Gobar Times

About Gobar Times

Overview

Gobar Times is a monthly environmental education magazine for the young adult, published from New Delhi by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), one of India's leading environmental organisations. First published in May 1998, it is published along with Down To Earth, CSE's fortnightly news magazine, as a supplement, and has built a widespread circulation across India and abroad. Described by CSE as among India's most popular children's environment monthlies, Gobar Times aims to promote environmental awareness among the young and curious in an engaging and fun-filled manner. Its very name is a statement of philosophy: "gobar", the Hindi and Nepali word for cow dung, was chosen to capture an eco-philosophy of generating wealth from waste — a symbol, in the words of CSE's founder-director Anil Agarwal, that embodies the spirit of the Indian environmental movement. The magazine's official page is hosted on the CSE website at cseindia.org/gobar-times.

The meaning of "Gobar"

To the uninitiated, naming a magazine after cow dung might seem like a joke; to the founders of Gobar Times, it was a manifesto. Gobar is woven into the daily lives of millions of Indians: it serves as an insecticide, plasters mud houses and floors, provides a waterproof coating for walls, keeps floors cool, and is the energy source of rural India, used as cooking fuel where people have no access to fuels like LPG. Its greatest use is in farming, where it serves as natural manure for crops. In short, gobar is a mainstay of rural India and an appropriate symbol for eco-friendly technology. Anil Agarwal, the founder-director of the Centre for Science and Environment, aptly called gobar the symbol that embodies the spirit of the Indian environmental movement, reflecting that the widespread and diverse use of cow dung in Indian society stands up to every principle of good environmentalism. The magazine's name thus teaches its first lesson before a single page is turned: that wealth can be generated from waste, and that sustainability is already embedded in Indian tradition.

The Centre for Science and Environment

Gobar Times is published by the Centre for Science and Environment, the New Delhi-based public interest research and advocacy organisation founded by Anil Agarwal. CSE is best known for its fortnightly magazine Down To Earth, its campaigns on air and water pollution, and its influential environmental research, but it has always treated environmental education as central to its mission. CSE's Environment Education Unit targets the future inheritors of the earth — tomorrow's planners and administrators — and tries to make the young familiar with issues that are contentious and political: issues that reveal the linkages between a degrading environment and poverty, and between unsustainable development and inequity in society. Gobar Times is the flagship product of this unit, a colourful eight-page tabloid that CSE describes as being loved by adults too, for providing a fresh perspective and new ways of looking at environmental issues in an engaging, attractive and humorous way. Teachers and interested parents find it useful as a teaching aid, and an online edition has long been available through the CSE website.

Launch in May 1998

The first issue of Gobar Times appeared in May 1998, and it was launched with a clear and confident voice. A contemporary review in The Hindu that month captured the magazine's tone, describing it as a different kind of "ecomag" for kids that sought to teach children "some other things about the environment some other way". The publishers even issued a playful appeal for a "Gobar-Mantri" — a minister for cow dung — to underscore how seriously they took their unserious symbol. The magazine was circulated as a supplement with Down To Earth, which gave it immediate access to CSE's established readership of environmentally conscious adults, while its colourful tabloid format and humorous approach were designed to win over young readers directly. From the start, it was conceived not as a textbook but as a companion: something children would pick up voluntarily, read for pleasure, and absorb environmental thinking from almost without noticing.

Pandit Gobar Ganesh

Every great children's magazine needs a guide, and Gobar Times created one of the most memorable in Indian publishing: Pandit Gobar Ganesh, the pondering panditji. Described as an Indian elderly gentleman whose brains can be picked for anything on earth, Pandit Gobar Ganesh takes readers through current issues, subjects and ideas relating to the environment. The character embodies the magazine's method: a wise, witty, slightly eccentric elder who can move effortlessly from explaining the chemistry of pollution to musing on the politics of climate negotiations, always in language that respects the young reader's intelligence. In a media landscape where children's content is often either patronising or purely entertaining, Pandit Gobar Ganesh offered something rarer — an adult voice that takes children seriously as thinkers about the planet's future. The icon has become inseparable from the magazine's identity, the friendly face of its eco-philosophy.

Content and style

The editorial approach of Gobar Times is summed up in a rhyme its creators wrote at the time of its launch: it is "an ecomag without the usual green / But with things like gobar and vanishing genes / Jungles on platters / and countries on barter / Someone else's decisions on our matters". The magazine covers the full range of environmental subjects — forests and wildlife, water, air pollution, waste, climate change, energy — but always through a lens that connects the local to the global and the scientific to the political. Its pages mix reportage, explainers, cartoons, illustrations and photographs, written in language that is familiar and simple but never dumbed down. A distinctive feature is its willingness to tackle the political economy of environmental issues: why the poor suffer most from pollution, how global negotiations affect Indian villages, who decides and who pays. This is environmental education with a conscience, designed to produce not just informed children but engaged citizens.

Children at the climate negotiations

One of the most celebrated moments in the magazine's history came at the Eighth Conference of Parties (CoP-8) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, held in New Delhi in 2002. For the occasion, young schoolchildren from various schools in the capital collaborated with CSE to produce a special eight-page edition of Gobar Times, produced entirely by children, on climate change and the CoP-8 negotiations. The special edition was released by Enele Sopoaga, Ambassador of Tuvalu to the United Nations and chief negotiator of Tuvalu, the Pacific island nation then facing the catastrophic effects of global warming and rising sea levels. Sopoaga congratulated the children's painstaking efforts, saying they had made a realistic assessment of the issues and zeroed in on the failures of CoP-8, and added that their perspective needed to be taken seriously if the world was concerned about the future of the earth. The children's edition reiterated the importance of equity in global environmental negotiations and the need for industrialised nations to take responsibility for mitigating climate change — a message that remains at the heart of India's climate diplomacy.

The Green Schools Programme and outreach

Gobar Times is closely linked to CSE's Green Schools Programme, the organisation's flagship initiative to make schools themselves laboratories of environmental practice. Through the programme, schools audit their own consumption of water, energy, land and air, and students learn environmental science by measuring and managing their own campuses. The magazine serves as both a resource and a rallying point for this network, carrying stories of what green schools are doing and giving young environmentalists a platform to share their work. CSE's environment education work extends beyond the magazine to manuals for educators, storybooks for children — including titles such as Raindrop, Within the Well, Naina's Village, Chilka Adventure and Chipko — and workshops, eco-tours and lectures. Gobar Times sits at the centre of this ecosystem: the monthly voice that keeps the conversation going between issues, events and school terms.

Gobar Times today

More than twenty-five years after its first issue, Gobar Times remains, in CSE's description, among India's most popular children's environment monthlies and a Down To Earth supplement, published by CSE from New Delhi. Its formula — serious environmental journalism translated into a language children love, guided by Pandit Gobar Ganesh and grounded in the eco-philosophy of its name — has proved remarkably durable across generations of young readers. In an era when children's attention is fiercely contested by screens and social media, the magazine's continued publication is a quiet achievement of India's environmental movement: proof that environmental education, done with wit, honesty and respect for its audience, can hold its own. For parents, teachers and young readers, the magazine's official page at cseindia.org/gobar-times is the gateway to its current issues and archives — and to the worldview of Pandit Gobar Ganesh.