Advisory

Mr. Raj Khoshoo

Mr. Raj Khoshoo is Senior Vice President of Portfolio Management for Siemens PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) Software, a business unit of the Siemens Digital Factory Division. In this role, he is responsible for Mergers, Acquisition and Equity Investment planning in the context of specific initiatives, such as System Driven Product Development, Design for Environment, Application Lifecycle Management, Configuration Management, with a general focus on strategic initiatives that have measurable business impact. 

With over 34 years of experience, he has served in a variety of senior management positions in strategic planning, product development and strategic marketing. 

Mr. Khoshoo co-conducts the MBA Student Lab course on ‘Enterprises of the Future’ in Tepper School of Business of Carnegie Mellon and the University Of Chicago Booth School Of Business.

In 2014, he was nominated as Senior Principal ‘Key Expert’ in Siemens PLM software.

Mr. S.V. Ranganath

S.V. Ranganath, is currently the Vice Chairman, Karnataka State Higher Education Council and a Member of the Karnataka Knowledge Commission’s technical committee. A former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, he retired as Chief Secretary, Government of Karnataka.

As a Civil Servant, he worked in various capacities both in Government of India and Government of Karnataka. Previously, Ranganath was the also the Chairman, Indian Coffee Board and Resident Director, Indian Investment Centre, Abu Dhabi. He also served as Principal Secretary to Chief Minister of Karnataka, Additional Secretary & Financial Adviser in the Department of Space and also Member [Finance] to the Space Commission, Atomic Energy Commission and Earth Commission.

Post retirement from 2014-2017, Ranganath was the non-executive Chairperson of IFCI.

Ms. Shruti Shibulal

Shruti is the Chief Executive Officer and Director of The Tamara Leisure Experiences. She is one of India’s entrepreneurs in the hospitality industry and was named one of World Economic Forum’s YGLs from India in 2017.  Through her hospitality venture, Tamara Leisure Experiences, she is at the forefront of promoting sustainable living and responsible tourism in India.

Shruti is a Trustee for both Advaith Foundation and the Sarojini Damodaran Foundation, organizations involved in providing educational opportunities and healthcare assistance to underprivileged sections of society. She is on the Management Council of The Samhita Academy. She serves as a Trustee of the Women’s Education Project, an NGO providing mentorship and scholarships to young women in need of support.

Dr. Gita Sen

Professor Gita Sen, former Chairperson of the Centre for Public Policy at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, has been conferred the Dan David Prize for the year 2020 for her pioneering work to advance gender equality. The Dan David Prize is a prestigious international award endowed by the Dan David Foundation and headquartered at Tel Aviv University.

Professor Sen is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Ramalingaswami Centre on Equity & Social Determinants of Health at the Public Health Foundation of India. With a PhD in Economics from Stanford University, she is also an Adjunct Professor of Global Health and Population at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. She was Professor in the Public Policy area at IIMB from August 1993 to October 2013. “A large part of my work in public policy was done when I was at IIMB, particularly at the Centre for Public Policy,” she said.

IIMB Director Professor G. Raghuram said, “The Dan David Prize is a wonderful acknowledgment of the tremendous body of work which Dr. Gita Sen has put together on population and development. We are especially proud of her long association with IIMB.” 

The Dan David Prize recognizes and encourages innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms. It aims to foster universal values of excellence, creativity, justice, democracy, and progress and to promote the scientific, technological, and humanistic achievements that advance and improve our world. 

For over three decades, Professor Gita Sen has worked on population policies, reproductive and sexual health, gender equality, and women’s human rights, as well as issues of poverty, human development, and labour markets. Her work has helped to shape the global paradigm shift on gender and development, and on population and development.

Professor Gita Sen is a founder-member of the feminist network, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN). The United Nations System has sought out her expertise in several ways, including during intergovernmental processes, high-level events, and as an advisor to policies and programmes. She was the lead consultant for drafting UNFPA’s India Country Population Assessment document for the 2003–2007 period.

She currently serves on the Gender and Rights Advisory Panel of WHO’s Department of Reproductive Health and Research and was co-chair of Pan American Health Organization’s (PAHO) Technical Advisory Group on Gender Equality and Health. She is a member of the UN’s Independent Accountability Panel for Every Woman, Every Child, Every Adolescent.

