Meet Teen Climate Activist Ketaki Tyagi

Ketaki Tyagi has been a staunch climate change activist since the age of 14. She first became involved in activism due to her struggle as an asthmatic athlete contending with air pollution. “Every breath I took during soccer training felt like pure agony,” she told The FBomb. She admitted that she only began to care about the terrifying air quality in her hometown of Delhi when it started directly affecting her, and that she only began to learn about other environmental issues after conversations with her cousin.

One such issue she learned about was the adverse environmental effects of stubble burning in India. Stubble burning is the intentional torching of straw to clear land for cultivation. These intentional farm fires grow rampant in paddy fields during the second half of the year, because they help farmers take better advantage of the short window of time available between harvesting paddy and sowing wheat; this occurs because a delay in the planting of wheat can be cataclysmic for the crop. But stubble burning creates unfavorable air quality, harms people’s health, and even disrupts the economy by delaying the mobilization of vehicles as it emits fumes that cloud over the air.

Sensitive to the economic conditions and limited resources of local farmers, Tyagi understood that not all villagers had the means to alleviate this problem without disrupting their produce. So in 2017, at the age of 15, she set out to resolve this by raising funds to help farmers buy Happy Seeders, tractor-mounted machines that cut and lift rice straw, sow wheat into the soil, and deposit the straw over the sown area as mulch. The machine vanquishes the need to irrigate fields post stubble burning, which prevents water depletion. According to a 2019 report in the journal Science, employing Happy Seeders improves the carbon footprints of farmers by reducing virulent emissions from mixing with the air.

Tyagi decided to pursue this approach to the problem after her research revealed that “most prosperous farmers owned the seeder, while the destitute were unable to access it.” She reached out to manufacturers and informed them of her mission. The manufacturers were willing to sell the machines to such farmers at a subsidized cost, and Tyagi then set out to crowdfund the money necessary to purchase three machines, which she donated to a women’s self-help group rather than to individual farmers. She said she did this because it gave the women authority to control the lending, borrowing, and maintenance of the machines, and allowed them to earn a steady income by leasing the machines to others. “I wanted to take the opportunity to make more than one positive impact,” Tyagi explained.

Now, at the age of 19, Tyagi is taking a gap year from university to pursue her activism in association with My Right To Breathe, a national movement to fight air pollution in India, and Youth For Climate India. When questioned about whether she felt that her work for the cause was complete, the activist stated that she firmly believes that she is nowhere near done.

“Once you’ve worked towards a cause, it culminates in a chain reaction of awareness which materializes advocacy,” she said. “In the current situation, I strongly believe that it is a choice to be blind to the situation before us, but my eyes are wide open and I am working to better what I see.”