Jai Hind! I am Shyama, the co-founder and director of Friend in need India trust or FIN and I want to share with you our big news. Today, we seek your good wishes and support for a new endeavour that…
Author: Shyama Ramani
UNU-MERIT Blog How a home-grown social innovation sought to contribute to COVID-19 containment A human-networked education campaign as a crisis response By Shyama V. Ramani There is an English saying: “Necessity is the mother of invention”, but this is…
I am extremely sad at the mob violence over running India’s universities in the name of service to country. The miscreants who beat up students in JNU must be condemned and dealt with immediately according to the rules of the…
The 9th #SITE4Society event at United Nations University-MERIT was a #Sanitation awareness educational quiz to commemorate #WorldToiletDay (November 19th). Participants were quizzed about the interlinkages between health and sanitation. Then, they were challenged to identify the technological, behavioural, organizational and…
FIN Asks: Would the Mahatma Approve? Today is Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday, the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi had targeted for India to become an open defecation free country. Millions of toilets have been built in India and its citizenry has…
Simple as ABC, Art for Behavioural Change!
UNU-MERIT Blog Governments worldwide have pledged to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. But given the scale of the task, not even national governments can manage alone. This has sparked a new phenomenon: whereby non-governmental players – from…
From cyclones in India to protests in France: Why systemic shocks need ‘solution design’ Published as UNU-MERIT Blog and republished in several newspapers Wonder how a social movement in France and a cyclone in India could ever have parallels?…
I was at this conference, and I caught sight of Prof. Carl Pray, internationally renowned for his work on agriculture in developing countries including India. Though I do not share his enthusiasm for genetically modified plant varieties or newer biotech…
UNU-MERIT Blog in 2015 For universal sanitation coverage, the formulation of the sustainable development goals (SDG) represents a very positive step forward. It is a far cry from that of the ‘Millennium Development Goals, where the issue of sanitation coverage…