Date and time: 5th May 2008 at 5 p.m.
Venue: MCCIA Moolgaonkar auditorium (
On the
Sequence of activities
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Dr. Nandini Nimbkar (NN) requests Madhura Rajvanshi to give flowers to the guests |
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NN requests Anil Rajvanshi (AKR) to introduce the guests |
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Introduction of guests by AKR. |
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NN starts the proceedings and tells about NARI |
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NN requests Shri Baba Kalyani the chief guest and others on the dias to release the book |
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NN then requests the author Anil Rajvanshi (AKR) to talk |
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AKR – author’s musings |
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NN requests Shri Rakesh Sharma to give his remarks |
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Shri Rakesh Sharma’s speech |
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NN requests Shri. Madhur Bajaj, the chairman of the ceremony to give his address. |
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Shri. Madhur Bajaj addresses the gathering |
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NN requests the Chief guest Shri Baba Kalyani to address the gathering |
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Shri Baba Kalyani’s address |
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AKR gives the vote of thanks and invites everybody to have tea |
Introduction of Guests
by Anil K Rajvanshi
It is a great honor for me personally to have three very well known and prominent personalities of Pune in this ceremony. They need no introduction still the formality demands it.
Our chief guest Shri. Baba
Kalyani is one of the most distinguished industrialists of
Mr. Kalyani is a graduate in
Mechanical Engineering from BITS Pilani and received his M.S. from the prestigious MIT in
Mr. Kalyani serves on the Boards
of many prestigious companies and represents industry on several industry,
Trade and Educational institutions in
The Chairman of the ceremony Shri. Madhur Bajaj is a very dear friend of mine. We first met in November 2001 when he as a trustee of Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation chose me for the Bajaj Award. Since then our friendship has grown and he has been a great well-wisher of our Institute and a source of inspiration to us.
Madhur graduated from the prestigious
Besides his industrial work he is very much involved in social development work via his Bajaj Foundation and also through various industry organizations like CII with which he is associated very closely. Thus he is the past president of CII western region and presently its national council member. He travels extensively and though extremely busy he was gracious enough to take time out to attend this function. It is indeed a pleasure to welcome you here Madhur Bhai.
Dr. Nandini Nimbkar’s
welcome speech
Good evening ladies and gentlemen!
I am Nandini Nimbkar – wife of Anil Kumar
Rajvanshi. I am pleased to welcome all
of you today in this function to release Anil’s book entitled “1970’s
I thought as its president it will not be out of place for me to talk about the Nimbkar Agricultural Research Institute—NARI for short -- on this occasion, as our lives have revolved around NARI for last more than 25 years.
Anil
and I were married in 1976 in
NARI
was officially founded in 1968 by my father Shri. B. V. Nimbkar, who remained
its president till 1990. Unofficially
NARI had started functioning a few years earlier as the research division of
the seed company Nimbkar Seeds.
Therefore, till 1981 NARI carried out research and development in the
field of agriculture. In 1981 when Anil
and I returned to
The
basic philosophy of the institute is to solve the age-old problems of rural
For example, in the decade of the 80s, complete technology for producing ethanol from sweet sorghum was developed at NARI. Sweet sorghum is a sweet-stalked jowar which yields sweet juice like sugarcane. Anticipating the global food shortage crisis which we are facing today, NARI advocated the use of sweet sorghum for biofuel production as this crop is capable of producing food, fuel, feed and fertilizer from the same piece of land. How visionary this thinking was has become very clear in last few months when the food vs. fuel debate has become very strident.
We have also developed a package of practices for
growing sweet sorghum and the complete technology for producing jaggery and
syrup from it. In fact sweet sorghum was
introduced into
NARI in the past has been instrumental in developing high yielding hybrids and varieties of many crops like cotton, sunflower, grain sorghum and maize. However, for last 20 years our focus has been on safflower or kardi and sweet sorghum. NARI is a center for irrigated safflower research and is included in the All India Coordinated Research Project on Oilseeds under the aegis of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). Several hybrids and varieties of safflower including the first non-spiny hybrid have been developed at NARI and are being grown on thousands of hectares all over the country. In addition to the oil-yielding seed another important product from safflower is its flowers. We are promoting their use as a food coloring and more importantly as an herbal health tea for reducing hypertension and to remedy many other ailments.
