Presently there are two bodies associated with the running of the Journal: the Steering Committee that
manages the Journal under the guidance, advice and directions of the Journal Forum. The Steering
Committee also serves as the Editorial Board of the journal for now.
Steering Committee
Ashok Jhunjhunwala
Kannan Lakshminarayan
C N Krishnan
Chennai
Ashok Jhunjhunwala is a Institute Professor at IIT Madras. He has a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur, and an M.S & Ph. D. from the University of Maine, all in the area of electrical sciences. He is a recipient of the Bhatnagar Award as well as the Padmashree Award. He has been associated with PPST from 1981 onwards. He has authored a book on Indian Mathematics, based on what he was taught by elders at his home, rather than at school. Ashok recognises that India was a well-functioning society with rich science and technological capabilities till about 1800. Understanding this is critical for Indians to stand up and haveconfidence to develop technologies to solve their problems and not look up to the West for everything. His focus has been to develop innovative technologies affordable to Indian people with help of a large pool of young engineers, inspired to make a difference. He brought in wireless communications to replace land-line telephony, so that telecom and Internet reach everyone in urban as well as in rural India. This opened up the possibility of a whole variety of digital services for education, health care and agricultural support. He worked on transforming banking and digital payments and was instrumental in introducing Internet banking, mobile-payment, and ATMs in India. Later, Ashok learnt about solar energy, and made electricity reach rural homes using solar-DC technology. Today, he works on technologies which would enable a society to live entirely on renewable energy in line with Indian philosophy of worshipping nature. He conceived and created IITM Research Park to enable next-generation Indians to take control of India’s destiny, develop innovative technologies and commercialise them through start-ups. He married Bhavani in 1982 and their son Sidharth teaches Bioengineering in IISc Bangalore.
Chennai
Kannan Lakshminarayan is currently a Professor of Practice in the department of Engineering Design at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras where he leads a team designing and developing High Efficiency Traction Motors for electrical vehicles. His overarching research objectives revolve around electro-mechanical engineering for making products that impact livelihoods and sustainability. He is the founder and director of Fractal Foundation – a one of a kind “ideas accelerator” focused on bringing new technologies to the market, including Microspin and Skillveri. In addition, Kannan’s passion for innovation-driven engineering led him to co-found and direct tech companies like Vortex and Motorz. Kannan received the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras 2014, in recognition of his innovations and transformative work in sustainable solutions for rural India. As a Trustee, and then as the Secretary, of the PPST Foundation, Kannan was deeply involved in the organisation of the Congresses on Traditional Sciences & Technologies of India at IIT Bombay (1993) & Anna University Chennai (1995). As the Coordinator of the AU-PPST Centre in Anna University, he initiated, jointly with the Textile Technology Dept of the University, and took forward the work on Decentralised Cotton Spinning which later got incubated as a start up at IIT Madras. Kannan holds a B.Tech. Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the IIT Madras.
Chennai
I have a B.Sc. Degree from Kerala University, B.Tech. Degree from IIT Madras, and M.Tech. and Ph. D. Degrees from IIT Kanpur – all in Electrical Sciences. Joined the Madras Institute of Technology Campus of Anna University Chennai in 1977 where I presently have the position of a Professor of Eminence (Honorary) in the AU-KBC Research Centre of which I was the founding director. In my efforts to pursue a serious R&D career in Anna University, I quickly realised the rigid institutional hierarchy of our S&T institutions and enterprise of our country – Central institutions, Private Universities and StateUniversities. The lions share of the resources, patronage and privileges of the nation goes into a few institutions being controlled by the Central Government, termed “Institutions of National Importance”. Private Universities are pretty much given a free hand to do what ever they wish by charging whatever they want from the students with no accountability and transparency. The State University System, including the private colleges affiliated to the State Universities, produces around 95% of the nation's graduates, but has been left to rot with little resources, freedom and prestige. With such a narrow base of 'quality', hierarchical structure and iniquitous resource allocation that prevail among our institutions of Higher Education and Research (HER), there is no way Science and Technology can effectively serve our nation and our people, and a part of my efforts has been to see how this can be changed. I believe that, from now on, the States of India should drive the HER system in our country, and there should be no further expansion of the Centre in this sphere. I was one of the 6-7 persons who came together in Chennai in the late seventies of the last century which eventually led to the formation of the PPST Group, and later the PPST Foundation. I share the sense of pride with my friends in having realised then itself that we need both the P s , Patriotism and People-orientedness, in every field for the progress of our nation and our people, seeing them as connecting with the ideas of Swadeshi and Swaraj of Mahatma Gandhi. Married my friend (late) Prof. Rajalakshmi Srinivasan, and our daughter Aarya and her husband Aditya are practicing psychiatrists, and they have a son Abhimanyu.
