ESG mourns death of Noble Laureate Elinor Ostrom

Media Release

Bangalore, 13 Jun 2012: Bangalore based Environmental Support Group (ESG) has mourned the death of Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom, 78, who passed away earlier on Tuesday in Bloomington. She had been suffering from pancreatic cancer for past few months, and was in hospital for the past 3 weeks. She bagged the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her groundbreaking research on the ways that people organize themselves to manage resources.

 

 

Ostrom, 78, died IU Health Bloomington Hospital. Ostrom shared 2009 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, also known as the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, with University of California economist Oliver Williamson. She was the first woman and remains the only woman to be awarded the prize. Harini Nagendra of ATREE, who worked with Ostrom for a very long time broke the news to ESG.

 

Even as she fought cancer at IU Health Bloomington Hospital, Elinor showed the presence of mind to commend ESG’s efforts to advance use and conservation of lakes in Karnataka. In a letter to the Secretariat of the United Nations office to support the International Decade for Action Water for Life 2005-2015, she commended ESGs efforts for utilizing legal redressal mechanisms, and eliciting appropriate responses from judiciary and administration.

 

The subsequent responses from executive and judiciary were to protect, conserve, and wisely use Karnataka’s 35,000 irrigation tanks (lakes) and their canal networks". Elinor’s letter acknowledges that guidelines evolved to assist in this process are pragmatic as they acknowledge importance of community centric, democratic, and ecologically viable interventions for managing watersheds and water resources, Leo Saldanha of ESG said.