Forest Vihara Foundation

We founded the N.G.O. Forest Vihara Foundation to serves our local Buddhist community in Nagpur city, comprised of mostly backward and aboriginal caste people, by improving the standard of living with 1) employment generation through self-dependency, entrepreneurship, & economics of sharing (from my doctoral dissertation), and 2) with monasteries and meditation center for the development of the human mind by improving the standard of our Buddhist monasteries. Thereby, they can start functioning efficiently and be available to the general public for training in and practicing meditation and morality to improve their health and quality of life. Our organization started with an idea during my doctoral studies in Barcelona, Spain. There while studying Finance, I got interested in exploring the problem of financial fraud due to unethical or immoral behavior by the agency. Combining Ethics and Economics, we produced an alternative organizational, economic theory with people and compassion at the center. The same question was highlighted in our local Buddhist monasteries. In those companies like Satyam or Enron, the agency was the C.E.O. or C.F.O., who showed a lack of moral conduct. Similarly, in our local monasteries spread throughout the city and rural areas receiving multi-million dollars of yearly government grants and donations, the agency was the Abbotts and their monks, who sadly also showed a lack of ethical conduct and compassion; and perhaps, misappropriation and misallocation of donation funds. Soon we teamed up with likeminded friends from all age groups from our Buddhist community and gave public talks and presentations to the elites of our society, garnering a team of top medics and government officers from the Ministry secretariat of our state onboard. After my Ph.D., I went as far as to myself stay in the forest of Thailand as a Buddhist monk and novice, for about six months and another six months traveling in Buddhist monasteries around the world.