Rajeev Sangal
Indore
G Sivaramakrishnan
Bengaluru
Sunil Sahasrabudhey
J K Suresh
Varanasi
Bengaluru
Rajeev Sangal is a former Director of IIT(BHU), Varanasi, and was the founding Director of IIIT Hyderabad. He is a Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering and of Computer Society of India, with research in languages and AI. He holds B.Tech. from IIT Kanpur, and MS and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Earlier he was a faculty member at IIT Kanpur where he headed the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He along with Dr Vineet Chaitanya has developed Computational Paninian Grammar (CPG) framework based on Panini's theories of 5th century BC. He led a consortium of 11 institutions for building machine translation systems for 18 Indian language pairs based on CPG. He has written 5 books and numerous research papers. As the Director of IIIT Hyderabad, Rajeev established the new university with an innovative academic structure, research centres rather than departments, a research oriented undergraduate curriculum, integrated trans-disciplinary BTech-MS programmes, research that tries to connect with society & industry, and an environment of experimentation, openness, and caring. He designed and helped make Universal Human Values (UHV) course a regular part of the academic curriculum in IIIT-H and in several institutions. He started the Student Induction Program in IIT(BHU) for new UG 1st year students, and AICTE has subsequently adopted the same for all engineering colleges in India from 2018 onwards. Rajeev was an early member of the PPST, since returning to India in 1982. He feels that the best from the traditional Indian society and the modern needs to be taken and integrated with a larger humanistic vision. He is keenly interested in swaraj and how it can form the basis of future society. Rajeev married Nisha in 1983, and they have two daughters Sapna and Shefali, who respectively are a Green Architect and a Ayurvedic physician. The entire family is engaged with studying and living according to universal principles of Jeevan Vidya, with a humanistic vision for the entire humanity and planet.
G Sivaramakrishnan (GSR) has a BA in Psychology, Sociology and Economics, MA in Sociology, and Ph.D on Sociology of Indigenous Medicine – all from Bangalore University, Bangalore. Served as Lecturer in Sociology and Logic, MES college; Reader in Sociology University of Mysore; Professor of Sociology Bangalore University; Visiting Professor NLSIU, Bangalore. Participated actively in Students and Teachers Movements, elected to the academic council of Bangalore University for two terms. Edited and published Padigal, a little magazine in Tamil. Organised the little magazines of Tamil into an umbrella organisation called Ilakku. Organised several conferences, seminars in different places in Tamilnadu on Tamil literature, culture and succeeded in forming a united front of serious scholars, academics, writers and grass root activists against commercialization of Tamil literature/culture. Actively associated with PPST since its inception. Associated with Vidya Ashram, and Loka Vidya Jan Andolan , Varanasi and Loka Vidya Vedike ,Bengaluru. Member , Gram Seva Sangha, Bengaluru. Meeting Dharampalji around 1981 was a ' game changer'; was in very close and constant contact with him till his death. Married to Rajkumari , a bank executive , in 1985. Have two sons, Ravi and Prakash.
