Debashish Sen, director of the People’s Science Institute in Dehradun, India, received his PhD in 2015 from Wageningen University and Research Center in the Netherlands. In addition to his research on the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), he has been instrumental in promoting and successfully up-scaling SRI among farmers in the Himalayan states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Sen has also pioneered work in the country for motivating farmers to apply SRI principles on other crops such as wheat, finger millet, kidney bean, and maize. In addition to SRI-related efforts, he has worked onand authored numerous articles about participatory watershed development, mountain-appropriate technologies, traditional water sources and drought management.

In this seminar, Sen will focus on how farmers in the Indian state of Uttarakhand interpreted and adjusted the System of Rice Intensification to fit with local social and agro-ecological arrangements and how the new method influenced existing rice farming practices in the locality.