Inspired by the dream of “One straw revolution” of Masanobu Fukuoka, G. Narendranath left his bank job to be a farmer in his native village in Venkatramapuram, Chittoor District, Andhra Pradesh.  Over the decades he along with his wife Uma Shankari have worked on Dalit issues and land struggles and led many padayatras working with others including Andhra Pradesh Vyavasaya Vrutthidharula Union (APVVU). On his passing away, this article was posted by AID India.

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G. Narendranath was active in Human Rights Forum,  National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM), on issues of civil rights, displacement issues and organizing public hearings on two big SEZs in AP.  Naren & Uma initiated Rashtriya Raithu Seva Samiti and led Bhu Samskranala Karyacharana Udyamam (Forum for Land Reforms) to raise voice on various problems of the farming sector.

"A human environment cannot exist apart from nature, and so agriculture must be made the foundation for living.  The return of all people to the country to farm and create villages of true men is the road to the creation of ideal towns, ideal societies and ideal states.”  (Masanobu Fukuoka – in – The Natural Way of Farming). 

What inspired me to go back to my ancestral village in the eighties was the dream of “One straw revolution” of Masanobu Fukuoka, the need for alternatives to the present paradigms of modern science, development and polity raised by Rajni Kothari, Dhirubhai, Ashish Nandy, Vijay Pratap and other sensitive and eloquent social scientists of Lokayan, the urge to do something – crystallizing the ideas (into action) by Uma Shankari, my wife, and my father who was a government servant all his life, but a farmer at heart. He  increasingly took the driver's seat once we moved to the village.