Sushmita Kaneri is a software engineer turned social entrepreneur and the Founder of Gullakaari, an NGO working with 1000 tribal and rural artisans to revive India’s traditional crafts and provide them with sustainable livelihoods. Gullakaari launched in 2023 with Dr. Kiran Bedi, marking the beginning of Sushmita’s mission to preserve India’s rich craft heritage. She is a recipient of the Asia’s 1000 Women Faces Award and has also been recognized among India’s leading women entrepreneurs and social innovators. Her work beautifully blends technology, entrepreneurship, and social impact to create sustainable change.
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Meera Goradia is a graduate of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her experience of working with artisan clusters spans 3 decades. She has co-founded Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan with Sushma Iyengar and Alka Jani. She was the Director of Khamir, a premier organization in Kutch for the cultural and creative industries. Khamir was nurtured by her over ten years to develop innovative approaches to the artisan sector. Her experience ranges ground level artisan supply chain realities, building farm to fibre value chains, archiving cultural histories along with frontend integration. Since 2016, she has been consulting organizations and companies such as AIACA, RiseWorldwide, Jaypore, Center for Pastoralism, Ikai Asai etc. In 2020, she co-founded Creative Dignity with a group of other creative professionals, as a network to support the artisan sector through and post the pandemic. She is the Chair of Creative Dignity at present.
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Siddhi Gupta teaches Creative Education at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology and is Design Director at the Inclusive AI Lab. She is currently pursuing her PhD at Utrecht University. Her practice spans visual storytelling, design research, pedagogy, craft, and emerging technologies, with a focus on creating access and facilitating learning through making. She has worked across alternate-learning schools, craft and cultural organisations, NGOs, government stakeholders, design labs, and museums, including the Ministry of Textiles, IIT Delhi, and the V&A Museum. At the Inclusive AI Lab, she has led projects with partners including IDRC, Adobe, and UN-affiliated initiatives, spanning digital rights, representative datasets, and ethnographic research.
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