A post-doctorate from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore and a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, US, you are a pioneering ecologist with a very unique mission. He founded Basudha a small farm near a forest close to Muniguda, Odisha. In 1997, he established Vrihi, the largest non-governmental seed bank in India. Vrihi has become thelargest rice seed exchange center in eastern India conserving 1420 varieties of rice and distributed freely to farmers of 12 states of India.