Online seminars
A single guest lecture or a themed series, delivered over Zoom, Teams, Google Meet or Webex. Forty-five to ninety minutes including discussion, scheduled to your time zone.
The Mountain Institute – India · Gangtok, Sikkim
Understanding the socio-ecological landscapes of the Eastern Himalaya
Thirty-two years of research, restoration and community practice across the Eastern Himalaya — forest and farming systems from the tropical foothills to the trans-Himalaya, in a global biodiversity hotspot.
Available worldwide for university lectures, seminars and keynotes — online and in person.
150springs revived, with 35 rivulets and three lakes
196Biodiversity Management Committees facilitated
20community seed banks established
₹6.6 crresearch and development projects delivered as PI
93publications, chapters and policy reports
Invite a lecture
Guest lectures, worldwide
Dr. Sharma gives guest lectures on Himalayan ecology, agroecology, springshed revival and traditional ecological knowledge — for universities, institutes and conferences, in any time zone.
Campus lectures & keynotes
In person, with international travel. Some 92 papers presented across 19 or more countries, with invited keynotes in Rome, Kathmandu and Paro, and the Best Presentation Medal at Colombo.
Short courses & workshops
Multi-session teaching for a department — a seminar series, a workshop with student research clinics, or a recurring module embedded in a course that runs each year.
Where the work comes from
A scientist who is also a farmer
Dr. Ghanashyam Sharma knew this landscape as a farmer before he studied it as a scientist — born into an indigenous farming family whose practice in these hills goes back two hundred years.
He learned it from his grandfather, a farmer and an expert in mountain agricultural farming systems, and a pastoralist besides — more than sixty cattle, some forty buffaloes and a flock of sheep. Dr. Sharma worked alongside him from boyhood: walking the farms through every season, and going up with the herds into the forest grazing grounds.
Forty-eight years of his own hands in those fields came first. The doctorate in ecology, the JSPS–UNU postdoctoral fellowship in Tokyo and twenty-seven international papers came afterwards. The first qualification is not decoration — it is why the science works here.
What we do
Three decades of work, in four strands
Each strand is research and practice together — published in international journals, and standing in the landscape.
Water & springshed revival
Aquifer-centric, geo-lithologically informed nature-based solutions. Around 150 springs, 35 rivulets and three lakes brought back across Sikkim and Kalimpong, benefiting more than 20,000 households.
Agrobiodiversity & seed sovereignty
Twenty community seed banks, landrace conservation, millet revival across some seventy Gram Panchayat Units, and the authoritative volume Agrobiodiversity of the Sikkim Himalaya.
Agroforestry & organic agriculture
Doctoral work on Alnus–cardamom systems underpins the state’s phased cardamom revival programme, and the technical volume behind Sikkim’s State Policy on Organic Farming.
Biodiversity governance
196 Biodiversity Management Committees and 196 People’s Biodiversity Registers, protecting genetic resources and traditional knowledge against biopiracy under India’s Biological Diversity Act.
Recognition
Sikkim Himalayan agriculture is a candidate site for the FAO’s Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems. Dr. Sharma contributed to that initiative and prepared the technical report behind it.
He holds the Sikkim Sewa Samman, the highest civilian award of the Government of Sikkim, and the Overall Best Presentation Medal from the 8th International Conference on Climate Change in Colombo. He has served on ten state statutory and advisory committees, past and present, and reviews for sixteen international journals.
Study with us
The Field School
Four-week and eight-week field study programmes for university students, hosted in a village with a completed People’s Biodiversity Register, a constituted community institution and three decades of published research behind it.
Students map aquifers, sample agroforestry plots, document landraces, and work alongside households whose farming practice is two hundred years old. Not a field trip — a field school.
Shorter ten and twelve-day retreats are open to individual visitors, with no academic enrolment required.
