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Policy Matters:
Insight from Civil Society Engaging with Science and Technology

held at Hyderabad Central University, Gacchibowli, Hyderabad

August 3-4, 2007

We have three representations of the goingson at the workshop - the oral presentations, the written papers and the powerpoint slide shows..

If you follow the links on this page,  we first take you to the outline of each session and from there to the oral presentations and a themewise summary of the plenary sessions.

If you which to go to the workshop proceesdings, as it happened,  you can go to the schedule which will take you to the session.

In each presentation, there are links to the written papers, as well as the ppts.


Outline of Workshop

The first session focuses on Civil Society and the general policy environment. It starts with M V Sastri’s note on policy spaces and Sreekumar’s note on Prayas’ experience in the power sector, Rukmini Rao shares how women’s movements have been engaging with policy issues. Sagar Dhara will then raise the larger question of how we need to look at policies in the light of large-scale environmental destruction.

The second session will broadly focus on Civil Society experiences with policy-making. Here we have Kalamani speaking on CWS'experience on Panchayati Raj institutions and Gender. Suryakumari from Centre for Peoples'Forestry shares how civil society and the state have worked together on Joint Forest Management, Dr. Madhulika Bannerjee focuses on civil society groups'engagement in Ayurveda, Ramchandrudu on similar kind of efforts and discussions on policy guidelines for watershed and Shibu Nair on the experience of the zero waste effort in Thiruvanantapuram in Kerala.

The post lunch session will be on the broad theme of Institutional change and civil society.  There are talks by Professor Sanghi on Institutional spaces and Community Based Organisations, Ramanjaneyelu on issues relating to the scaling up of Non Pesticidal Management (NPM) by his organisation, Centre for Sustainable Agriculture (CSA) along with the Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN), Chitra will then share some of their ideas on whether it is possible to look at irrigation infrastructure from the people point of view. Harish examines some issues relating to the mainstreaming of indigenous systems of medicine. . And John, a late entrant, will put in some ideas on Laurie Baker and his work on architecture.

The last session is on science and democracy. In this, Dinesh Mishra will speak on how the "expert" can sometimes be a burden as in the case of the floods that we witnessed in Bihar and other parts of the country. Haribabu will share some ideas on the 11th plan in the Policy context.  Debasis and I have a small note on the relationship of democracy and the 11th Plan. Sridhar will speak a little bit about agriculture research in the 11th plan. We then have Kavitha speaking on some of her work on agricultural research and experiences from the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture’s engagement with the agricultural establishment. Ramasubrahmaniam will speak on technology democracy in the context of the recent experiment that he has had with farmers groups.

After the presentations, we had small group discussions. We had a plenary after which  we once again divided into theme areas, and  held discussions in smaller groups.   All these discussions along with relevant portions of the presentation have been put together themes wise as Plenary notes

We concluded the workshop with a panel discussion on the theme "How science and technology policies can be more people friendly". The main speakers were N. K. Sanghi , M.V Sastri ,   Prajit Basu,   Shiv Visvanathan  and Walter Mendoza

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