Professor Anil K. Gupta

Professional Experience: Helped establish NIF (National Innovation Foundation, India) (February 2000) with an initial corpus of Rs.20 crores (USD five million) with a view to help India become an innovative and creative society and a global leader in sustainable technologies by scouting and sustaining grassroots innovations. Union Finance Minister of India announced this fund in his Budget speech for 1999 in response to our work to develop a national register of innovations, help link informal and formal science, convert innovations into products through linkage with investment and enterprise, help set up incubators etc. NIF is chaired by Dr.R.A.Mashelkar, CSIR Bhatnagar Fellow; former Secretary, DSIR & former Director General CSIR, and fourteen members on its Governing Council from diversified fields, including Director General, ICAR and Secretary, DARE, Director, IIMA, Secretaries, Finance, Science and Technology, Chief Secretary, Govt. of Gujarat, leading private sector industrialist Shri R Gopalakrishnan, Executive Director, Tata Sons; Prof Ashok Jhunjhunwala, eminent Gandhian NGO leader Ms Ela Ben, Prof. Kuldeep Mathur, etc.

Helped set up the National Micro Venture Innovation Fund, the first of its kind in the world at NIF with the support of SIDBI on October 1, 2003 through collaboration between SIDBI and NIF announced by Finance Minister in Union Budget 2002

National Project Director for a GEF (Global Environment Facility) and UNDP supported PDF B project on Conservation of Biodiversity in Dry Lands; Set up GIAN (Grassroots Innovation Augmentation Network) Society and Trust (1997) to scale up grassroots innovations and convert these into viable products or services with appropriate benefit sharing arrangements,

Facilitated collaborative agreement of NIF with CSIR, ICMR, and several other research institutions;

Worked on a three year Pew Award of US $150,000 (1993 1996) for Biodiversity Conservation and Environment granted by Pew Scholars program at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor to ten outstanding scholars around the world. This award had been used to strengthen Honey Bee network- a global network of activists, scholars, policy makers and farmers around the issue of indigenous technological and institutional innovations for sustainable natural resource management