visited Jakarta and Bandung for last 3 days 19-21 Dec, 2026 at the invitation of Ministry of Education, Science, technology and Innovation to share the lessons of the Indian GRI ecosystem. The Honey Bee Network’s four-decade-long journey has many lessons that can be helpful to other countries.

prof Yudi Darma, head of science, tech amd innovation wing of the ministry took a great pains to explain their programs, particularly suryakanta 2.0 and living Lab and rural visit by the students

I shared the learning from shodhyatra and also teaching various courses at IIMA and AcSIR to stress upon the need to expose UG, PG and PhD students to the creative potential of local communities

some of the key ideas:

a) encourage students to map local knowledge of elders getiing eroded very fast, faster than ever in the history of human kind , record unmet and some times unfelt needs,

b) leverage abundant and abandoned bioresources for local enterprise

c) discourage or ban publications by academics of papers on local knowledge, without prior informed consent, acknowledging knowledge providers in the body of the paper or as co-author, protecting their IPRs and ensuring that benefits are shared with them if any commercial returns accrue to authors ir users of the disclosed knowledge

d) put the names of the knowledge providers, inventors and innovators on the labels of the package of the products

e) share databases of local knowledge ( except unique claims, these after filing patents ) as done at gian.org/databases

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more soon