Padmashri Dr Darshan Shankar is the Chairman of the Indian Institute of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine, Managing Trustee of Foundation for Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions (FRLHT) & Founder Vice Chancellor of the Trans-Disciplinary University (TDU) in Bengaluru.

Born into a family of modern scientists, Dr. Shankar has always stood for innovation in education from a very young age. While working on problems of development and healthcare, his outlook throughout his career has been one for combining eastern traditional knowledge systems with western science.

He began his career in 1973 at the age of 23, at the University of Bombay, where he designed and implemented a postgraduate program based on ‘experiential learning’ that won the Commonwealth Award in 1976.
He went on to work on issues of tribal development in forested tribal talukas of Maharashtra for the next twelve years and from 1985 to 1990, Dr. Shankar directed an all India Network of NGOs called Lok Swasthya Parampara Samvardhan Samiti (LSPSS) which is a network of individuals, groups and organizations working to revive indigenous systems of primary healthcare in India.

In 1993 he moved to Bengaluru, and co-founded the FRLHT, TDU and a 100-bed healthcare research centre called the Institute of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine.

For his contributions he’s won several national and international awards, such as the Normal Borlaug Award in 1998 for efforts in conservation of wild populations of medicinal plants, Columbia University’s Award in 2003 for revitalisation of traditional health-care systems in India, and was also conferred with the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2011.

Today Dr. Shankar is an educator, researcher and inspiration for young people. A pioneer in reimagining formal education systems, he has always advocated for building more multicultural institutional frameworks that can foster creativity and individuality for the people that enter it.

In this episode, he is in conversation with A.V. Balasubramanian, a biologist and molecular biophysicist who founded the Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems in Chennai, which works on sustainable agriculture. Having shared interests of science and traditional knowledge systems, Balu and Dr. Shankar’s association began in 1986, at a tribal village near Karjat.

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