Amrita Bhoomi

Amrita Bhoomi is a peasant agroecology training Centre. It was launched in 2013 by Indian farmers to find solutions to the agrarian and ecological crises in India. The Centre is an established pioneer in the movement for seed sovereignty and food sovereignty, based on agroecological self-reliant farming and rural enterprises. Amrita Bhoomi is also La Via Campesina’s agroecology school in South Asia. A passionate Gandhian, Nanjundaswamy was among the founders, in 1980, of the Karnataka Rajya Ryota Sangha (KRRS), a farmers' group which opposed the corporatisation of agriculture and the entry of multinational corporations into India. At its height, in the mid-1990s, the KRRS had up to 10m members - one in four of the southern Indian state's farmers - and the professor was frequently able to attract a million people to his famous rallies. The slight, bespectacled figure, usually seen wearing green to symbolise solidarity with farmers, advocated "direct democratic action" where passive for