NARI has
developed the technology for gasification of loose leafy biomass fuels like
sugarcane leaves and bagasse. A 500 kW (thermal) gasifier is now ready for
commercialization. NARI also pioneered
the concept of energy self-sufficient talukas which became the basis for the
national policy and program implemented by the ministry of new and renewable
energy. NARI was also the first to
develop electric and improved cycle rickshaws as well as low cost motor-assisted
and motorized tricycles for handicapped and aged persons. More than two dozen of the improved and
motor-assisted pedal rickshaws are in use around the world and some of you may
have seen them in action at the
Recently,
NARI has been selected as the joint winner of the prestigious ‘CSIR Award for
S&T Innovations for Rural Development-2007”. This award was given for the work in animal
husbandry division of NARI for introduction of a gene for twinning from Garole
sheep of
Now this year we are looking forward to the start of the project to build a center for promoting sustainable living --- a dream that has been cherished by Anil for last few years. We have received many generous donations in recent times and expect a few more this year to fulfill this dream. All the proceeds from the sale of this book to be released today will go towards achieving this purpose and so I urge everyone to buy at least one copy each and contribute to furthering this noble goal.
Now I would request Shri Baba Kalyani –the chief guest and Shri Madhur Bajaj –the chairman of the function along with Shri Rakesh Sharma to release the book
May I now request Anil to give his author’s perspective.
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Author’s musings
Good evening ladies and gentlemen,
I am delighted with the audience numbers and am
extremely honored and humbled by the elite gathering. I would like to thank Shri. Baba Kalyani,
Shri. Madhur Bajaj and Shri. Rakesh Sharma for taking time off from their busy
schedules and come here for releasing my book.
Generally the author’s musings consist of what is in
the book besides what made him write it.
I will follow this tradition. However I will also take this opportunity
to share with you few of the lessons that I have learnt while living in rural
This book is about my journey in 1970s from IIT
Kanpur to
In
the last couple of years I have been invited increasingly by engineering and
other colleges like IITs, Indian Institute of Mines, Dhanbad, Rural Management
Institutes among others to give talks to students about rural development and
on path less taken. Invariably after my lecture I am always asked what made me
come back from
Besides as one grows older there is an urge to pen
one’s memoirs both as a part of reliving those happy memories and partly as a
historical record. That was another
motive to write the book.
After I wrote the first version of the book I was
not sure whether anybody will be interested in reading it and so I put it on
the web. The response was excellent and
I received quite a large amount of mail from NRIs. Quite a few of them wanted
another book on my experiences of Phaltan.
I have briefly alluded to some of them in the epilogue. Nevertheless a
fuller account of my work at Phaltan will hopefully come one day in another
book.
However this forum gives me an excellent opportunity
to share with you some of the lessons I have learnt during my stay in Phaltan.
“
I think the best way to help the rural population is
a strong partnership between the corporate world and civil society. Corporate world has the resources, managerial
skills and outreach and together with civil society can really help in rural
development. The Government of India can play an enabling role by providing
lots of incentives and taking proper policy decisions to forge this partnership.
I do see some changes in the thinking of the government on this issue and hence
with this change in mindset the private-public partnership can be very
beneficial for the country. Also it makes good business sense not only for
making profits but also of creating goodwill.
I therefore think it is in the interest of corporate world to take very
active part in
One of the best ways that corporate
Another lesson that I have learnt during my stay in
rural
Thus from my experience I feel that high technology
together with spirituality to curb the greed for resources, can be a new mantra
of sustainable development for India and hopefully for the world. In order to propagate this concept on a wider
scale we are proposing to set up a
I will end my musings by reading to you the last few
paragraphs from my book:
“I have
always believed that the purpose of human beings is to first become happy and
self-contented and then give something back to the society. Coming back to
rural
“Thus to a
lot of people I may have been a failure when after so much promise in US I left
everything to come back to rural India, but I use the measure of my contentment
and find that I have not done that badly !
I still
have regrets that probably in my lifetime I will not be able to see India as a
land of prosperity and contentment, where most of our citizens do not have to
follow the rat race of US or China where the greed for materials and resources
knows no bounds, but are able to live a life which is meaningful, happy and
contented and thus sustainable and holistic.
It is the
Thank you very much. May 5, 2008
Excerpts
from Shri Rakesh Sharma’s speech
Shri. Rakesh Sharma spoke very movingly about
Anil’s school days in
Shri. Rakesh
Sharma then read excerpts from Anil’s book showing how the thirst for knowledge
was the theme throughout his life. “The
same thirst to use the knowledge for betterment of rural
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Excerpts
from Shri Madhur Bajaj’s speech
“Dr. Anil Rajvanshi, Baba Kalyani, Mr. Rakesh Sharma, Nandini, Madhura - my namesake with an A. I never got an A, friends and well wishers. As they say you can never judge a book by its cover by but you can by its author and thus I would like to spend some time talking about the man whom I have known for last 5-6 years. As Mr. Sharma said Anil could had a very lucrative career in U.S. but left everything to come to rural India and it is this man that I am going to talk about.
