 Good morning. I am Deepak Fateh, greeting you from IIT Bombay. I am the principal investigator of the T-10KT project which attempts to train up to 10,000 teachers at a time. I am very happy to welcome all the people on this exciting subject which is not yet the mainstream route course, but it is fast tending to become a very important and critical course. And I am so very happy that more than 4000 teachers are attending this two-week IST workshop. Without further ado, I would like to invite on stage Professor Kannan Mautgalyar, my colleague and co-coordinator of all NME ICT projects here and a fairly large team of faculty members led by Professor Viren Sethi. I request Professor Sethi to escort all the colleagues to the last place. I will now request Professor Viren Sethi to kindly introduce himself and all his colleagues. Well, I think I should introduce Professor Viren Sethi. While he happens to be associated with the environmental science group here in IIT Bombay, he is also an expert in a variety of other subjects. Most important from our point of view is that he leads the effort jointly with Professor Sundar, Professor Parasati and others from HSS department on what we call an effective communications course which is now an obligatory course for all postgraduate students. Incidentally, we will be conducting a self-financed IST workshop on effective communication this December. And that effort will also be led by Professor Sundar is going to coordinate, not Sethi, but Viren Sethi is a hallmark of enthusiasm for all such interesting and exciting experiments which further the cause of better quality in our education system and in our teaching learning process. So, over to you Professor Sethi. Okay, good morning everybody across the country. I believe there is a good 4200 plus all of us on this adventure called environmental sciences course. It's a required course and we have seen that a lot of times we may not have always the kind of resources that are available. So, this particular effort would fulfill on that lacuna and we look forward to partnership with you not just for these 10 days but for many, many years to come. We will talk about this a little more in the following parts of this session. For now I just want to introduce myself. I have been at IIT Bombay for the last 15 years in the Center for Environmental Science and Engineering which has been in existence from 1977. So, that's what 23 plus 15, about 38 odd years. And we have a group of 10 faculty colleagues who work in the center and this course, it's had its own evolution within our IIT campus. It started with a common course between humanities and social sciences and our center. And now we for administrative reasons we have split it into two half semesters. They go together as sister courses. So, much of what we're going to be doing is going to be in line with things that we cover in our course, HS 200 and ES 200. But we also have a partnership from Amrita University where Professor Nikhil has come. Professor Maya Mahajan who is also a part of this development of this course is unwell. So, she will not be participating with us but I just communicated with her this morning that she continues to send her best wishes to all of us. And we will soon at some point in time she will also have a contribution to make. So, with that I just want to welcome all of you and we'll talk a little more over the next 10 years. Okay. 10 years? I said, yeah, I meant it actually. 10 years. Okay, good. So, I'll hand it over to Professor Partha Sarthi. Hello and good morning to all of you. I am Partha Sarthi from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. As Professor Seti already mentioned, several of us in CESC and HSS departments have been teaching this environment studies together for our undergraduate students. As you all know from the UGC syllabus for the Environmental Studies course, there are science and technical modules and there are also policy and social science modules. So, we cover the latter for this course. Two other colleagues of mine who are not here presently will also be teaching some of the modules here, Professor Ranjan Panda and Professor Narayanan. So, on behalf of them as well, I invite you all and wish you all the best for the next 10 days, 10 years and for the world at large for whom we are actually doing this maybe for the next 100 years. I'll hand you over to Professor Nikhil now. Hello, good morning, everyone. I'm Nikhil Koturkar. I'm from Amruta University, Amruta Viswa Vidyapetam from the Coimbatore campus. As a university, we are very committed to environmental studies and there is a course called ENV200 Environmental Studies which is offered to the science and all the other streams. There are roughly 2500 students per year who go through this course. I'm the chief mentor for teaching this course. I coordinate the activities of roughly 15 to 20 faculty members and we have over the past five, six years, we have introduced a lot of innovation in teaching this course and it is being received very well by students. I'll hand over to Dr. Munish. Good morning, everyone. I am Dr. Munish Chandel. I am a faculty in the center of Environmental Science and Engineering with Professor Sethi and I have been teaching this course for last four years or so and I think most of things about this course is already introduced so I hand over this to Professor Narayanan. Very good morning to all of you. My name is K. Narayanan. I'm a trained economist. I'm a lawyer with the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in IIT Bombay. I have been involved in teaching, designing and teaching the environmental studies course right from inception in IIT Bombay and we thoroughly enjoyed every year that we interacted with students on this so basically I try to explain the interaction between various economic activities and the environment and when every country tries to sort of foster ahead for development, try to put themselves on high-growth pedestals, we try to see what impact it has on the environment. We make inter-country comparisons and so I look forward to a very nice interaction with all of you. Thank you. So thank you all of you for first of all agreeing to participate in this exciting course and for being present here on the inaugural function but I would like to acknowledge with thanks the contributions made by Amruta University in actually originating the idea to begin with and then pursuing it jointly with our colleagues to come up with this exciting course.