Trilochan Sastry

Founder

Founder of Association for Democratic Reforms

Photo: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA)

Trilochan Sastry is the founder of Association for Democratic Reforms (1999)[1], an Indian non-profit working on road safety & civic and human rights.

Trilochan Sastry is an Indian academic and social entrepreneur, a professor of decision sciences at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, and the founder, chairman and trustee of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), a non-partisan organisation working on electoral and political reform.

He also founded the Centre for Collective Development, which organises smallholder farmers into cooperatives, and Farmveda, a food enterprise that shares its profits with farmers.

Early life and education

Sastry took a BTech in electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, an MBA at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, and a PhD in operations research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Career

Sastry has taught at IIM Ahmedabad and the Indian School of Business and is a faculty member in decision sciences at IIM Bangalore, where he was dean from 2008 to 2011. His research covers operations research, supply chain management, rural development and governance.

In 1999 he was among a group of professors at IIM Ahmedabad who founded the Association for Democratic Reforms. The group filed a public interest petition in the Delhi High Court seeking that candidates for election disclose their criminal records, financial assets and educational qualifications; this led to Supreme Court judgments in 2002 and 2003 requiring all candidates to file affidavits with the Election Commission of India setting out these details. ADR has since analysed candidate affidavits and party finances at every general and state election.

In 2004 he established the Centre for Collective Development, which by 2019 had organised more than 25,000 farmers with an emphasis on marketing and value addition, and he later founded Farmveda. He is the author of The Essentials of Hinduism: An Introduction to All the Sacred Texts, published by Penguin Random House India.

Recognition

Sastry received the Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT Delhi in 2012 and the Satyendra K. Dubey Memorial Award in 2013 for his work on transparency. He has also been recognised by CNN-IBN, NDTV and The Times of India.[2][3]

Association for Democratic Reforms

ADR is a nonprofit that works on electoral and political reforms — analysing the criminal, financial and educational backgrounds of candidates, political party finances and election expenditure. Its reports on MPs, MLAs and elections are a standard reference for Indian voters and media.

Association for Democratic Reforms reports the following, on its own site: