Lokavidya Panchayat
Idea
With the advent of new forms of organization of knowledge and communication and with the reorganization of the global economy since the early 1990s, lokavidya, variously translated as people's knowledge or knowledge in society, is getting greater and greater recognition in the public domain. Whereas lokavidya was externed and denigrated as not-proper knowledge at all through out the scientific-industrial age, now it has a forward looking face in many speres like design, art, language, entertainment, health, agriculture, water management, architecture and even the hard industrial sector. This increase in presence of lokavidya across the board has led to a new confidence in the bearers of such knowledge, namely, farmers, artisans, women, adivasis and small traders and shop keepers, however, such confidence and the dynamics that it may engender is heavily overweighed by the exploitation of lokavidya and its bearers in almost all the spheres mentioned above. Large majority of people, inspite of possessing such knowledge whose public utility is being proven by the day, are suffering due to the negative terms of trade, displacement, land grab and shear loot of their knowledge legitimised by patents, intellectual property rights and by the innocuous looking data bases, etc. It is the pressing need of the hour that lokavidya emerges out of the fragmentation, disconnectedness and privatization etc. that it had suffered in the scientific-industrial age when knowledge was epitomized in the ivory towers of the university.
Lokavidya Panchayat is the program to affect this transcendence.
Activities
The activities are envisaged so as to enable the bearers of lokavidya to:
- understand their location in the world of knowledge,
- come together in solidarity with one another and
- contend for an equal place for them and for lokavidya.
The activities are:
- Publication of a periodical/paper in Hindi called Lokavidya Panchayat
- A blog by the name lokavidyapanchayat.blogspot.com
- Events of actual gatherings of farmers, artisans, women, adivasis and small traders and shop-keepers together and separately. (link)