PV Satheesh left an indelible mark on agriculture bio-diversity

Fondly called as the millet man of Telangana, Satheesh had founded Director of Deccan Development Society to champion the causes of agriculture biodiversity, food sovereignty, women's empowerment, social justice

Sangareddy: As the news of the passing away of the founder and Executive Director of Deccan Development Society (DDS) PV Satheesh (77) has reached Zaheerabad on Sunday morning, a pal of gloom descended in the villages of the Zaheerabad area where Satheesh had left an indelible mark on the lives of women farmers during four decades-long association with them.

Hundreds of people from different villages had started coming to Pastapur to pay their last respects to him. Satheesh, who was suffering from a prolonged illness, died at a private hospital in Hyderabad on Sunday morning at 5 am. Fondly called as the millet man of Telangana, Satheesh had founded DDS to champion the causes of agriculture biodiversity, food sovereignty, women’s empowerment, social justice, local knowledge systems, participatory development and community media.

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In the early 1980s, Satheesh, along with a few friends, initiated the DDS in the semi-arid Zaheerabad region by collectivising poor dalit women in the villages for a range of programmes that together challenged hunger, malnutrition, land degradation, loss of biodiversity, gender injustice, and social deprivation. He led the organisation for nearly four decades to make DDS an internationally acclaimed NGO and an inspiring example that has motivated similar experiments in millet revival and promotion across the country.

Born on June 18, 1945, in Mysore in Karnataka, Periyapatna Venkatasubbaiah Satheesh was a graduate of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication in New Delhi and started out as a journalist. He went on to work as a pioneering television producer for nearly two decades for Doordarshan, making programmes related to rural development and rural literacy in the then-united Andhra Pradesh. He played an important role in the historical Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) in the 1970s.

As the director of DDS, PV Satheesh’s long-standing efforts resulted in improving the livelihoods of thousands of poor women across 75 villages in the Zaheerabad area. He also led several national and international networks like Millet Network of India (MINI), South Against Genetic Engineering (SAGE), AP Coalition in Defence of Diversity and was also the India Coordinator for the South Asian Network for Food, Ecology and Culture (SANFEC0, a five-country South Asian network with over 200 ecological groups. He was formerly a Board Member, of Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN), Barcelona, Spain and was also a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), Brussels, Belgium. He is also credited with the initiation of India’s first Community Media Trust, a grassroots media centre where non-literate Dalit women were trained in film-making to democratise media spaces, and also with the launching of India’s first rural, civil society-led community radio station, Sangham Radio.

The women’s sanghams of DDS and their steadfast adherence to millet cultivation and organic agriculture led the way nationally in offering demonstrable alternatives to the dominant agricultural paradigm. The recent efforts to incorporate millets into the public distribution system owe much to the work of DDS under his guidance. Satheesh will be laid to rest at Pasthapur, the headquarters of DDS, near Zaheerabad on Monday at 10.30 am. Thousands of people particularly women were expected to participate in the funeral.