About Us
Our Objective
The Bengaluru Sustainability Forum, BSF in short, is an inter-institutional collaborative initiative that aims to address issues relating to long-term sustainability of urban and peri-urban landscapes. Bengaluru Sustainability Forum focuses on public goods and urban commons – including water, air and soil – amongst others.
The main objective of the Bengaluru Sustainability Forum is to convene and disseminate knowledge on various aspects of sustainability in the urban landscape, with a focus on Bengaluru. The Forum aims to achieve this by encouraging conversation and collaboration across a broad range of stakeholders.
One of the approaches the Forum takes in facilitating exchange of knowledge is to host invitation based retreats on specific aspects of urban sustainability. These retreats are a platform to listen and learn about various perspectives and approaches from people of different educational and professional backgrounds on a defined topic in an informal setting. To know more about the retreats, please click here.
While BSF is not a ‘funding agency’, we offer a small grants program which provides seed support for local, innovative projects which can bridge the gap between research and on-ground action. To know more about the Small Grants program, please click here.
In recent years, BSF is also taking conversations on sustainability to the larger public through various mediums like a film festival, podcast, exhibitions, workshops etc. You can read more about these here.
Steering Committee Members

Jahnavi Phalkey
A filmmaker and historian of science and technology by training, Jahnavi Phalkey is the Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru. Jahnavi has authored Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India and is director of the documentary film Cyclotron.

Jagdish Krishnaswamy

Mahesh Sankaran
Mahesh Sankaran is an ecologist whose research interests lie in understanding the impacts of global climatic changes on the structure, functioning and stability of ecosystems.

L.S Shashidhara
Prof Shashidhara specializes in Genetics, Molecular Biology and Evolutionary biology.
Prof. Shashidhara is currently the Director of NCBS. He is one of the founding academic members of IISER Pune and Ashoka University, contributing to their growth. In addition, Prof Shashidhara has contributed to establish the Indian Cancer Genome Atlas, a national consortium to promote collaborative cancer research (https://www.icga.in/) and the Pune Knowledge Cluster, a consortium to promote multi-disciplinary collaborative work to address problems of health, water, environment and sustainable mobility (https://www.pkc.org.in/).
He has also been very involved in the promotion of science and science education, and has had many experiments in this area, including working with the Ministry of Education on training of high school and undergraduate teachers in adopting inquiry-based teaching methods. Beyond conventional education and research, he has organized several career workshops for scientists in science journalism, science policy, climate education, administration, and management. He is an active and founder member of IndiaBioscience dedicated to strengthening the Life Science research community in India. He is also steering an international project on Climate Change Education and has initiated various global programs on sustainability, biodiversity and zoonotic diseases in his capacity as President of the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS).
Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Prof Shashidhara has been working very actively at various fronts to help mitigate the impact of the pandemic in Pune city and across India, which include epidemiological data collection and analysis; serosurvey; indigenization of reagents for RT-PCR kits; genome surveillance, longitudinal studies on immune response to vaccination etc.

P. S. Narayan
P.S.Narayan is the Head of Sustainability at Wipro Ltd and the Managing Trustee and Head of Wipro Foundation, the CSR arm of Wipro Ltd.

Satyajit Mayor
Prof. Satyajit Mayor is an Indian biologist.

Tejal Kanitkar
Tejal is an Associate Professor in the School of Natural Sciences and Engineering at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru.

Uma Ramakrishnan
Uma Ramakrishnan is a professor at NCBS interested in molecular ecology and conservation genetics.

S Vishwanath
Vishwanath is a Civil Engineer and an Urban Planner. He is a Trustee with the Biome Environmental Trust (www.biometrust.org).
Wipro Anchors

Lingaraj Dinni
Lingaraj Dinni has been anchoring various sustainability programs for Wipro over the last 13 years.
involved with a neighborhood focussed sustainability and livability accelerator called LVBL.

Nakul Heble
Nakul Heble is an urban water professional.
BSF Coordinators

Manasi Pingle
Manasi Pingle is a filmmaker by training.

Vinita Suryanarayanan
Vinita is a development professional by training.