Alvares is the editor of the Other India Press[1] and Director of the Goa Foundation, an environmental monitoring action group that has filed successful public interest litigation cases.

[7] After starting a short-lived rural development project, Alvares began writing for The Illustrated Weekly of India while Norma studied law.

Together with like-minded Goans, the Alvares founded the Goa Foundation in that same year to increase societal awareness and combat evasion of the new environmental standards.

In 1987, the Foundation filed its first public interest litigation case against sand miners who were causing erosion of the local beaches; represented in court by Adv.

His 1986 Illustrated Weekly of India article "The Great Gene Robbery" criticized the U.S.-funded International Rice Research Institute's program to replace indigenous crop varieties with their own less-robust ones.