About the author

Achyut Siddu is a community architect and co-founder of Loksutr. His work focuses on enabling indigenous communities generate sustainable livelihoods through the development of participatory tools and collaborative projects. Achyut's background in architecture and design, combined with his experiences of on-ground development work in Kenya, Sweden, and India, inform his mission to enable under-resourced communities achieve self-empowerment via their own traditional knowledge systems.

To fully immerse himself in this mission, Achyut started living with the tribes in Anuppur and volunteered with a residential school for girls from the Baiga and Gond tribes. The experience touched him deeply, and he felt a strong calling to use his skills to help preserve and uplift the local arts and artisans. He saw the value in preserving this intangible cultural heritage and realized that by supporting these communities, he could not only help preserve their cultural heritage but also provide them with a means of a sustainable livelihood. With this in mind, he and Apoorva Mishra founded Loksutr with the sole intention of enabling indigenous communities to transform their traditional knowledge systems into contemporary collectibles, just like this book.