Satheesh, as DDS Board member Vinod Pavarala put it, was one of India's icons of civil society activism. His rural Telangana organisation, situated in Zaheerabad, has effectively advocated for problems such as agri-biodiversity, food sovereignty, women's empowerment, social justice, local knowledge systems, participatory development, and community media.
The DDS women's organisations, known as sanghams, and their unwavering commitment to millet production and organic agriculture led the way nationwide in providing verifiable alternatives to the mainstream agricultural paradigm.
The latest efforts to include millets into the public distribution system owe a lot to DDS's work under his direction. Years ago, Sathesh established a local public distribution system run entirely by women farmers and based mainly on millet products.
Periyapatna Venkatasubbaiah Satheesh was born in Mysore on June 18, 1945, and graduated from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication in New Delhi. He began his career as a journalist. He went on to serve as a pioneering television producer for Doordarshan for nearly two decades, producing programmes about rural development and literacy in the then-united Andhra Pradesh. In the 1970s, he was a key figure in the historic Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE).
Satheesh, along with a few friends, founded the Deccan Development Society in the semi-arid Zaheerabad region in the early 1980s by bringing together poor Dalit women in villages to rediscover their faith in traditional knowledge systems that helped challenge hunger, malnutrition, land degradation, biodiversity loss, gender injustice, and social deprivation.
While Satheesh led the organisation for nearly four decades to become an internationally acclaimed NGO and an inspiring example that has inspired similar experiments in millet revival and promotion across the country, he also effectively created powerful leaders from among the most marginalised communities, who became empowered ambassadors of change.
PV Satheesh's long-standing work as DDS director resulted in the improved lifestyles of thousands of disadvantaged women across 75 villages in Telangana. He also led several national and international networks, including the Millet Network of India (MINI), South Against Genetic Engineering (SAGE), the AP Coalition in Defense of Diversity, and the South Asian Network for Food, Ecology, and Culture (SANFEC), a five-country South Asian network with over 200 ecological groups. He formerly served on the board of Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN) in Barcelona, Spain, and on the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) in Brussels, Belgium.
PV Satheesh was a hard worker and NGO leader who stayed true to his convictions and was a compassionate mentor to many young people. He was recently honoured in Delhi by the RRA (Revitalising Rainfed Agriculture) Network at the People's Conference on Millets for his lifelong achievements to making millets a people's issue.
