Vandana Shiva

World renowned intellectual and advocate for the preservation and celebration of biodiversity against genetic engineering and the negative impact of globalisation. She is an important voice in favour of people-centered, participatory processes; support to grassroots networks; women rights and ecology. Time Magazine identified Dr. Shiva as an “environmental hero” in 2003, and Asia Week has called her one of the five most powerful communicators of Asia.

Dr. Vandana Shiva is trained as a Physicist and did her Ph.D. at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. She later shifted to inter-disciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy, which she carried out at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, India. In 1982, she left to set up her Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy in her home town of Dehra Dun in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains. As an advocate, especially in international forum, she has proved one of the most articulate spokespersons of counter-development in favour of people-centered, participatory processes. As an intellectual she has produced a stream of important books and articles, which have done much both to form and address the agenda of development debate and action.

Her foundation is an informal network of researchers, working in support of people’s environmental struggles, part of the objective of which is the articulation and justification of people’s knowledge.