Parisar conducts annual public lectures on different topics of social interest by eminent personalities in the social field. Dr. Vandana Shiva, Dr. Ramachandra Guha and Dr. Amulya K. N. Reddy have been some of the speakers at the Parisar Annual Lecture series. Parisar has re-started the lecture series from 2010 with a lecture by Mr. P. Sainath. If you are interested to conduct a lecture on issue of relevance, or would like to recommend any topic, please write to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..


Annual Lecture 2023: Plastic Waste Management by Vinod Bodhankar, Sagar Mitra

Vinod Bodhankar is the co-founder-director of Sagarmitra Abhiyaan - an Initiative, dedicated to plastic waste management at the school, housing society, village, and city levels. He also serves as the convenor of the Indian Peninsula River Basins Council, Jalbiradari, a network of river teams from 11 states and 3 union territories. Additionally, he is a founder and director of Vishwasankruti Ashram for ethical training and leadership. Mr. Vinod has been honored with the 'Jal Rishi Samman' in 2017 at the National Convention on Droughts and Floods. Since 2022, he has been appointed as the 'Advisor for Ocean and Coastal Energy Conservation' by the Swedish-based organization 'People's World Commission on Drought and Flood.'

In memory of Sujit Patwardhan, the 2023 lecture Vinod Bodhankar on 1st October, took us on a 12-year journey tracing the path of Sagar Mitra Abhiyaan and its dedicated team of 250,00 volunteers in plastic waste recycling. He unveiled the significance of collaborative efforts, strategies for community engagement that bring about meaningful change from a personal to a global perspective.

Annual Lecture 1993, Mahatma Gandhi and the Environmental Movement by Ramchandra Guha


Ramchandra Guha
      

 

 

Ramachandra Guha is an eminent Indian sociologist and historian who has previously held appointments at the Indian Institute of Science and Yale University. His research work has focused on human interactions with the natural environment, in the past and present. Aside from his work on environmental history, he has written a number of essays on environmental ideas in India and the West, which have been widely anthologized and translated. In this lecture he explores the idea of Mahatma Gandhi being and early environmentalist, considering the influence his ideas have had on environmental movements in India like the Chipko Movement and Narmada Bachao Andolan. He also speaks about the famous Nehru vs Gandhi , Development vs Environment debate in some detail.

 

Annual Lecture 1994, Can Life be made? Can life be owned? by Vandana Shiva

 vandana shiva 1994         

 

Dr Vandana Shiva is one of the most acclaimed environmentalists in the country today. After her education abroad, Shiva returned to India, where she worked for the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management. In 1982 she founded RFSTN, later renamed the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE), in her mother’s cowshed in Dehra Dun.

Shiva proceeded to work on grassroots campaigns to prevent clear-cut logging and the construction of large dams. She was perhaps best known, however, as a critic of Asia’s Green Revolution, an international effort that began in the 1960s to increase food production in less-developed countries through higher-yielding seed stocks and the increased use of pesticides and fertilizers. The Green Revolution, she maintained, had led to pollution, a loss of indigenous seed diversity and traditional agricultural knowledge, and the troubling dependence of poor farmers on costly chemicals. In response, RFSTE scientists established seed banks throughout India to preserve the country’s agricultural heritage while training farmers in sustainable agricultural practices.In 1991 Shiva launched Navdanya, meaning “Nine Seeds,” or “New Gift” in Hindi. The project, part of RFSTE, strove to combat the growing tendency toward monoculture promoted by large corporations.  

In this lecture she speaks about the ethical and ecological issues emerging from genetic engineering and patents on life.

 

 vandana shiva marathi    

 

 

 

 

Annual Lecture 1982: मानव निसर्ग आणि विकासनीती, माधव गाडगीळ

 madhav gadgil        

 

Madhav Dhananjaya Gadgil is an Indian ecologist, academic, writer, columnist and the founder of the Centre for Ecological Sciences, a research forum under the aegis of the Indian Institute of Science.

In this annual lecture, focused on Man, Nature and Development, Madhav Gadgil analyses the interpretation of development that we have accepted as a country and its implications. Development cannot be measured by production alone, even as production is a convenient measure. He observes that we are failing in many ther parameters, environment and sustainability being amongst the most critical ones. He further elaborates on the degradation of land and water resources, as well as of biodiversity and forest cover. He calls for a development policy which accommodates these resources rather than merely exploiting them for economic gains.

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