Padma Koppula

Padma Koppula is a permaculture practitioner, educator and community organiser in India. She is the co-founder of Aranya Agricultural Alternatives, a permaculture non-profit organisation in India, and is listed on the organisation's own site as its co-founder and CEO. Before Aranya she worked for ten years with the Deccan Development Society, where she and Narsanna Koppula first met.

She helms several of Aranya's permaculture outreach programmes. Among them, she is lead facilitator for a drought mitigation project in Andhra Pradesh which seeks to aid 165,000 households. She also works with tribal communities who have been displaced from their ancestral forestlands, supporting them in re-establishing their ancestral practice of permaculture-led natural farming.

A large part of her work is with women in rural communities. She has worked with 3,000 women farmers, helping them to access natural resources and to take part in legal and financial decisions, and creating awareness of child marriage and women's rights. She teaches the preservation of local and native seeds, and she has helped establish seed banks in many villages. Her programmes connect permaculture design with water management, seed keeping and the livelihoods of the farmers she works alongside.