Document(s) 11 of 22

Recipient: Shailesh Shukla

Hometown: Winnipeg, Manitoba

University: University of Manitoba

Award: IDRC Doctoral Research Award

Purpose: To help Canadian graduate students undertake their thesis research in the field of international development.

PhD Thesis topic: Community-based Conservation and Environment Education

Research location: India (First visit: September 2003-February 2004; second visit: 3-4 months in 2004)

Amount of award: up to $20 000

 

 

 

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Shailesh Shukla was born in a village in India’s Gujarat State, but while he was still young, he moved with his family to a large city.  Mr. Shukla, however, never forgot his village roots and the fact that his grandfather had a large farm. Agriculture was in his blood. Throughout his school days, heknew that he would go to university to study agriculture.

 

He gained bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Gujarat Agricultural University and,  in 1993, started work as a research and academic associate at the Ravi J. Matthai Centre for Educational Innovation at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad.  During his four years there, he worked with 30 or 40 teachers whom he calls “unsung heroes” – teachers who were doing innovative work outside the formal school system.  One of Mr. Shukla’s innovative projects was a series of school competitions in traditional knowledge, an idea envisioned by the Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions (SRISTI) in Ahmedabad.

 

 “We organized 17 competitions in different remote tribal and economically disadvantaged areas of India, asking children to bring in plants known and used in the traditional culture,” he recalls.  “Some children brought in300 to 500 plants and they knew everything about them.  They knew their uses in agriculture, in medicine, in nutrition, and which plants might be found growing where groundwater was available.  They probably consulted the elders in the village,so there was transmission of knowledge from one generation to another.  This has not been studied properly.  If you want to build bridges between formal and informal education, you need to understand these informal knowledge systems.  The children showed a lot of interest and enthusiasm.  We need to know how to build on this.”

 

The children who won prizes were not necessarily those who did well academically at school.  “There was no correlation betweenacademic performance and performance in biodiversity,” says Shukla.  The prizes the winners received were school supplies – pencils, compass sets, and notebooks – yet, ironically, many of the students had to drop out of school because their families could not afford for them to continue.  They were living in the dry, hilly areas where living conditions were harsh.

 

In 1998-99, Shukla worked for the Gujarat government as a planning and management consultant with World Bank-sponsored primary education programs. But he liked hands-on innovative programs and after a year took a job with SRISTI. He managed a project supported by the United Nations Development Programme and the Global Environment Facility, aimed at conserving biodiversity in the dry and semi-arid ecosystems of North Gujarat.  He also coordinated educational projects.

 

He had volunteered for some years with SRISTI, and was (and still is) on the editorial boardfor Honeybee, a newsletter on grassroots innovations for sustainable agriculture and natural resources issued in eight Indian languages and distributed to 70 countries. 

 

With SRISTI, Shailesh Shukla used the “competition” process to tap women’s knowledge of wild plants.  He organized recipe contests for mothers and daughters. Each entry had to use a wild vegetable not commonly cultivated.  It helped the communities realize the importance of women’s knowledge and raised the self-esteem of the women themselves. "Their knowledge is not regarded properly in society,” he points out.  “It is taken for granted.”

 

Shukla has been involved in a number of other Indigenous educational initiatives over the years.  For example he has been State Research Director for a project on elementary education for tribal and disadvantaged communities sponsored by India’s Ministry of Human Resources Development. 

 

Involvement with innovative schoolteachers and mentors such as SRISTI’s founder, Professor Anil Gupta, was a significant source of inspiration for his later career, Shukla says.  It convinced him that he should return to school to study for a PhD. He had met Dr. James Gardner, the University of Manitoba’s Director of International Relations, at an international conference on grassroots creativity and innovations in India. Dr. Gardner persuaded him to study in Winnipeg.

 

That, Shukla found, has it advantages and disadvantages: “It was hard coming back from India in February where it was plus 40ºC to Winnipeg where it was minus 15ºC,” he points out. 

 

His PhD research is looking at how traditional medicinal knowledge is passed on and how the formal and informal educational sectors can work together to improve community-based conservation.  He has been doing research with the Medicinal Plant Conservation Centre, a nongovernmental organization based in Pune, Maharashtra State.

 

During his fieldwork, he has organized an array of activities with local communities, including plant and recipe contests for school children and rural women respectively.  He also organized a workshop with traditional local healers, children who excelled in biodiversity contests, forest department functionaries, and schoolteachers to discuss the conservation agenda and ways to strengthen the threatened localknowledge systems through both formal and informal education.

 

“This is very pertinent to Canada,” he says. “Some of the issues we are pursuing are similar to those faced by Canadian communities and more particularly among Aboriginal groups.”

 

Mr. Shukla spent six months in India in late 2003 and early 2004 and will return there for a second study session in a remote village later in 2004.

 

Along with other students and facultymembers at the University of Manitoba’s Natural Resources Institute, he is also carrying out a case study of the Medicinal Plant Conservation Centre in Pune, which was among the finalists for the Equator Initiative Prize in 2002. The Initiative isdesigned to reduce poverty through the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in the equatorial belt by fostering, supporting, and strengthening community partnerships.

 

Now a Canadian landed immigrant,  Shukla lives in Winnipegwith his wife and six-year-old daughter.  He hopes to divide his time between Canada and India when he graduates.  Despite the demands of research and travel, he has become involved in the Winnipeg community: he walked in a 12 km charity marathon in 2002, and, as an enthusiastic Indian drummer, takes part in meetings of the Indian community there.

 

Document(s) 11 of 22