Draft:Reena Gupta

Reena Gupta
Reena Gupta is a politician and spokesperson for Aam Aadmi Party. She works as an advisor to Government of Delhi Gopal Rai and is a member of the Steering Committee of Delhi Government's policy think tank, the Dialogue and Development Commission of Delhi, constituted to help DDCD in implementation of Vision "Delhi@2047". She is also a member of Delhi's State Level Environmental Impact Assessment Authority (SEIAA).

Early Life and Education
Born in Uttar Pradesh, Gupta holds a Masters in International Development from Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. She has been working on issues related to environment and sustainable development for more than two decades covering both grass roots work as well as policy/advocacy work, at civil society groups (AMUL milk cooperative) and internationally at Oxfam America as well as multilateral institutions like World Bank(in Washington DC and later in Delhi).

Environmental Activism
Gupta has been very active in the Safe Food Movement and has written extensively on the menace of pesticides in India.

Gupta is working on making environment a political agenda for the citizens and is very vocal on issues of environment and social injustice. She writes regular columns in Indian newspapers like Hindustan Times, The Times of India, The Indian Express on issues of air pollution, environment and social justice.

Politics
Gupta took the plunge into active politics in 2013 when she gave up her illustrious career at the World Bank to join the 2011 Indian anti-corruption movement in Delhi as an activist and then as a volunteer with the Aam Aadmi Party.

As the advisor to the Environment Minister of Delhi, she has helped create a decision support system that identifies the major pollution sources and a time bound measurable action plan to tackle each of these.[21]

One of her biggest, recent legislative wins has been the policy around logistics and vehicle aggregators companies like Uber, Ola Cabs.[22] To address Mobile source air pollution — one of the leading causes of air pollution in Delhi — she legislated a policy that legally mandates vehicle aggregators to convert their fleet to Electric vehicle with annual targets in a time bound manner.[23] She is now lobbying with the neighbouring state and federal governments to legislate similar mandates in order to boost adoption of electric vehicles.[24][25]

To ensure that things happen at scale, Gupta has also been able to leverage technology for solving the air pollution crisis in Delhi. She was the brain behind the creation of Green Delhi App and Green War Room.[26] Green Delhi is a mobile-based application through which residents are able to report instances causing localised pollution.[27][28] The complaints are monitored to identify air pollution hotspots, leading to the creation of local air action plans through a 24x7 operational Green War Room.[29][30]

She was instrumental in the launch of 'Yudh Pradhushan Ke Virudh' (Delhi’s war on pollution) - a statewide participatory citizen engagement campaign to fight Delhi’s air pollution.[31][32]

Gupta is also leading 'Greening Delhi' — another key initiative of Delhi Government. This two-pronged initiative is converting vacant spaces in Delhi into Neighborhood park|community parks and forests and modernising the existing neighbourhood parks with world class facilities.[33][34] Secondly, the Delhi Government is organising free urban farming workshops[35] to encourage and support citizens in growing vegetables and fruits in sustainable and pesticide-free environment, as well as increasing the green cover of the city.[36]

Gupta supported Delhi in signing onto the Urban 20 (U20), a city diplomacy initiative permanently convened by C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and United Cities and Local Governments, that allows Delhi to use a global platform and represent itself in discussions on climate and sustainable development to inform the G20 summit agenda.[37]

Due to her outstanding work and experience, Reena Gupta was nominated as a member of the State Level Environment Impact Assessment Authority late last year. She is working on making this Authority more transparent and participatory in nature.[8]