Farming the City 2020 – Speakers

Mr. Hari Shankar and Dr. Isha Vishan

Hari Shankar is a graduate from the civil engineering department from IIT Kanpur, and Dr. Isha Vishan is a Ph.D. from IIT Guwahati on Waste Management. Both of them worked on the idea to develop a simpler solution to manage the organic waste in the premises itself without any use of energy through rapid Drum Composting. As well as the proposed idea of Farm to Fork revolves around establishing a decentralized/hyper-local model for supplying garden-fresh vegetables, fruits, grains, etc.

 

 

Anubhav Pradhan

Anubhav Pradhan teaches urban literature at South Asian University. His doctoral thesis, awaiting examination, was conducted from the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia on colonial ethnography and the British imagination of India. He has taught English communication to B.Tech students in Jamia Millia Islamia; served Primus Books as its Senior Marketing Editor; and worked in Bharati College, University of Delhi as an Assistant Professor. He has also been part of the Researching the Contemporary programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and the Urban Fellows Programme of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. He is the co-editor of Literature, Language, and the Classroom: Essays for Promodini Varma (forthcoming) and Kipling and Yeats at 150: Retrospectives/Perspectives (2019). He works primarily on questions of belonging and identity in urban literature, on urban heritage and
history, and on land history and rights, all with specific reference to Delhi.

 

Deborah Dutta

Deborah Dutta is a researcher working at the interface between environmental education, urban studies and cognitive science, with a
focus on community-practice based approaches such as urban farming. The motivation for this approach stems from the failure of information-based environmental education in promoting impactful and relevant sustainable practices. Towards this goal, her research involves designing practice-based interventions, to study motivation and ecological sensibilities emerging from the activities. She is particularly interested in the theoretical framing of pro-environmental actions as an outcome of lived experiences rooted in somaesthetics and care-based encounters. She is an avid urban farmer, enthusiastic cook, and a hoarder of water-colours.

 

Dr Lakshmi Unnithan

Dr Lakshmi Unnithan , is a Doctorate holder in Horticulture from The University of Agriculture Sciences, Bangalore. She is currently the Editor and Head: PR and Communications, at Agriculture World Magazine, a Krishijagran Publication, New Delhi. She is responsible for supervising and guiding her entire team in relevant content dissemination in various print and social media portals of the publication group, especially Agriculture World. She was earlier associated with SIMFED, an Apex Marketing society for the state of Sikkim for Agriculture Products from SIKKIM and was the Head of Developing and Implementing PR strategies. She also was involved with their Organic
Farming Projects nationally and used to Collate and Analyze case studies of their projects. A freelance writer and freelance photographer for many magazines/ newspapers and a blogger for nearly ten years she has many articles to her credit.

 

Jagriti Pandit

Jagriti Pandit is a PhD scholar in the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She completed her M. Phil. in July 2018 from JNU and her master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Delhi. She has a keen
interest in the issues of identity, violence and gender and she is currently working on food, hunger and environmental issues.

 

Manasa Kambanna

Manasa Kambanna is an independent journalist and researcher based in Bengaluru. She covers education, theatre and dance for The Hindu. Previously, she worked as a researcher at Centre for Science, Society and Sustainability and Centre for Knowledge Systems, Jindal Law School. She has a bachelour’s in Law and a master’s in Public Policy. Her core research interest revolves around food and farming.

 

Nrupaja Bhide

Nrupaja Bhide did her bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from Pune, and has a master’s in Public Policy and Human Development from the United Nations University in the Netherlands. In 2019, she completed the SPARK Fellowship at BAIF Development and Research Foundation, Pune, India. Here she was working on capacity building activities for children in rural Maharashtra. She is also passionate
about working for sustainable waste management and ecological conservation, and volunteers for these activities in her free time. Most recently, she has been accepted for the class of 2020-2021 at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

 

Vishal Shaukeen

I am an electrical engineer by my qualification and started farming in 2017 after a year of corporate job. I am highly indebted to my family and my uncle Mr. Prem Prakash Shaukeen for their constant support and encouragement throughout the entire journey. I have successfully set up 2.5 acres of polyhouse and have 16 acres under open cultivation. over the course of time i gained experience in cultivating food grains, mass consumption vegetables and exotic vegetables as well as ornamental and landscaping plants. I have actively raised farmer issues at regional a well as national level through prominent media channels and national newspapers and am serving as youth executive at haratiyan Kisan Union (BKU).  To further improve my knowledge in the unexplored domain of food, I am pursuing masters in agriculture and food technology from University of Lincoln, UK; with plans to subsequently improve food security in and around Delhi.

 

 

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