SRISTI is a developmental voluntary organization aiming to strengthen the creativity of/at/for grassroots communities ,including individual innovators. It supports eco-friendly solutions to local problems being scouted, spawned and spread by the Honey Bee Network for over 26 years. It also nurtures ecopreneurs engaged in conserving biodiversity, common property resources, cultural diversity and educational innovators. There are five pillars of Honey Bee Network which SRISTI is committed to backstop: Educational innovations by school and college teachers, students and other stakeholders; institutional innovations at community and other levels in managing resources, improving access of knowledge rich-economically poor people to trigger self reliant development process; cultural creativity so that curiosity, collaboration, and compassion growth through art, literature and crafts, technological innovations and traditional knowledge dealing with human, animal, plant and ecosystem health, and policy reforms to generate frugal innovations for sustainable development at all levels, with specific reference to youth, children, women and elderly.
You may read about various activities and social movement pursued to empower the creative and compassionate people, get involved in the movement, download Honey Bee newsletter, research papers and be a Bee, volunteer, contribute, and own up the only sky we have to share.
WHO ARE WE?
SRISTI (Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions), which means creation in Sanskrit, was born in 1993, to support the activities of the Honey Bee Network to recognize, respect and reward creativity of/at/for the grassroots.
Visit https://www.sristi.org/ to know more.
OUR VISION
Inclusive growth through a distributed, collaborative, co-operative and compassionate knowledge system.
OUR OBJECTIVES
- Systematic documentation, dissemination of, and value addition in grassroots green innovations.
- Providing them intellectual property rights protection and risk capital support.
- Help in in situ and ex situ conservation of local biodiversity and associated knowledge system.
- Empower the knowledge rich but economically poor people by adding value to their innovations, traditional knowledge and associated biological diversity including microbial diversity.
- Link formal and informal science to enrich both the knowledge systems.
- To provide early stage venture support to grassroots innovators, students and other mavericks to scale up products and services based on grassroots and youthful innovations through commercial or non-commercial channels.
- To embed the insights learnt from grassroots innovations in the formal educational, policy and institutional systems in order to expand the conceptual and cognitive space available to these innovations.
SRISTI has helped to establish GIAN, NIF, MVIF, Techpedia.sristi.org and AASTIIK in support of innovators and their innovations. SRISTI created the Honey Bee database of innovations, and supports the publication of the Network’s newsletter in nine languages. These are: Honeybee (English), Gujarati (Loksarvani), Hindi (Sujh-Bujh, AasPaas Ki), Tamil (Nam VazhiVelanmai), Telugu (PalleSrujana), Malayalam (IniKarshakanSamsarikkatte ), Odia (Aama Akha Pakha), Marathi (Mrudgandh) and Chinese.
Over the years, we have worked on neglected domains like women’s knowledge systems, value addition through Sadbhav-Sristi-Sanshodhan, a natural product laboratory, and innovations in education, culture and institutions.SRISTI organisesShodhYatra (walking Journey of Exploration) twice a year, Traditional food festival, Biodiversity, Idea and recipe Competitions and maintains the database of innovations and traditional knowledge.
SRISTI has been advocating for protecting knowledge right of creative communities and individuals. Weorganised several consultative sessions with the private sector, scientists, activists and development workers for discussing various issues related to the access to bio-diversity and associated knowledge rights. It has also organised worldwide contest for scouting and rewarding innovations at Grassroots with IFAD, Rome.
Techpedia.in, another initiative of SRISTI, aims at putting the problems of micro, small and medium enterprises, informal sector, grassroots innovators and other social sectors on the agenda of the young technology students across the country. The industry and academic institutions can collaborate, co-create and foster distributed innovations and promote both horizontal and vertical learning and sharing through this platform. To promote a culture of innovation among the young minds of the country, SRISTI has established three categories of national awards for innovative student/ faculty projects in engineering, pharmacy, biotechnology, basic sciences and other applied technologies in the form of Gandhian Young Technological Innovation Award (GYTI) since 2012. Recently, BIRAC has joined hands to reward 15 most powerful ideas in biomedical technologies and also support students in 100socially relevant technologies at the idea or prototype stage.
SRISTI Samman is given periodically to outstanding social change agents. SRISTI is trying to build an online sanctuary of social, technological and institutional Innovations through blend of open innovation, collaborative design, crowd-funding, incubation, e-commerce and challenge awards. Volunteers and collaborators are invited.
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