Advisors

Dr. T.B Dinesh is the Founder and technology Director of Servelots (1999), which develops cost-effective open source solutions and services. Servelots develops Pantoto, a collaborative open source platform. Dinesh is also an active member of the environmental group Hasiru Usiru and has provided open source web-based technology support to National Folk lore institute, and various community-based tourism initiatives, pastoral communities as well as NGOs through Janastu (a non-profit trust). His current projects also involve browser-based Open Course Ware in Computer Science education and Web accessibility for Inclusion of non-literate communities.

Email:[email protected]

Madhu Bhushan worked with Vimochana, meaning liberation, initiated in 1979 by women and men from within the Centre for Informal Development Studies (CIEDS)collective, that had come together in 1975 to seek a just, humane and creative society rooted in transformative politics. Vimochana grew out of the need for a public forum that would stand for organised resistance to the increasing violence on women and would be assertive in challenging the pervading apathy to the problems of women in the context of larger structures of violence and power. Madhu is a leading activist in India to assert the rights of women and disenfranchised communities.  She is currently an independent researcher.

Email: [email protected]

Past Trustees

Arthur Pereira is an active human rights activist in Mangalore and has successfully led the demand for fair compensation by Dalit and minority communities due to the Bajpe airport for over a decade now. He played a key role in mobilizing communities affected by the Airport expansion plan in Bajpe and also fought the expansion of the airport at the State High court and later at the Supreme Court on grounds of safety.  He is well versed on matters relating to Land Acquisition and has helped hundreds of farmers to benefit from the provisions of Land Reforms Act. His expertise also lies in building homes and rain water harvesting units to ease the struggle for water in major cities such as Bangalore, Mangalore and Mysore.

Late Dr. Shirdi Prasad Tekur, MBBS, MCH, served as Captain in the Armed Forces Medical Core, and following his retirement worked to form Community Health Cell (now Sochara). He also worked in establishing Community Health Departments in varoius hospitals and medical colleges. He was a much sought after General Physician and Paediatrician, especially with his popular practice at New City Clinic in Jayanagar, Bangalore. He offered various public health and counselling services, and was a proactive participant in various disaster management and rehabilitation efforts. He was also widely consulted on Homeopathic and AYUSH systems. On 16 May 2021, he lost his battle with COVID. ESG is forever grateful for his extraordinary guidance.

Suprabha Seshan,  lives and works at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary (GBS) in the Western Ghat Mountains in India, a small conservation centre and community  concerned with plant conservation, habitat nurturance and nature education. At GBS a small team, consisting largely of rural women, employs skills that place them among the world’s most advanced plant researchers and conservationists.  Through a combination of scientific and traditional knowledge, this team has achieved successful plant conservation results for a deforested region, where many species face extinction. The 25-hectare sanctuary area has been restored to a far higher level of biodiversity. This involves thousands of plant species and animals, as well as nurturing habitat at scale, spurring collaborative action with groups in other parts of the Western Ghats that undertake restoration work. The same team has also created the School in the Forest, a rubric covering residential programmes and daytime exposure visits concerned with plant diversity, forest ecology and a life in  harmony with nature. 

In her work, Suprabha honours traditional and indigenous peoples from rainforest areas through cooperative community based actions and mutual support. She also endeavours to educate students, land-based peoples, NGOs, government servants and forest activists on issues of ecological destruction and renewal. She envisions a “Green Phoenix,” or a movement that supports resilience and restoration to arise from the ashes of modern industrial culture.  Suprabha is a recipient of  Whitley Award in 2006 on behalf of the GBS team, and an Ashoka Fellow.

Suprabha also offers a talk on request titled Rainforest Etiquette in a World Gone Mad,  based on two premises: that nature is primary and that the planet is in peril. She draws on stories from her 27 years of experience in the forests of southern India, and the lives of plants, animals and humans she shares her mountain home with, as well as the environmental biography of their locality, the Wayanad plateau. She invites an exploration of a life in community with plants and animals and the two contrasting aspects of nature that ecosystem gardeners work with: resilience and fragility. The whole forest and its myriad beings can indeed return, but only when certain conditions are met and only with the right kind of help. This is critical: with the right kind of help, the whole forest, and all its beings, grows outwards again. 93% of the Western Ghats are already destroyed. The remaining habitats are fragmented badly. Her talk  calls attention to the vital beauty of these mountain forests and their precarious toehold in an India that annihilates the environment as its technocrats push for economic might.The questions that drive the Sanctuary’s work echo through her presentation: What must we do to bring the forests back? What is it to listen to the natural world? What do the plants have to say? Whom do we love? She is Managing Trustee of Munnarakkunnu Trust (MKT) which supports Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, the Green Phoenix and the School in the Forest.

  Joe Athialy is Executive Director of Centre for Financial Accountability, New Delhi.  He has previously worked with the Bank Information Centre, Amnesty International, Narmada Bachao Andolan, and various other human rights and accountability institutions in leading positions. He is a key organiser on issues of accountability of International and National financial institutions with regard to the impact of their activities on human rights and environment.

Email: Joe @cenfa.org