Sunil Sahasrabudhey is the founder president of Vidya Ashram (vidyaashram.org) set up in 2005 at Sarnath, Varanasi. He did Masters in Chemistry and Ph.D. in Philosophy (thesis submitted in Hindi, and hence rejected by the institute) from IIT Kanpur and was a member of the Faculty of The Gandhian Institute of Studies in Varanasi for several years. He has written books relating to the Human Activity and theConcept of the Colonized human, the Farmers' Movement and Science and Politics in Gandhi's philosophical perspective. He has done studies in the philosophy and logic of knowledge and politics with Gandhian perspective and has been active in the Farmer’s Movement in India since the late 1970s. He was a member of the Interstate Coordination Committee of Peasant Organizations (1987-90) and he edited (1977-87) the Hindi fortnightly Mazdoor Kisan Neeti, a journal for radical political activists. He was a member of the PPST Foundation almost from the beginning and held secretarial positions in the three Congresses of Traditional Sciences and Technologies of India. Sahasrabudhey lives in Vidya Ashram with his partner Dr. Chitra Sahasrabudhey who is a life long activist working amoung women and artisans. With her, he gives all his time to Ashram activities, theory and practice around the idea of lokavidya. Lokavidya is the knowledge with the people, which ever renews itself with their experiences, needs, change of ethical and aesthetic contexts and so on. It incorporates their practices, expertise, way of thinking, principles of organizations, modes of abstraction etc. Lokavidya constitutes the epistemic strengths of the people, which are likely to provide the new political imagination for a just and sustainable life and its governance. Vidya Ashram has held several dialogues in different parts of the country and workshops in the global events of the World Social Forum (WSF) to focus on Knowledge in Society (lokavidya) and Knowledge Satyagraha for the dignity and status of knowledge that it deserves. Sahasrabudhey and his friends at the Ashram initiated the Lokavidya Jan Andolan (lokavidyajanandolan.blogspot.com), to start a peoples’ knowledge movement for the dignity of lokavidya and through it a new political imagination. The Vidya Ashram website www.vidyaashram.org gives a reasonable idea of the work of the Ashram and Sahasrabudhey’s involvement in it. Sunil and Chitra have one daughter and one son.
Ever since his growing mind was steered away from a single-minded pursuit of academics at IIT Kanpur around the year 1978, Suresh has been dabbling in readings, thoughts and analysis of the befuddling relationship between politics, technology, science, society, language, philosophy and the like in our times. He has a B-Tech from IIT, Kanpur, an MS from IIT, Madras and a PhD from IISc, Bengaluru. Over the years, he has been associated with groups that have had a powerful influence on his thinking and writing, such as: The group of social thinkers at Kanpur who were involved in articulating new possibilities for India engendered by the peasant movement during the 1980’s and who, in later years, set up the Vidya Ashram on the premise that the knowledge of ordinary people (Lokavidya) is the central source for developing a polity and society that integrates power with equity and development with justice. The PPST group which during the last two decades of the 1900’s strove to lay bare the hidden assumptions and values that underlie the so-called objective and value-free Science and Technology (S&T) of the West, and in later years embarked on an exploration of Indian S&T in relation to its epistemological and ontological bases. Suresh anchored the PPST newsletter for a couple of years in the 1980’s. The Gram Seva Sangh (GSS) group that in recent years has been working towards popularizing a reversion to hand-made products in India as an alternative to large scale automated production of goods and services, in order to provide jobs, justice, dignity and livelihood to its people that have been systematically denied to them thus far. Somewhere in these 40 odd years, he also managed to serve a little more than two life sentences in business organizations (HAL and Infosys, both at Bengaluru) in exchange for livelihood and sustenance. He is married to S. Meera, formerly a software professional, and presently a counselor, and has two children. Tejaswini, the elder of the two, and her husband Samanvaya, are E&T surgeons. They have a son, Shivansh. The younger daughter, Rohini, is enrolled for a PhD in Genetic engineering.
Umashankari Narendranath
Hyderabad
Veena Joshi
Pune
BA, MA and Ph.D. in Sociology from Delhi University; Sociology of Religion: A Hindu Temple in Tamil Nadu, being the topic of doctoral dissertation. Worked as Research Scientist on the theme of Indigenous Institutions for Rural Development. From 1987 onwards , serving as a practicing farmer in Chittoor District of Andhra Pradesh,as a researcher with special interest in religion, water and agriculture, and a social activist involved in advocacy on farmers and farm workers issues. Been part of a variety of initiatives at the village level: tank restoration, organic farming, forestation, environment-friendly lifestyle, village governance, health, women’s issues, education, etc.- all inspired by, and jointly with, her late husband Gorrepati Narendranath. Moved to Hyderabad in 2015 to pursue advocacy work with ASHA- Kisan Swaraj, Vasudaiva Kutumbakam, etc. Been associated with Neeti Samakhya, Bhusamskarana Karyacharana Samithi , Hyderabad Ekta and Human Rights Forum. Rashtriya Raithu Seva Samithi, Asha-Kisan Swaraj, Rythu Swarajya Vedika-Telengana and Andhra Pradesh. Also has had long term association and involvement with networks such as Lokayan, Narmada Bachao Andolan, Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture, Mahila Kisan Adhikar Manch, South Asian Dialogues on Ecology and Democracy), Patriotic and People - oriented Science and Technology (PPST) Foundation, National Alliance of Peoples Movements. Have participated in a large number of meetings and conferences organised by these networks all over the country and abroad. Does translations of literary works from Tamil to English, particularly the writings of her late father T.Janakiraman. Author of the book Dilemmas in Agriculture: A Personal Story. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam Publication (P )Ltd. 2010. http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/dilemma-naren.pdf Published extensively on matters of Indian Agriculture, Farmers , Irrigation and Water Management, Seeds and Crops, Ecology, Women, Temples and Religion, Indigenous Institutions, Rural development etc. Samyukta and Lakshmi are the two daughters of Uma Shankari Narendranath.
