me really far I think. But, I think the field has definitely evolved. There are a plethora of organisations looking for people to do this kind of dedicated work which I think was not the case when I finished my undergrad. I think it is changing for the better but I also think it is becoming a crowded space and what ends up happening is sometimes the number of players acting on a problem becomes inversely proportional to impact that they are making on the problem. I don’t know why but in my experience, that has been the case. I don’t know if this will move the needle but I think it eventually will. I think the sector generally needs a more collaborative approach. So, the way I see it, there will be more collaborations and therefore more opportunities in this space in the coming few years, which will definitely require professionals who understand multiple disciplines and who can solve problems in multiple ways.
N: What would you advise a young passionate person contemplating a career in Sustainability?
H: I would say – Go for it! I would also tell people that the sector is hard initially on you in multiple ways.
If it is in India, the salaries are not great. So, if you compare your life with your friends who would go for engineering or who would go to an IIM, they will walk out with fancier job titles and fancier salaries than you, but I think it somehow balances in a few years. So, don’t let that be a deterrent.
I don’t know if this is advice and I don’t want to go into preachy mode but these jobs are becoming more career focussed and career oriented. I think a lot of people are coming into the sector, wanting to do it just as a job with no ideological position. I would really encourage people to start looking at this space in a more political way and I don’t mean that as electoral politics but have your opinion about politics. Know where you stand. That is what will make you stand out in a crowded sea of professionals. If you don’t have the ability to think critically, if you don’t know where you stand on an issue, if your position keeps changing with the organisation you are working for, I think that will make for a very flaky sustainability professional and that matters more in the space than any other space because at the end of the day, it is all oriented towards the larger cause of making this world a better place. So, I would recommend people to develop critical thinking skills, make informed opinions on issues and have their ideological position very clear and why you stand for what you stand for.
Number 17 of the Sustainable Development Goals, which is ‘Partnerships for Collaboration’ is clearly receives the least attention and I think more people in this sector need to build that collaborative mindset. In today’s world it is becoming even more challenging to truly understand what collaboration means. I use this word a lot and wonder if I know how complicated collaboration can be, or how much collaborations could end up ruining relationships if not done right. So, I would encourage people to explore the nuances of what it really means to collaborate, understand that, and use more of these insights in their work.
Please take care of your mental health. I can’t say that enough. This advice comes from my experience of working on the gender related project. Just hearing some people describe instances of sexual assault, sexual abuse somehow brought me a lot of trauma. Things that you don’t want to deal with come up and when you are into the work, trying to get the work done, you constantly bottle these things up. So, don’t be afraid to ask for help if this is happening to you because this space makes the issues that you are working for personal, and it becomes so personal sometimes that it can end up triggering you in ways that you don’t fully understand.
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