Milan 2025

Seema Kulkarni is a founding member and Senior Fellow at SOPPECOM, Pune, where she works on gender and rural livelihoods. With over three decades of experience, she has worked extensively on gender and natural resource management, especially around land, water, sanitation, and decentralisation. Seema has published extensively, contributing to books, peer-reviewed journals, and edited volumes that interrogate the intersections of gender, water, sanitation, and rural livelihoods. She is also the co-editor of two books focusing on gender and natural resource management, which are widely used by academics and practitioners alike. 

She is actively involved in grassroots movements, including the Stree Mukti Sangharsh Chalwal and Stree Mukti Andolan Sampark Samiti, and plays a key role in national platforms like the Mahila Kisan Adhikar Manch (MAKAAM) and the Feminist Policy Collective (FPC). Her work brings a strong feminist lens to research, policy, and action in agriculture and natural resource governance. 

Kiran Vissa is a long time social activist who works on issues related to the agrarian crisis and sustainable organic agriculture in India. His work has simultaneously focused on village-level work with local farmers as well as system-level changes that help solve the problems of millions of farmers. His efforts have helped reach assistance to thousands of farmer suicide affected families, focus the attention of the government on the issues of tenant farmers and farmers who are facing the brunt of climate change, and initiate a Farmers' Helpline that addresses farmers' distress and prevents suicides.

After obtaining a B.Tech. at IIT-Madras and Masters at the University of Maryland, Kiran was a key volunteer of AID since its formative years and has worn many hats of leadership and organizational roles. After several years of volunteering, Kiran quit his job in the USA 15 years ago, and returned to India to address the crisis of farmer suicides in his native Andhra Pradesh. Kiran is the founding convener of Rythu Swarajya Vedika, a broad platform of farmers and their well-wishers in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Over the years, Kiran has become a key figure in farmers' movements and helps coordinate national level coalitions such as the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA-Kisan Swaraj).

Ravi Kuchimanchi founded Association for India’s Development (AID) in 1991 while pursuing his PhD in Particle Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, with a vision “problems are interconnected, so must be the solutions”. AID has since grown into a volunteer movement, bringing highly skilled professionals such as the non-resident Indian community, to partner with the poor, and underprivileged so that there is a deeper understanding of causes beyond the mere symptoms of poverty. After his postdoctoral work, Ravi began to focus his attention on human rights and social justice issues in India such as renewable energy, sustainable livelihoods, and struggles of marginalized people. 

Ravi received the International Alumnus Award from University of Maryland in 2012, and in 2011, AID won the Times of India Social Impact Award which Ravi and his colleagues received from the Indian prime minister. He is an alumni of IIT Mumbai, and continues to publish papers in several international physics journals. 

Ravi is an inspiration to many volunteers - pursuing a dream to build an ideal world, collaborating with the grassroots communities to understand the hurdles they face and working relentlessly to bring about change.