My educational background is in Physics. I did my BSc from Karnataka University Dharwad, MSc from IIT Bombay and PhD from IIT Kanpur. During my days at IIT Kanpur I briefly participated in the activities of a student group named Nagarik Adhikar Morcha. In many ways a new dimension was added to my world view. I stayed in touch with the subsequent activities of my IITK friends in the form of Lokvidya and PPST with occasional participation. I see the Dialogues on Knowledge in Society Journal as a conversation platform to build an inclusive knowledge based worldview. My brief background is as follows: Since my retirement in 2014, I provide governance and advisory services to energy, environment and development sector organisations. I have also been engaged to provide strategic advise by institutions undergoing leadership changes. Currently, I am learning the language of Hindustani music. Prior to retirement, I worked in the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), a bi-lateral cooperation arm of the Government of Switzerland in New Delhi. I joined SDC, India in 1994 to develop its Energy and Environment programme in India. In the 20 years with SDC, I participated in developing and managing several programmes in the international frameworks for climate change and ozone depletion. A special feature in most of these technical interventions was its human and institutional dimension. Prior to joining SDC, I was a researcher at the Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI) for ten years. I developed and led projects in the areas of Rural Energy Research and Extension, and Energy-Environment Interface. Over the ten years at TERI, I developed a commitment to conducting/supporting interdisciplinary research and program development to support policy and practice relevant to solving problems that face the underserved sections of society.
The Journal Forum
Annapurna Mamidipudi, Hyderabad - annapurnam@gmail.com
Aravindakshan K, Thrissur - aravindkailath@gmail.com
Ashok Jhunjhunwala, Chennai - ashok@tenet.res.in
Jatinder Bajaj, Delhi/Chennai - jatinderkbajaj@gmail.com
Angarai Balasubramanian, Chennai - ciksbalu@gmail.com
N Bharath Ballal, Udupi - nbballal@gmail.com
Claude Alvares, Goa - goafoundation@gmail.com
Chitra Sahasrabudhey, Varanasi - vidyaashram@gmail.com
Darshan Shankar, Bengaluru - darshanshankar2009@gmail.com
Girija PLT, Chennai - pltgirija@gmail.com
Gita Dharampal, Jalgaon - gitadh@gmail.com
Hema Kannan, Chennai - hema@microspin.co.in
Kannan Lakshminarayananan, Chennai - kannan@motorz.in
C N Krishnan, Chennai - cnkrish@gmail.com
Mukundan T M, Chennai - t_m_mukundan@rediffmail.com
Rajeev Sangal, Indore - sangal@iiit.ac.in
Ram Samanvaya, Chennai - ram.samanvaya@gmail.com
Sunil Sahasrabedhey, Varanasi - budhey@gmail.com
Gorrepati Samyuktha, Hyderabad - samyuktha.gorrepati@gmail.com
Sashikanth, Chennai - kanth.sashi@gmail.com
P K Sasidharan, Kaladi - pksasidharan4@gmail.com
G Sivaramakrishnan, Bengaluru - gsiva49@gmail.com
Mandyam D Srinivas, Chennai - mdsrinivas50@gmail.com
Suresh JK, Bengaluru - jksuresh60@gmail.com
UmaShankari Narendranath - umanarendranath@gmail.com
Veena Joshi , Pune - veenak78@gmail.com