Perhaps the most authentic advocate of a ‘Gandhian science’ in contemporary India is the Garhwali social worker Chandi Prasad Bhatt. As a pioneering environmentalist—it was he who started the ‘Chipko’ movement—Bhatt has critiqued the ways in which science has both centralized power and led to environmental degradation. He has been in the forefront of the opposition to monocultural forestry and large dams, state schemes which have claimed the mandate of science. Yet, like Gandhi, Bhatt also understands that technical knowledge can and has been put to humane use, when informed by an ecological sensibility and attention to social deprivation. Bhatt has written insightfully on forest conservation, urging a creative synthesis between the ‘practical knowledge’ of peasants and the ‘latest scientific knowledge’ of the state. He has called for a decentralized approach to planning, and has himself pioneered the dissemination of ‘appropriate’ rural technologies such as biogas plants and micro-hydel projects. While keen to listen to and learn from the ‘people’, he doesn’t always romanticize folk wisdom either. It is not just science which has to be reformed, he argues; but also local practices which, in an altered ecological and demographic context, have become unsustainable. He has thus noted that in the hills, terracing on very steep slopes and free-range grazing are no longer viable for either society or for nature.