Asha-16 Conference: Home

Asha-16 Conference

May 26-28, 2007

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

The Sixteenth Asha Conference will be hosted by the Central New Jersey, Philadelphia and Princeton chapters of Asha for Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick, NJ, between May 26-28, 2007.

The main speakers at the conference are Dr Vinod Raina and Mr E. S. Ramamurthy.

Profile of Mr. E S Ramamurthy

Mr. Ramamurthy has had a distinguished career for more than 30 years, in the field of renewable energy sources and is considered as an international expert in his field. For more than a decade, he has been on many advisory panels of the Government of India and was invited to function as a Senior Consultant to the Government of India. Since his retirement he has been using his experience and understanding to work for improving the quality of education in the public school system at the primary level. In 2002, he started a program called Sikshana ( www.sikshana.org ) with the goal of evolving a sustainable and replicable model through adoption of modern management concepts and techniques. The program has been making impressive progress since its inception and currently covers 30 schools with more than 8500 kids.

Mr. Ramamurthy will broadly speak on the topic of improving Government schools.

Profile of Dr. Vinod Raina

A theoretical physicist, Dr. Raina resigned his job from Delhi University in 1982 to work full time at grass roots in the areas of education and rural development. He has helped to evolve the People's Science Movement that empowers people to plan and implement their own developmental ideas, so as to reverse the trickle-down paradigm of development. He has worked in developing alternative school curriculum for rural areas. He has also edited a children's magazine and created a developmental news feature service. He is the main editor of a book titled 'The Dispossessed Victims of Development in Asia', published by the Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives (ARENA), Hong Kong, of which he is a board member. He has worked closely with the Bhopal Gas Tragedy victims and with the Narmada Dam movement. He has been a Homi Bhabha Fellow, a senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and is a Honorary Fellow of the Indian Science Writers Association.

Dr. Raina will broadly speak on the topic of the Right to Education.

For a sample of Dr. Raina's writings click here

Donate

We invite your donations for covering the admin expenses of the conference. We are looking at expenses around $2500.

Some Examples of what your donations would do

a) Provide for travel and accommodation expenditures
of our keynote speakers
b) Provide for travel grants for student volunteers
c) Reduce the registration costs of the conference

Your donations would greatly help in increasing participation and ensure success of the conference.

Note that your donations is purely for admin purposes and would not go towards funding of Asha projects. Note also that this is not for conference registration. If you want to register, follow the link on the left hand side column instead.