SRISTI (Part 2)

SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGIES AND INSTITUTIONS) ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ (Part 2)

Key Aim:

The aim is to establish linkage between formal or reductionist or institutional science with holistic or informal science underlying the local ecological knowledge system.

The key objectives of SRISTI are to strengthen the capacity of grassroots level innovators and inventors engaged in conserving biodiversity to (a)protect their intellectual property rights, (b) experiment to add value to their knowledge (c) evolve entrepreneurial ability to generate returns from this knowledge and (d) enrich their cultural and institutional basis of dealing with nature.

Key Tasks ahead:

a) To look into the taxonomic basis of indigenous ecological knowledge system and derive comparative understanding of the local and global categories of sense making. b) To survey, document and disseminate local innovations throughout India and in other collaborating countries. c) To provide training and technical, methodological and institutional support to Honey Bee Network members. d) To put in place the software and hardware required to support access to information, data analysis and electronic communication for researchers and network members. f) To provide legal, technical and managerial support to local innovators in order to protect their intellectual property rights and ensure their ability to generate returns for their knowledge, inventions or value addition. g) To produce training material supporting the incorporation of insights from indigenous knowledge systems into education curriculum.

Methodological approach

i)To analysis the relationship between indigenous basis of classification of soil, climate, plants, pets, insects, etc. To discover underlying basis of the same. This would help not only in uncovering new scientific concepts but also in targeting extremely developed low input technologies.

ii)To support experiments in farmers' field, agricultural universities and in collaboration with private small scale entrepreneurs for developing or help in developing commercializable herbal products for use in India as well as other developing and developed countries. The results would be interpreted through multiple heuristics i.e. the cultural and religious categories will be given as much importance as other so called more rational categories.

iii)Study of indigenous folkloric nature conserving traditions particularly raddles, proverbs besides songs and stories. this will help in embedding secular technological ideas in sacred institutions.

iv)To sponsor postgraduate research and development of training material for distance learning as well as in the work shops for natural science and other faculties.

v)Research on intellectual property rights and legal registration support to the innovators.

vi)Entrepreneurial development for value additions in local innovations.

vii)Market research for prospecting the scope for development of herbal pesticides and other such products for use by intensive agricultural farmers as well as organic farmers.

viii)Organization of biodiversity contests for triggering local initiative for conservation, identification of endangered species and other eroding parts of ecological knowledge systems. One such contest was organized through a NGO in South Indian in December, 1991. A student of class Fifth who came first could identify as many as 116 different plant species and varieties with their uses. The farmer who came first could identify only 240 different plant types. The remarkable thing about this is that this student of 12 years of age had covered half the intellectual journey covered by the most knowledgeable adult of the community at that age. Such contests may help in uncovering the tacit knowledge in a competitive mode and help restore the pride of the people in their own knowledge. In second contest organized in Village Gangagarh, UP in Northern India, all the three students who got first three prizes were from sixth class and could identify about 65 plants with their uses, maximum being 80. It is not surprising that biodiversity in this predominantly irrigated village was half of the South Indian dry village.

b)Documentation

i)Survey of innovations through students, farmers, rural youth and other activities in different parts of India and other collaborating countries,

ii)Translation, editing, computerization for research experimentation and dissemination purposes.

iii)Compilation of bibliographies, annotated as well as otherwise on different aspects of indigenous innovations and ecological knowledge systems.

iv)Collection of antiquiranian manuscripts and books on indigenous knowledge systems.

c)Network support

i)Training and documentation support to various collaborating NGOs and academic activists engaged in bringing out local language versions of Honey Bee News Letter.

ii)Assistance in organization of local biodiversity contests to discover latent ecological genius among rural children as well as adults.

iii)Organization of workshops and comparative action research on biodiversity conservation.

iv)Graphic support to local language versions besides assistance in identification and storage of plant samples.

v)Orientation workshop for young political leaders as well as media planners, journalists particularly of vernacular news papers to generate sensitivity about scouting local creativity and documenting their innovative ethics.

vi)Establishment of bulletin board and or a global electronic mail network on indigenous ecological knowledge system and grass root innovations called as SRISTI net or INSTAR (International Network for Sustainable Technological Application and Registration). The effort will also be made to set up a server on SUN system (or a similar system) for making certain automated data bases available through electronic mail to registered users. These data bases would try to make certain aspects of knowledge as common property among the bonafide users. Efforts will also be made to acquire communication technologies and hardware by which direct link can be made through satellite without having to use telephone lines. Alternatively we will gain independent access to the electronic mail network ethernet established by Indian Telecommunication Department.

