Dr. Anil Prakash Joshi has devoted himself to resource-based rural development for the last 29 years. As a teacher, he guided 19 Ph.D. students and motivated many more to work in the hill villages to use science and technology to solve the basic needs of the mountain community. An Ashoka Fellow, he has authored over 80 research papers and 10 books dealing with sustainable development of the Himalayas through various means. He has also been publishing other important scientific magazines to popularize science in the villages. The major publications are TIME (Technology Intervention for Mountain Ecosystem) and Rural Tech, which have a distribution of 5000 villages and institutes.
He quit his comfortable job as a Reader in the Government P.G. College, and plunged himself whole-heartedly into research and development work for the village people of the Himalayas. He formed a voluntary organization entitled Himalayan Environmental Studies and Conversation Organization (HESCO), and concentrated on need-based science and technology developments, and their application for the mountain regions. He began this work on a small scale by taking up initiatives that had immediate application possibilities in the rural areas through the support of agencies such as the Department of Science and Technology, and the Department of Bio-technology.