As Anil
mentioned I met him at the Jamnalal Bajaj Award function in 2001 when he won it
and since then we have remained in touch with each other and have had many
occasions to work together. But the most
profound experience was when I visited him in Phaltan about three years back
with my students from the Amity,
Both Nandini and Anil were extremely gracious host and we spend half a day there. They showed us around and why the Amity students chose Phaltan because he has done magic there. Some of our awardees have developed one or two inventions. He has developed 8-9 inventions. After the visit he invited the students to join him, after their MBA, for a year or two in Phaltan. However they did not but I do hope that engineers and technologists will join him for some time.
But it shows what it is – we keep
on talking about majority of our people living in rural
“There are few
Anil Rajvanshi’s in
I was in
In conclusion I
will tell you a story. As Anil said I
did my MBA in
Gandhiji talked about freedom. He gave us freedom from British. However post independence we need freedom from want, from poverty etc. Anil Rajvanshi is trying to do just that and is an epitome of new freedom fighters. May his story inspire generations to come.
Thank you.
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Chief
Guest Shri Baba Kalyani’s speech
Shri. Madhur Bajaj, Shri. Rakesh Sharma, Dr. Nandini Nimbkar, Dr. Anil K. Rajvanshi members of the press and ladies and gentlemen.
First of all I would like to confess that while Madhur or Shri. Rakesh Sharma have known Dr. Rajvanshi for a long time, I have only known him for the last few weeks. Hence I am therefore not familiar with his background as other members on the dais are.
However I did have a very interesting meeting with him last week when he and Dr. Nandini Nimbkar came to see me. We had a very pleasant chat and spent about 45 minutes to an hour discussing various things. At that time I was kind of initiated about the work being done at NARI. And I was really impressed by the simplicity of the whole process, of his doing fairly sophisticated technological work in rural atmosphere of Phaltan.
And I think you see that whole
brand of idealism coming through this book as he narrates his story about
There were so many similarities
between my experience and Anil’s. For example the things he talks about like
India Association at UF, I was the President of Indian Association in MIT; he
talks about his friend buying a car at $ 100; I bought my first car at $ 100
and the amount of hard work you had to do to earn little money so you could buy
few things. Those were the days that the
students from
1970s was also
the time of the height of our socialism in
It was at that
time that people like Anil, me and Madhur went abroad to study and as Anil said
some of us went to a country like US which was an idealistic place and after
then to come back to India with a mission of doing work in renewable energy, to
bring excellent science and technology to rural India was extremely
commendable. Even to have a mission at that time to do something for
I really admire your courage, Anil, your determination, your ambition, and most of all your unwavering resolve to stay on the path even when your reason for coming to India were different than what you have discovered in your journey. You found out a much more meaningful path which is much more valuable and meaningful to you, Nandini and to all of us.
I have not visited NARI, Phaltan but after listening to Anil and Nandini and reading the book I have resolved to go and visit them in next month or so.
One of the areas they are doing tremendous work, and they are working in many areas, I think and which is being extremely relevant today is the whole concept of energy and renewable energy. In the 70s, 80s and 90s everybody talked about increasing per capita consumption either of energy, steel or any other product. Madhur talked a little bit about CII national council meet. In last 20 years I have not heard anything at CII council meet except how to increase the consumption. Now all of us and everybody in the world is talking about reducing consumption. I think this is the concept which will become extremely relevant in coming decades with the oil prices presently at $ 125/barel and I read some reports today that it will go to $ 200/barel very soon. Forget the price, the amount of conventional energy in the world is not enough for everybody’s needs. Now therefore there is a need to get into reverse business model of finding ways and means, using technology, using brainpower to find solutions of consuming less energy and still to have a decent quality of life within the present resources. This is great lesson I see from this book and something that interests me personally and thus Anil you will have a one more visitor coming to see you soon.
I think these
are the kind of stories that not only inspires me and my generation but would
also inspire the future generations. I
think, and I am sure in my mind, that our generation of entrepreneurs,
scientists, and engineers have created a platform for future generations to transform
Thank you.
© NARI, May 2008