Green with pride

After addressing the UN Summit on Climate Change,Yugratna Srivastava is back to her routine of going to school,reading,watching TV and making the world a greener place....

Not many 13-year-olds travel to Korea and the US on official assignments. So when Yugratna Srivastava,Asia-Pacific representative of the Junior Board of the United Nations Environment Programme,rattles off the names of presidents and prime ministers from the world over and says they were pleased to meet me,one is not exactly surprised. I had the attention of the premiers of the world when I addressed the Summit on Climate Change at the United Nations General Assembly, says Yugratna,now back in Lucknow.

This wasnt her first international conference. Her stint with the environment began over three years ago in Muzaffarnagar,where she studied in St Francis School,Shamli,a student of class VI. A Patna-based NGO,Tarumitra,took note of her academic excellence and initiated her into the UNEP. Then a trip to Korea opened up a whole new world. I participated in the UNEP-TUNZAs International childrens conference held last year in June in Norway,in which I got elected by 107 countries into the Junior Board representing the children of the Asia-Pacific region, she says. In February this year,I went to Nairobi for a presentation and a UNEP agenda meeting. I also assisted in organising an International Children and Youth Conference held in Daejeon,South Korea,from August 17-23,2009.

Shes a chip off the old blockher father is a PhD in botany and her mother holds a doctorate in zoology. Now a class IX student of St Fidelis School,Lucknow,which she joined only a year ago after the family moved to the city,Srivastavasays her mother Roshnihas always been a topper in her class. I feel world leaders are not paying as much attention as they should to the cause of the environment and all progress is at the cost of ecological balance, says the little UN delegate,who will become a member of the youth board of the programme on turning 14.

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For all the talk on the environment,Srivastava is a quiet girl who likes to read and watch television. She spends a lot of her time on her laptop,surfing, says her father Alok Srivastava as she chips in,I also watch movies. I liked Titanic,An Inconvenient Truth and Black.

Yet to make friends in Lucknow,Srivastavas best friends are Felix Finkbeiner from Germany and Jin Ho Huh from South Korea. At school,she is partial to physics,computer science and geography. Srivastava,who idolises Mother Teresa,Kalpana Chawla and Nobel Prize winner R.K. Pachauri,says she would like to pursue astronomical physics when shes older.

As for her agenda of making the world a greener place,she is occupied in preparations for the UNEP Plant-for-the-Planet programme of planting a million saplings in India. No mission,it seems,is too big for this little wonder.