Dr. Debal Deb is a post-doctorate from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, US, who is 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 the largest rice seed exchange centre in eastern India, conserving 1420 varieties of rice, distributed freely to farmers of 12 Indian states.