Education and Public Engagement

Education

Our country, India has been progressively adopting GM crops, which has led to a heated debate in our country. This prompted us to investigate GMO related issues by reaching out to it's stakeholders, general public (consumers and farmers), NGOs and regulatory authorities. We conducted a survey among undergraduates, graduates and professors (330 responses) of colleges in four states of India. We interviewed two highly vocal NGOs, Gene Campaign & ASHA, and two members of GMO related decision making government body. To educate farmers about GM crops and its implications, we prepared a write-up in their local languages, and circulated it among farmers using social media. In order to spread awareness in public sphere about Synthetic Biology, we made a mobile game 'Codonut' (released on the App Store and the Google Play store) to educate players about the concept of codon bias. We also organised an interactive synthetic biology session for students in a high school near our campus and primary school students in a village in Maharashtra.

Public Engagement