d)Data Base Development

i)Efforts will be initiated to identify expertise for development of local language data bases for flow of information across language barriers with the purpose of storing information on innovations. At the same time existing softwares will be used for documenting both the literature and field innovation data base.

ii)A system of registration of innovations across the world will be developed so that legal and other steps could be taken up for filing patents and occassionaly court cases on finding infringement of rights of grass roots innovators and inventors.

iii)To develop or collaborate with software designers in evolving softwares which can interlink information in different data bases such as NAPRALERT and METFLOR at college of Pharmacy, University of Illinois, Chicago. Since NAPRALET has more than 100 thousand references on about 46 thousand species with full scientific, biological, biochemical and biosafety information, there would be obviously no purpose served in duplicating the effort. Dr. Fransworth has made this data base accessible freely to scholars from third world though the same is available to drug companies and other Western scholars for a price.

c)Legal Support

Legal expertise will be mobilised through existing institutions for strengthening the IPRs (Intellectual Property Rights) of grass root innovators. Since this activity would require close cooperation among the concerned legal NGOs across the world, we will learn from the experience of existing NGOs and strengthen their capacity to appreciate finer biological, ecological, technological and institutional dimensions of intellectual property rights.

d)Market Research, Product Development and Testing

i)It is necessary that if grassroots innovators and inventors have to compete with Multi National Corporations then they should have access to same tools and techniques as available to the competitors. Given SRISTI's close relation with IIMA mobilizing professional expertise would not pose any problem. Wherever possible and necessary support from private entrepreneurs would be taken. Links would be established with reputed scientific and technological institutions across the world so that the grass root level innovators get the best technical and market research expertise for launching their products.

Education and Training

i)There has been a significant increase in the interest in indigenous ecological knowledge system across the world. While rigorous empirical and conceptual studies have been lacking, emergence of this interest in indeed a positive sign. Sustenance of this interest will however depend upon the availability of demystified and easy to use methods and approaches which can convert individual interest into initiative and initiative into action and reflection. We have been opposed to so called rapid rural appraisal (RRA) methods or other variants of the same. We have evolved simple and robust analytical approaches which make us dispensable while pursuing search for innovations. The comparative effectiveness of our approach vis-a-vis the much celebrated and sold RRA/PRA can be gauged from the fact that while we have around 1000 indigenous innovations in our data base, all other groups in different parts of the world would not claim even to have a few dozens with name and addresses of the relevant community.

We intend to organize training workshops and educational materials for use by natural as well as social scientists to incorporate insights from indigenous ecological knowledge system into the curricula at different levels.

ii)The curriculum reform require linkages at multiple levels in the educational system. The postgraduate, graduate, school, and pre-school education would need to be reoriented to incorporate insights from indigenous ecological knowledge systems.

iii)Summer schools for the teachers from various colleges may be organized at IIMA so as to generate critical scrutiny of the concepts and approaches available in indigenous knowledge systems from different disciplinary perspectives.

Conferences

In 1995, an international conference will be organized on indigenous ecological knowledge systems at IIMA in which apart from presenting our own work, we would invite presentations by the global community of scholars on the subject. The resources for the travel grants for third world scholars and some from the first world would be separately mobilized from various agencies. We will try to hold SRISTI sponsored conferences once in three years in different parts of the world. Only those colleagues would be invited who have shared their ideas and work with the local communities in local language. Even if there are scholars who have gained reputation but have not followed this practice, we will nor compromise. Hopefully, the intellectual discourse in due course will become more authentic and accountable towards those whose knowledge we document, write about and generate personal professional rewards.

Summing Up

The poor people are not poor because they lack inventive ethic. They are poor because our poverty of imagination discounts their knowledge systems. In the process we generate a system of development which encourages people to discount their own institutions and knowledge systems.

The search for sustainable technologies world over provides an unique opportunity for empowering the poor people in hill, drought and flood prone regions and forest regions. The proposed International Center intends to support the intellectual property rights of rural innovators through lobbying for their rights to: Genes, herbal medicines, plant protection and veterinary medicine recipes, implements, vegetable dyes, anti-oxidants (which are needed by elite consumers to store processed food) etc.

It also aims at reorienting agricultural research strategies by creating alternative agenda in a language which scientists understand. It aims at linking knowledge, institutions, technology and politics in manner that control for shaping future direction of development passes on in the hand of those who solve the problems in a sustainable manner rather than in the hands of those who only talk about people as victims, problems and the helpless sufferers.