Coming from a deeply spiritual family, I was blessed with a holistic and ecological perspective about life, and a very supportive family with a vast traditional knowledge. I am a computers graduate and a professional animator. I have set up a home school which I ran for the past 4 years, I run a magazine and I gathered up a bunch of friends and our group started to think very seriously about holistic living. Being interested in social activities, I was drawn to the problems with unsustainable economies and food supply, and that lead me to research into local food systems. I started looking into designing urban and rural food-scapes, seed saving, un-cultivated but traditional food crops, etc.

That is when I discovered permaculture. My intention is to take the permaculture design methods and apply them in a wider context than just gardens or food forests. I am keenly interested to learn more and to research more and to apply this knowledge to set up sustainable human settlements, encompassing everything from abundant business models to educational systems. My heart lies with education and that is what I have been doing for the past few years. I wish to become a permaculture teacher and to spread the knowledge and help make the world a better place.

After getting to study about permaculture for a year and half, i got together all my friends and their families together and started talking about permaculture. For over 3 years this is happening, and after I finished my PDC with Geoff Lawton, it all culminated in a double PDC (the first pdc was for 24 days, 8 hrs a day, very detailed, and the second one was to equip people to be able to teach in an organized fashion). Now, these are some of the results.
1. Almost every available space for us is in gardens and food forests and a large part of that is in 'experimentation' where various techniques and theories are constantly tested so that they can be understood and propagated, like various planting patterns, various types of putting garden beds, etc., particularly in the indian context.
2. Looking at the time wasted in every house where one woman is caught up in cooking for the family every day, we started a common kitchen concept, where two or three or four people (ladies and gentlemen as well) cook for everyone on one day of the week. Rest of the people get time to work on productive things. This also is a chance to test things like rocket stoves, millet dishes, uncultivated crops, as well as to consume the massive garden output.
3. As a result of the above two, the young guns of the group, as well as the ladies, picked the opportunity up and started a free educational event called 'gather to garden'. That is where we go to some one's roof top, much like permablitz but 50 percent of what we do is classroom style teaching, and set up a garden, talk about the necessity and methods of setting it up, as well as to introduce permaculture. Several such events happened in the last several months. And now that concept is spreading to three other towns, although right now, we are having to go there ourselves to conduct it. We hope to get more people started with a more indepth understanding of roof-top and kitchen gardening so that they themselves can start such events.
4. Then, there are a lot of upcoming events that are being planned. For a PDC in local language for farmers and NGO workers. Workshops on permaculture with focus on that particular bioregion. etc.

Being in India, and having lived with the poorest of the poor (i grew up with kids in a slum), I understand that resilience is required in four key aspects. 1. Food 2. Medicine 3. Education and 4. Restoring traditional knowledge. Coming from such a country, there is still a lot of traditional knowledge around which is excellent in being eco-friendly, but it is being neglected. Bringing that back is a priority. Similarly, the monoculture of medicine systems is harmful to the society. There is being planned a PDC with addendum classes on growing and processing of medicinal herbs. This event is going to be a class FOR ayurvedic medical workers and doctors, while they themselves participate in building a database, which will then be seen by our permaculture team (which contains a botony phd and a zoology phd among others) who look at them and design guilds for growing such medicine. The idea is to create local medicinal gardens as well as medical doctors who can use the herbs for the bio-regional medical resilience.
Several such projects are in the pipeline and will come into fruition this year!
Those are the main points I would put forth. Although a lot of other things are happening, like educational resilience (none of our kids go to school. They are home schooled and all of them are being trained in permaculture and other such eco studies as well as traditional education. Models based on 'Gurukulam' traditional concepts are being developed right now so that what we were able to do in the last 6 years can be replicated everywhere regarding education) are happening, but they are still more in pipeline than fully developed.

Oh, btw.. here every little village has a lake which is currently being very badly managed. There is a course being planned (currently in talks with relevant professionals) where by a 'Lake Management Permaculture Workshop' is being planned.

Hope it all works out as well as it could be!

PDC - Suparna Kshetram, Jaggaiahpet, A.P., India July 2015

PDC - Hyderabad - Jan 2014

Hyderabad, Jan 18th to Feb 2nd.

PDC - Hyderabad - October 2013

I am teaching my first solo PDC at Nagole, Hyderabad, starting today!