Welcome To
Centre For People’s Collective
a not-for-profit that acts as a knowledge partner of community collectives
The Centre for People’s Collective (CPC)
a not-for-profit that acts as a knowledge partner of community collectives
Ashwini Kulkarni is presently working with Pragati Abhiyan, a Civil Society Organisation based in Nashik, Maharashtra (www.pragatiabhiyan.org), which she has founded with like minded friends. She has extensively worked on MGNREGA, working with the Community, working with Government at all levels from local administration to the ministry in Delhi and has also worked with renowned researchers to understand the program in the context of rural development. Working on rural livelihoods for a long time naturally led to exploring the issues of small and marginal farmers, especially the rainfed. Public policies and public investments are the main drivers of development, hence studying policies of the Government has been an important part of Pragati Abhiyans work. In addition to working with various stakeholders, she has been involved in occasionally writing for the media to supplement the discourse on various issues. She is closely associated with the RRAN and NREGA consortium and is on the Board of Bharat Rural Livelihoods Foundation.
Milind Watve is an independent researcher and a former professor at IISER, Pune. His interests include applying principles of evolution to human behaviour and physiology; behaviourally optimized system design; philosophy and methods of science; behavioural ecology and conservation. Current active lines of research are evolutionary insights in diabetes, cancer and aging; human wildlife conflict; system design in the fields of academia, farmer policy, wildlife management and community forest rights; causal inference in intercorrelated variables.
Is a widely-travelled journalist, writer, researcher and educator with 27 years of experience in full-time and independent capacities with two decades of work in rural journalism; a Core Team member of the People’s Archive of Rural India, he has research interests in agrarian society with a focus on collective social enterprise, food systems, water, institutional governance, climate change, commons, and caste and gender issues. Recipient of many coveted awards and fellowships, he is an author of ‘A village awaits doomsday’ (Penguin India, 2013) and ‘Ramrao – the story of India’s farm crisis’ (Harper Collins, 2021); his journalism appears in Indian and foreign publications; he is a Visiting Faculty at the IFMR-Krea University, Sri City, AP. The CPC was born out of his and other friends’ long-thought idea; he helps the CPC’s teams with designs and social theory to augment the grassroots works. His other interests are cricket, films, traveling and wine-making.
Is an entrepreneur and businessman with diverse interests, including education and infrastructure; is based out of Nagpur and heads the Gudadhe Group of Companies; as a director of the CPC, he heads finance, administration and provides inputs on entrepreneurship building to the community enterprises.
Has an MBA in IT Management and a bachelor’s in computer applications; handles all the IT and ITES related work for the CPC, building e-learning solutions for the CPC and community collectives; and works on the CPC’s projects to provide IT solutions; he has been a former consultant to the Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited (MKCL) in their ongoing ‘Green Collar Jobs’ project. Ajinkya has keen interests in the social landscape of Vidarbha, particularly the ever-migrating pastoralists, human migration, and photography. He enjoys spending time in the field with different livestock rearing communities as much as he enjoys playing cricket.
Is a budding biodiversity scientist, a scholar of the pastoralism in India, and researcher; he anchors the CPC’s vertical of agro-pastoralist communities and their social enterprises, in addition to building networks with many like-minded individual and institutional partners; is the convener of the Maharashtra chapter of the Revitalising Rainfed Agriculture Network (Maha-RRAN) where he networks with the individuals and institutions working on the structural problem of rainfed family farms and allied sector livelihoods, while conceptualizing and steering the agro-pastoralists’ institutional models and governance. Sajal has several research papers to his credit; he was instrumental in characterization of the lesser-known breeds of cattle in Vidarbha region reared by pastoralist communities & their conservation . As the CEO of the CPC, he heads the projects that are at the intersection of forests, pastoralists and agriculture, and leads grassroots research from the framework of social action theory and biodiversity. He is a product of Nirman, a youth innovation programme run by the SEARCH, Gadchiroli, and has interest in poetry.