Our Story

Apoorva and Achyut first met in April 2013, while pursuing their architecture degrees in separate colleges in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. While Apoorva spent all of her childhood in rural and often remote villages of Madhya Pradesh, Achyut was a typical big-city boy growing up in Mumbai and Hyderabad. Now, who would have thought that almost a decade down the lane they would be married and be working on-ground with indigenous communities together!

A couple of years after their bachelor's degree, Achyut (@simblykiltu) went on to pursue his master's degree in Design for sustainable development at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and Apoorva (apoorva_shashi_mishra) went on to pursue Urban Design at School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi. Coincidentally, both of them discovered their aptitude and passion for working with indigenous communities in under-resourced contexts of Kenya and Madhya Pradesh respectively. This led to both of them assisting the Madhya Pradesh government under the National RURBAN mission as consultants in their community-focused developmental work. 

It is here that both Apoorva and Achyut discovered the rich socio-cultural fabric of the Adivasi (indigenous) communities of Madhya Pradesh. These communities for the most part of history have lived in isolation from the "outside" world, thereby developing unique and rich knowledge systems that though well documented, haven't really found real-world applications of relevance and benefit to the larger world. They discovered a wealth on intangible cultural heritage waiting to find expression.

And hence Loksutr (@loksutr) was born! 

The word "loksutr" is a compound word of "Lok" meaning folk, people, and in some contexts even the world, and the word "sutr" literally means a thread. Sutr in Indian literary traditions refers to an aphorism or a collection of aphorisms in the form of a manual or, more broadly, a condensed manual or text. Loksutr hence is a thread, an extraction out of the rich socio-cultural tapestry of indigenous communities. It is an attempt to create a tiny opening through which the world can peek inside and hopefully learn. Learn what? Only time will tell.  

 At the core of our tiny organization are people who work together at every step to find the most effective way of transforming the intangible collective memory of their community into relevant and scalable products & services. 

So with utmost passion and reverence, we offer you a warm welcome to the world of Loksutr!