When she moved to Gurugram from South Delhi 21 years in the past, a 57-year-old resident of Wellington Property in DLF 5 believed town would develop into its promised “Millennium Metropolis” imaginative and prescient. As an alternative, she says she witnessed “a quagmire of neglect, mismanagement and apathy”, evident in waste, mud, and disordered citizen-environment relationships.
A designer with over 35 years’ expertise, Anuradha Dhawan states her private {and professional} journeys intersected a decade in the past when trend waste started troubling her deeply. This prompted a shift from merely creating garments to critiquing the programs behind them. Her label, Anu PD, transitioned towards what she calls “trustworthy sustainability in trend,” rooted in each day observe. She started designing versatile, multi-functional clothes for re-wearing, re-styling, and restore, accounting for each material scrap. The ideas of Refuse, Scale back, Reuse, Restore, Repurpose, and Recycle grew to become lived values, increasing into workshops, lectures, and collaborations.
These efforts led to creating “Round The Des”, an initiative connecting life-style decisions like trend, meals, forests, farming, and waste into one environmental dialog. Its most seen mission, “SWAPnotShop”, is a hyper-local trend swap group that has held 5 editions throughout the NCR since 2023, diverting over 700 clothes again into circulation with a goal of 18,000 in upcoming editions.
In parallel, she engaged in environmental activism. Seven years in the past, she grew to become a founding member of the Aravalli Bachao Residents Motion, responding to perceived indifference in the direction of the Aravalli vary. Her work expanded to opposing amendments to forest legal guidelines and the NCR Draft Plan 2041 and campaigning towards unlawful mining, landfill growth, waste-to-energy tasks, and diluted environmental safeguards.
She has mentored tons of, conceptualised a travelling Aravalli exhibition reaching 17 venues, and helped create “Aravalli Ambassadors” in faculties and housing societies, alongside organising therapeutic forest walks and collaborations with numerous establishments.
Presently, alongside lively Aravalli campaigns, she works with nationwide and worldwide organisations on sustainable trend, together with a World Sustainable Vogue Listing with Earth Day Community. Her long-term imaginative and prescient for Gurugram contains decentralised waste and water programs, walkable streets, environment friendly public transport, native meals programs, restored metropolis forests, and guarded Aravalli biosphere standing. Her message is to be environmentally aware, have intent, and observe by way of with motion.
Dhawan is a designer and environmental activist who works on round trend, waste discount and Aravalli conservation by way of workshops, and community-led sustainability initiatives.
