Assistant Professor
School of Public Policy, IIT Delhi
Research Pillars: Agriculture, Food and Water; Natural Resources Management; Climate resilience

About Me

My research interest is in land and water management for livelihood security and resource sustainability. I am especially interested in governance and policy questions of how common pool resources may be managed to achieve equity/fairness, sustainability and resilience to risks. I use a systems lens to approach problems and apply both quantitative (hydrology, agronomy, system dynamic modeling) and qualitative (interviews, focused group discussions, stakeholder workshops) approaches to understand interactions within and between social and natural systems.

I joined IIT Delhi in 2023. Prior to this, I was a postdoctoral researcher at IHE Delft Institute for Water Education in the department of Land and Water Management, where I continue to be an Affiliate Researcher. My postdoctoral research focused on developing Adaptive Investment Pathways: a novel, adaptive approach to support investments in smallholder irrigation, as an alternative to lumpsum investments in top-down, big infrastructure projects which cannot adapt to an uncertain future. My PhD was done under the supervision of Prof. Milind Sohoni, from the Center for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas (CTARA), IIT Bombay. My thesis was a critical investigation of the promotion of horticulture cultivation as a means to enhance farm incomes in the drought-prone regions of Maharashtra. This research directly contributed to the Maharashtra government's Project on Climate Resilient Agriculture (POCRA).

I received my Masters' degree from Stanford University in Management Science and Engineering, and worked in various engineering roles in the hi-tech and logistics/operations management industry in the US. My B.Tech.degree was in Chemical Engineering from IIT Bombay.

I have several opportunities to engage students who are interested in making serious contributions through internships, research assistantship or Masters/doctoral thesis. If you are interested, please go through my research projects and email me after having done some homework on possible areas of interest.