Serious Sustainability Practices - Praxis Awareness - Level 0.1 was organised under the aegis of the US Embassy and ably coordinated by Swechha, took place between 11am and 1.45 pm on 12.07.2020.

The program was broken into three clear instructional modules with in-built interactions, engagement exercises and tool- based input sharing with the participants.

The first module ‘Preparing for disruptions: Focusing on SDGs - Challenges , Complexities and Inter-relationships’, delivered by US State Department (IVLP) alumna Sanjukta Mukherjee dealt with creating a virtual map for the
participants at the conceptual level, where the terrain included precepts of sustainability, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and their interpretations, general concepts of businesses and ecology alignment to the overall ethos and bottom-lines of sustainability with a distinct synergistic story boarding of the emergent” new normal” apropos sustainable development in the ongoing scenario and the post pandemic world. It included concepts of business continuity, economic and disaster resilience, preparedness and alignment of perceptual positions to make
the participants’ personal businesses vis a vis eco systems empowered by readiness. There were a number of questions including one from a senior correspondent from the Trade Fair Times as to what she considered the most challenging aspect of propagating the sustainable business opportunities which the facilitator answered satisfactorily.

The next session, titled Sustainable Production & Processes - Enterprise Score Card & dealt with a more operational approach where the facilitator Satrajit Sanyal, who is a Lead Assessor for Sustainability Assurance and implementer of the Balanced Scorecard and an alumnus of The American National Standard Institute took the participants through the two different frameworks of sustainability assurance and score-carding and through a very short presentation explained to them the how these two frameworks could be synthesised to create an operational measuring tool for evaluating sustainability in both the social and professional contexts. The session ended with a small exercise which involved the participants and tooled them to measure emergent positive practices in a constrained scenario like the present pandemic. There were queries by a senior development practitioner and former government official, an International legal consultant and regional registrar for India’s apex body in the field of institutional arbitration and a recently returned post-doctoral fellow from California University. Each of these queries were satisfactorily solved by the guidance and facilitation of Mr Sanyal who helped these participants come to their own solutions by using the tools he had been discussing.

The last session, An Overview of The Growing Market And Increased Demand and Green Business Case Studies’, was a technical session which was delivered by Prof.Judhajit Sanyal who is an academic, scholar and researcher in the fields of Applied information Engineering and Advanced Environmental Practices, and dealt with the opportunities and emerging trends- pre, during & post COVID 19- in the field of sustainable and environmentally resilient business practices and areas, mapping it to the urgent need of recognising and predicting constraints, responsibly creating
redressal mechanisms and systems for the same, taking the incumbents step by step through UN, World Bank and other reports and live data vis a vis predictive analytic forecasts regarding the future of green business.

There were queries from several of the incumbents which were effectively addressed by Mr Sanyal and some queries which were beyond the permissible time frame were promised responses to, offline.

The program due to the enthusiastic response of the participants and the many queries that they raised to the facilitators had to be extended to a further 15 minutes than the originally declared duration. It ended on a very
positive note where the incumbents seemed interested to take part in future events which offered learning on similar lines. This seemed like a measure of efficacy of the program and could be considered as a point of departure for the way ahead.