He has lost count of the number of times he has been to India, but Dr. John Sinclair is under no illusions about the value of those trips. 鈥淚t has been a life-changing opportunity for me and for the students who have gone,鈥� says Sinclair, a professor and associate head of the University of Manitoba鈥檚 Natural Resources Institute.
Sinclair made his first trip in 1994, accompanying two professors funded by the 麻豆传媒入口. Some of his subsequent trips have been funded by the Institute, and for Sinclair, now 46, those early trips were critical in defining his area of study. 鈥淚t has been hugely enriching both personally and professionally,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 can now say I have an area of expertise in India鈥攖he Himalayas.鈥�
Sinclair鈥檚 work in the region focuses on 鈥渇inding ways that the voice of the community can be incorporated into decisions that affect them.鈥� Along with his students, he studies issues surrounding resource management and development. The former involve such things as forestry practices; the latter include assessing the impacts of hydro dams on local populations. 鈥淲e lend support with facts that otherwise wouldn鈥檛 be heard,鈥� Sinclair says. 鈥淟ike people all over the world who have been impacted by development these people want to be heard.鈥�
Not all of this work is funded directly by the Shastri Institute, but Sinclair has had some success leveraging grants from the Institute to secure other funding. 鈥淪hastri grants have been the impetus basically for all the work we鈥檝e been doing in India,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hey鈥檝e initiated a snowball that, to our good fortune, has become bigger.鈥�
That means that since 1994 about 30 graduate students have travelled to India. They typically conduct research for three months, learning things they won鈥檛 find in any textbook. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e taught the value of being a flexible thinker, the wealth of knowledge held by local people and the value of a multi-disciplinary approach,鈥� Sinclair says.
These insights are not limited to Canadian students because Sinclair and the Natural Resources Institute work with Indian students from various institutions, including the University of Delhi and Himachal Pradesh University. These arrangements expose local students to different research methods and mean that the work undertaken has a double-barrelled benefit. 鈥淲e鈥檙e helping to build capacity not only among local people but more importantly among Indian students,鈥� Sinclair says, proving that, in the Himalayas, many things can start to snowball