Way back in May 2007, C.S. Sharada Prasad ("CSP") joined Arghyam and India Water Portal and wrote this blog post entitled "A New course" at that time:
June 30th was Sharada Prasad's last day at Arghyam. He is moving on to do a Ph.D. with the Energy and Resources Group at the elite University of California, Berkeley. It is a testament to CSP's capability, motivation and drive that he secured this admission (he has no acrademic background in energy or resources, being a software engineer by training), and also secured a full teaching assistantship. Sharada Prasad was the primary technical person on the Water Portal team (a fact that he bemoaned frequently as he had joined Arghyam to get away from technology and do social sector kind of work!). He has an impressive list of achievements at the Water Portal and Arghyam:
- Migrating the email infrastructure at Arghyam onto Google Apps ; a decision that has helped enormously as Arghyam grew significantly in size over the last three years ; we never at any point experienced any growing pains in our email and painlessly added Calendar, Document & Mailing List functionality to our IT infrastructure due to this wise decision.
- Creating the first version of the Kannada Water Portal, kannada.indiawaterportal.org
- Managing the creation of the Sanitation Portal GIS application, by prising the relevant data out of fairly reluctant government hands and then working through the difficulties in cleaning up the data and putting it up as a GIS application
- Masterminding a hugely complex migration of the entire India Water Portal to a CMS (Content Management System) called Drupal, last year. This has significantly future-proofed us and made the Portal more sustainable.
- Many more smaller achievements
Somewhere in the middle of all this, he squeezed in a 3-month, 19,000 kilometer motorcycle trip across the country to fulfill his personal dream, while also visiting most of the Arghyam projects in the process. The journey, he says, was a transforming one for him and sensitized him deeply to environmental degradation and human struggles.
After 2 unsuccesful attempts at applying for higher education in the US, he was third time lucky this year. So with our best wishes he heads off to the US later this month to embark on his next journey.
Vijay Krishna
Director, India Water Portal
Arghyam, www.arghyam.org
"Safe, sustainable water for all"
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