Timesof24
PV Satheesh was one of many icons of civil society activism in India.
Hyderabad:
The person who deserves the honour of being known as the Millet Man of India for pioneering work in demonstrating an alternate, ecologically sustainable agricultural meals system, died in Hyderabad on Sunday morning after a chronic sickness.
PV Satheesh was founder and Govt Director of Deccan Improvement Society (DDS) that labored out of Pastapur village in Sangareddy district of Telangana, the place final rites of the 77-year-old will happen on Monday at 10.30 am.
As DDS Board member Vinod Pavarala put it, Mr Satheesh was one of many icons of civil society activism in India. His Zaheerabad-based organisation in rural Telangana efficiently championed problems with agri-biodiversity, meals sovereignty, girls’s empowerment, social justice, native information methods, participatory improvement, and group media.
The ladies’s teams, known as sanghams, of DDS, and their steadfast adherence to millet cultivation and natural agriculture, led the way in which nationally in providing demonstrable options to the dominant agricultural paradigm.
The current efforts to include millets into the general public distribution system owes a lot to the work of DDS underneath his steerage. Years in the past, Mr Sathesh had arrange an area public distribution system, run by girls farmers, solely primarily based on millet crops.
Born on June 18, 1945, in Mysore, Periyapatna Venkatasubbaiah Satheesh was a graduate from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi, and began out as a journalist. He went on to work as a pioneering tv producer for almost twenty years for Doordarshan, making programmes associated to rural improvement and rural literacy within the then-united Andhra Pradesh. He performed an necessary function within the historic Satellite tv for pc Educational Tv Experiment (SITE) within the 1970s.
Within the early 1980s, Mr Satheesh, together with a number of buddies, began the Deccan Improvement Society within the semi-arid Zaheerabad area by bringing collectively poor Dalit girls within the villages, to rediscover their religion in conventional information methods that helped problem starvation, malnutrition, land degradation, lack of biodiversity, gender injustice, and social deprivation.
Whereas Mr Satheesh led the organisation for almost 4 a long time to make it an internationally acclaimed NGO, and an inspiring instance that has motivated related experiments in millet revival and promotion throughout the nation, what he additionally did successfully was to create highly effective leaders from among the many illiterate girls, from probably the most marginalised communities, who turned empowered ambassadors of change.
Because the director of DDS, PV Satheesh’s long-standing efforts resulted in enhancing the livelihoods of 1000’s of poor girls throughout 75 villages in Telangana. He additionally led a number of nationwide and worldwide networks like Millet Community of India (MINI), South Towards Genetic Engineering (SAGE), AP Coalition in Defence of Range, and was additionally the India Coordinator for SANFEC, the South Asian Community for Meals, Ecology, and Tradition, a five-country South Asian community with over 200 ecological teams.
He was previously Board Member, Genetic Sources Motion Worldwide (GRAIN), Barcelona, Spain, and was additionally a member of the Worldwide Panel of Consultants on Sustainable Meals Programs (IPES-Meals), Brussels, Belgium.
Mr Satheesh additionally used his expertise within the media to start out India’s first Neighborhood Media Belief, a grassroots media centre the place illiterate Dalit girls had been educated in film-making, to democratise media areas, and likewise adopted it up with the launch of India’s first rural, civil society-led group radio station, Sangham Radio.
He was a tireless employee and chief within the NGO sector who remained dedicated to his ideas and was a beneficiant mentor to many younger folks. He was not too long ago honoured in Delhi by the Folks’s Conference on Millets by RRA (Revitalising Rainfed Agriculture) Community for his lifetime contributions in making millets a folks’s agenda.
