Where It All Started

WHERE IT ALL STARTED

The story started nearly twenty years ago when Prof. Anil Gupta went to Bangladesh to work with the farmers there. During his stay, he found inspiration for the Network from the realization that the benefit sharing between the rural community and those with material resources is unjustifiably skewed against the rural people. The farmers and other rural residents have immense knowledge but lack the resources to leverage this knowledge. In fact many-a-times, the knowledge of traditional knowledge holders is extracted and documented without any recognition to the original innovator. Moreover, public-private entities go on to make value-added products based on this new knowledge and gain significant benefits from it. Through all this, the knowledge holder is kept out of the benefit-sharing equation and gets nothing in return for having shared his ingenuity. The formal sector keeps benefitting while the informal sector's growth is hampered.

This kind of knowledge-asymmetry and the fact that the original knowledge holder was pushed into oblivion deeply troubled Prof. Gupta. He felt that as an academic, he was learning a lot from the Bangladeshi farmers since they were so open about their knowledge and creative innovations. Yet, he wasn't giving anything practical back to this community which had been so generous. Prof. Gupta realized that there was a lot more that he could do with the farmers back home in India. He realized that rural people all over the world are subject to these inequities, more so in developing regions, so he decided to try and bridge this asymmetry by starting with this home country India.

So, some sixteen years ago, the Honey Bee Network was born to overcome this ethical and professional crisis. The name itself indicates the basic tenet on which the organization was established and has continued working ever since. A honey bee collects pollen from the flowers without harming them in any way, and also connects flower to flower through pollination. Prof. Gupta's innovative approach to knowledge extraction documents the innovations of the rural millions by getting them patents in their name. In the words of Prof. Gupta himself, " Honey Bee Network connects people to people in a way that cross-pollinates. We should cross-pollinate, we should communicate ideas from one people to another".

Dr. Anil Gupta did his masters in Biochemical Genetics in 1974 from Haryana Agricultural University, Haryana. Thereafter, he completed his Ph.D. degree in management from Kurukshetra University in 1986. He is currently a professor at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad in India. He was awarded Padma Shree by the president of India in 2004. His unique work analyzing indigenous knowledge of farmers and pastoralists and building bridges to science based knowledge has led to the honour of being elected at a young age to India's National Academy of Agricultural Sciences and recognition through Pew Conservation Scholar Award. He is the author of many working papers and articles, and also the editor of the Honey Bee Newsletter