Home, Sweet Home
When American Municipal Power announced last fall that it had canceled plans to build a new coal-fired power plant in southeastern Ohio, NRDC and its allies rejoiced. For senior attorney Anjali Jaiswal, who had helped devise the legal strategy to fight the proposed plant, it was a particularly meaningful victory. She spent much of her childhood in Ohio -- "I love Cleveland!" she readily exclaims -- and the battle over the power plant represents what she values most about environmental law: the ability to make real change in her own backyard.
Jaiswal's affinity for protecting the places she has called home bodes well for the planet: she's had a lot of backyards in her 35 years. Jaiswal was born in India, but her family moved to the United States when she was just 3 years old, first to Dallas and then to Akron, Cleveland, and San Diego. By the time she was in high school, the Jaiswal family was settled in the Los Angeles area.
Since joining NRDC in 2001, Jaiswal has fought and won many local battles. First based in the organization's Southern California office, she worked to protect and improve water quality in rivers, streams, and coastal areas, waging battles that yielded immediate, tangible results.
Jaiswal and other members of NRDC's California staff have also successfully advocated for upgrades to a sewage treatment plant on the central coast, where sea otters in Morro Bay were being sickened by the discharge of dirty water. She waged legal battles to strengthen water pollution controls and to stop dairies in Southern California from dumping waste into the Santa Ana River. In the Sacramento area, she helped win the fight to require that irrigation projects leave more water in ecosystems, shielding endangered fish populations from further degradation. "We said, ‘This is the law, this is the science. You have to rule for us,'" she remembers. "It was a lot of sleepless nights and hard, hard work, but we won."
Last year, as Jaiswal was immersed in state and local legal offensives, a colleague approached her about trying international work. "I was conflicted," she says. "I really like working on local issues as a litigator." But as she heard more, her choice became clear. NRDC was looking to start an initiative in India, through which it hoped to bring clean energy and efficiency technologies to a country undergoing tremendous development and modernization. As the country of her birth, it was a place full of import for her. She said yes.
Jaiswal had visited India several times as an adult. In 2005 she took a leave from NRDC and spent three months in New Delhi working on pollution control through the Nehru Fulbright Indo-American Environmental Leadership Program. She was gratified by how easily her knowledge transferred to a new setting, allowing her to help with a campaign to improve sewage treatment near the Ganges River. "I knew what sewage plants looked like, their operation, their energy issues," she says. "I knew about compliance and enforcement."
She also knew the country on a personal level, having visited relatives in her father's village in Gujarat, India's westernmost state, which shares a border with Pakistan. Her experiences there gave her a snapshot of the broad challenges India faces. One evening, she and a cousin walked out into the tobacco fields surrounding the village. Her cousin wanted to show off the village's new power plant -- a sign of progress. Jaiswal couldn't help but see the environmental repercussions of the emissions spewing from the towering smokestacks.
India and the United States have two important things in common: they have large English-speaking populations and are democracies, making collaboration easier than in other rapidly developing countries, such as China. Though NRDC's work in India is full of potential, Jaiswal says, the challenges that lie ahead are significant: some 80 percent of the infrastructure the country will need by 2030 has yet to be built, and the number of motor vehicles on the road is expected to quadruple by 2020. The environmental ramifications of India's path forward will be felt around the world.
Jaiswal and Jacob Scherr, director of NRDC's international program, launched the India initiative last June. Their goals include fostering U.S.-India cooperation on clean energy and climate, strengthening environmental compliance and enforcement, and incorporating energy-efficiency standards into building codes to reduce carbon emissions.
"One of the great challenges in India is that there are laws on the books that are not implemented or enforced," Scherr says. "Anjali is in an excellent position to explain how we handle these problems in the United States and to translate her experiences to meet the needs in India."
Jaiswal sometimes thinks back to her father's village in Gujarat. The memory she recalls is a hopeful one -- that of a relative proudly leading her up to the roof to show off a new possession, the village's first solar cookstove.
