Mahatma Gandhi's thought and action has inspired many world leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela, Leopold Senghor, Julius Nyerere, Jomo Kenyatta, the Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bishop Desmond Tutu. Gandhi's strategies and tactics have been applied in freedom movements against colonialism, and movements demanding social justice during the 20th century and continue to guide many social and political movements in the 21st century. Gandhi's emphasis on truth and non-violence is well-known. But Gandhi also used truth and non-violence as a methodological framework in addressing conundrums produced by modern way of life such as sustainability, environmental pollution, waste management, healthcare, water resource management, sanitation, agrarian crisis, rural economic distress, employment generation, and inequitable development.

The Gandhian framework of truth and non-violence directly influenced Arne Naess, the founder of deep ecology movement, Johan Galtung, who is considered to be the father of peace research, and the famous economist E. F. Schumacher who emphasized the importance of economic decentralization. Gandhi's specialty was to identify a problem, the root cause of the problem, context of the problem, and choose a solution to the problem that is most non-injurious to all concerned parties. In this sense, Gandhi's approach was very logical, rational, moral and scientific. His objective was to address systemic injustice, internal colonization and structural violence. The SIDDHI Webinar Series is an attempt to facilitate creative and collaborative engagement of the experts in the field of science and technology to engage with the broader community, government officials, civil society, and legislators to find ways to promote a sustainable, equitable, and inclusive development of all segments of Indian society, which was Gandhi's life mission.