Dr. Govind Prasad Thapa
Dr. Govind Thapa is former Additional Inspector General of Nepal Police. He has extensive experience of policing in the most difficult period of the country. During his career of over three decades, he contributed in institution building of Nepal Police. He is the Impulse Model Policy Advisor for Nepal to Impulse NGO Network and a Trainer on the Nepalese legal framework.
Hasina Karbhih
Hasina is the Founder and Chairperson of Impulse NGO Network. Having spent over two decades in this sector, Hasina is considered one of the leading figures in the fight against human trafficking in India, as well as South and South East Asia. Hasina and her team developed the Impulse Model (formerly Meghalaya Model) for fighting trafficking-in-persons. The Impulse Model is today considered the ultimate guide for processes and best practices in the battle against human trafficking.
Hasina has won many awards for her crusade against human traffickers, and is a part of various boards and committees of both government and non-government organisations involved in social welfare, development and human rights. She is an Ashoka Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, as well as a Fellow of the Aspen India Leadership Initiative.
Kunal Majumder
Kunal Majumder is an award-winning journalist, editor and writer. In a career spanning 12 years, Kunal has been associated with major media groups including The Indian Express, Rajasthan Patrika, Zee Media (DNA & India.com), Tehelka and lately with VICE Media.
Kunal was the founding EIC of InUth.com and one of the founding editors of Catch News. He is a winner of the prestigious Statesman Award for Rural Reporting and UNDP-Laadli Award for Gender Sensitivity.
Saurav Malhotra
Saurav heads the management at Balipara Foundation and he is also the lead architect & designer of the Rural Futures programme, which aspires to integrate ecological gains with upward socio-economic mobility of forest-fringe communities. Through Rural Futures, Saurav and his team mobilise forest-fringe communities (esp. youth) to engage in the complete value chain of ecosystem restoration – from collecting seeds & building nurseries to planting saplings back into the forest of their homesteads.
Saurav is a trained biologist with a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology from Manipal University, and a Master’s degree in the Biological Sciences from the University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom. Through his training in the sciences and especially the science of biology with a focus on intracellular communication, Saurav became interested in learning about how cells communicate with each other in an organism and then further how this communication enables them to grow from one cell – the zygote into a full-grown organism.
It is through his interest in biological communication, Saurav became fascinated with the communications and feedbacks in the ecological world and how not only animals communicated with each other but the impact that humans have had on the faunal and floral diversity of the world. This eventually led him to the designing and creation of a conservation and livelihood plan which was human-centric and focused on human growth and well-being as a key aspect and indicator for sustained ecological growth and diversity enhancement.
