Executive Committee (2022-2024)

Dr. Nilanjan Ghosh is Director at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), India. In that capacity, he heads two centers at the Foundation, namely, Centre for New Economic Diplomacy, and ORF’s Kolkata Centre. His previous positions at various points in time include Senior Fellow at ORF; Senior Vice President & Chief Economist at Multi Commodity Exchange of India Limited (Mumbai, India); and prior to that, he taught at the TERI School of Advanced Studies (New Delhi, India). From 2015 to 2020, Dr Ghosh also advised WWF India for setting up their Ecological Economics practice. He has been nominated by the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India as Member, Expert Committee for formulating scientific and policy guidelines with respect to cutting trees for developmental projects. A natural resource economist and econometrician by training, Dr. Ghosh obtained his PhD from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta.

Seema’s teaching, research and practice revolve around the interface of society, political economy and ecosystems. Currently she is focusing on farmer-consumer and rural-urban interfaces as also tribal social-ecological systems. She has studied at Kerala Agricultural University, University College London and Forest Research Institute and worked with a state government, with NGOs, at Institute of Economic Growth and at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment. Seema is also active in the Network of Rural and Agrarian Studies.

Dr. Subir Sen is Associate Professor at HSS, IIT Roorkee. He has obtained Ph.D. in Economics from Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore. His research interests are microeconomics, behavioral economic analysis with focus on risk perceptions, economics of climate change and disasters, adaptation, disaster risk reduction, role of insurance, industrial organization (or economics), competition theory and policy, economics of regulation, performance evaluation (DEA, SFA, etc.), issues in Indian insurance industry.

Chandan Singha is an Associate Professor of Economics at Hindu College, University of Delhi. He received a PhD from Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. His research deals with evaluation of soil conservation measures on farm outcomes, analyzing technology adoption behavior in farming, and designing agri-environmental contracts as a mitigation tool against climate change. Using quasi-experiment, natural experiment, experimental method, and surveys he has been studying the impact of agri-environmental measures.

Dr. Shyamasree Dasgupta is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology Mandi. She has completed Ph.D. in Economics from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India with SYLFF Fellowship. Shyamasree’s area of research includes energy, environment and climate change. Currently her research focuses on climate related vulnerability and adaptation mechanisms in South Asia. She has published in journals such as Energy Policy, Energy Economics, Natural Hazards, Development Engineering, etc.

Dr. Pradyot Ranjan Jena is Associate professor at School of Management, National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK). After obtaining Ph.D. from IIT Kanpur in 2007, he joined Leibniz University Hannover as senior research Fellow and then worked as Development Economist at CIMMYT, Nairobi. Dr. Jena’s core research areas are impact evaluation, food security and climate change. He led 10 national and international research projects and published 60 research papers in peer reviewed journals and conference Proceedings. He won BEST ADVISER AWARD by Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association in 2016. He is associate editor of Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems and Frontiers in Climate Change.

Prajna Paramita Mishra is Assistant Professor in the School of Economics of University of Hyderabad. Before joining UoH she has worked as Assistant Professor in CESS, Hyderabad. Her research area is Environmental and Natural Resource Economics. Her earlier research has concentrated in the areas of mining, economic valuation and sanitation. Currently she is undertaking research on gender issues in extractive industries. She has supervised 6 Ph.D. and 13 M.Phil. students. She has published her research in journals like Environment and Development Economics, Environmental Science and Pollution Research, Benchmarking, Science of the total environment, Land, Energy Economics and One Earth.

Manjula is faculty, at School of Development, Azim Premji University. She is an Agricultural Economist by training and comes with long years of experience of connecting research and practice in the field of sustainable rural livelihoods. Her specific research interests are in the field of sustainable production systems, community- based adaptation to climate change and political economy of resource access. She has published journal papers, book chapters and research reports in these areas. She has coordinated research projects supported by various multilateral organizations, government agencies, and international/national donor agencies. She has more than two decades of programme management, organization, and coordination skills in the development sector. Her practice is largely in the interface of gender and agriculture with specific focus on the ecology-economy tradeoffs.

Dr. Chandra Sekhar Bahinipati is Assistant professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati, India. Over the years, he has been working on the issues related to climate change economics, environmental economics, behavioural economics, natural resource management, and development economics. I have published several research papers in peer-reviewed journals like INSEE Journal, Food Security, Land Use Policy, International Journal of the Commons, Climate and Development, Water Policy, Regional Environmental Change, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Environmental Economics, and Policy Studies, etc. He has carried out several research projects sponsored by ICSSR, SANDEE, APN-GCR, IIED-UK, GIZ, IGES, JSPS, OECD, etc. At present, I have been nominated as Research Fellow, Earth System Governance Network, Utrecht University, Netherlands. He is associate editor of International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management.

Dr. Amarnath Tripathi is Associate Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics and International Business, School of Business Studies, Sharda University, India. Previously, he has been a member of faculty in the Symbiosis School of Economics, Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune and the Institute of Economic Growth, New Delhi. Amarnath has also been a visiting doctoral fellow of Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai. He completed his Ph.D. in Economics from Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi and post-doctorate from Institute of Economic Growth, New Delhi under Think Tank Initiative of International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada. Tripathi has over 12 years of experience in academic and applied economic research. His research interests include Agriculture & Natural Resource Economics; Food Security & Food System; Rural Livelihood, Economics of Climate Change; and Public Policy & Impact Evaluation. He has published widely and several of his research articles have appeared in good impact journals like Food and Nutrition Bulletin, Environment Management, Climatic Risk Management, Journal of Environmental Management and Planning, and Economic and Political Weekly. He also writes columns in both print and digital media.

Lavanya Suresh is an Assistant Professor at BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad campus.

After her PhD in Political Science (from ISEC Bangalore), she was an Assistant Professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Hyderabad. Her work focuses on the political ecology of natural resources and commons, with a broader interest in decentralization and public administration. Besides publications in leading social science journals, she has co-authored a book (with Prof. M.V. Nadkarni and N. Sivanna) on “Decentralized Democracy: Gandhi’s Vision and Indian Reality.” She was also awarded the visiting research scholar fellowship under the Graduate Development Program of the Watson Institute of International Studies’ at Brown University, USA.