Dr. Gita Sen’s combination of advocacy, practical experience, activism, and analysis has won her several awards and honours, including the Volvo Environment Prize for her work on women, population and development and honorary doctorates from the University of East Anglia, the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm), The Open University (UK), the University of Sussex, and the University of Edinburgh. In November 2019 she received the Dr Fred T Sai award from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) for leadership and commitment to achieving rights and choices for all.

https://www.iimb.ac.in/gita-sen-wins-prestigious-dan-david-prize

Dr. NC Narayanan

N C Narayanan works in the area of water policy and governance with normative concerns of sustainability and equity as pointers. He started his career as a hydrogeologist and worked in an interdisciplinary team for land use planning using remote sensing techniques. The involvement with a science movement led him to studies on participatory land use planning for decentralised governance. In his later studies he focused on the institutional aspects of water management and governance. After his M Phil in Applied Economics from JNU (CDS) and PhD in Development Studies (ISS, Erasmus University, The Netherlands) he joined as faculty in the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA). He moved on as Senior Fellow and Executive Director of the South Asia Consortium for Water Resources Studies (Saci WATERs) mainly coordinating an academic programme to instil interdisciplinarity in Water Engineering programmes linking Wageningen University, NL and four South Asian Universities in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and India. Since 2008, he teaches and contributes to the interdisciplinary M Tech and PhD programmes in Technology and Development and newly started public policy programme in IIT Bombay. He has been a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley for two semesters in 2016-17. He and his students have worked on issues of water governance, water conflicts, uncertainty and climate change, technology/institutional choices in urban sanitation, rural drinking water governance/reforms, scaling up technology alternatives etc. He also has two ongoing field projects working with local governments on canal rejuvenation (see here) and flood mitigation planning. He has published four books and contributed to book chapters and journals.

https://sites.google.com/view/nc-narayanan/

Dr. Robin L Chazdon

Robin Chazdon is professor emerita in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at the University of Connecticut, USA. Her long-term and on-going collaborative research focuses on successional pathways, forest dynamics, drivers of land-use change, and functional ecology of trees in Neotropical forests. Chazdon served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Biotropica, as President of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, and as a member-at-large of the governing board of the Ecological Society of America. She is a member of the Board of Directors of EcoLogic Development Fund. She currently serves as the Executive Director of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation and Director of the NSF-funded Research Coordination Network PARTNERS (People and Reforestation in the Tropics), focused on understanding the social and ecological drivers of reforestation in the tropics. After 28 years as a university professor, Dr. Chazdon is moving into the science-policy arena in forest landscape restoration. She has taken on new positions as a Research Professor with the Tropical Forests and People Centre at the University of the Sunshine Coast and as Senior Research Associate with the International Institute of Sustainability in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She recently became a Senior Fellow with the World Resources Institute Global Restoration Initiative, where she is working to enhance decision support tools for landscape restoration and promote natural regeneration in restoration planning. She is an author of over 140 peer-reviewed scientific articles and co-editor of two books on tropical forests. Her sole-authored book “Second growth: The promise of tropical forest regeneration in an age of deforestation” was published in 2014. Her home base is now Boulder, Colorado.

Dr. Sudhir Chella Rajan

Academic Background:

• D.Env. Environmental Science and Engineering Program (cross-disciplinary doctorate), UCLA, 1994.
• M.S. Meteorology, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, 1985.
• B.Tech. Aeronautical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, 1983.

Research Interests:

• Automobility
• Climate policy
• Grand corruption
• Sustainable development

Professional Summary:

Sudhir Chella Rajan teaches at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Madras. He was formerly Head of the Department (2011-2014) and was Coordinator of the Indo-German Centre for Sustainability (2010-2016) and Area Coordinator for Land-Use (2016-2020). He obtained an inter-disciplinary doctorate in Environmental Science and Engineering from the University of California Los Angeles and has worked in progressively senior positions in government, research consultancies, NGOs and academia. His interests are primarily at the interface of political theory and the environment; in particular, on the new challenges that enter politics within democratic societies in the face of composite social and environmental encounters.

Dr Rajan has worked on emergent policy dilemmas in automobile pollution regulation in California, the politics of power sector reform in developing countries, conflicts in relation to energy access and climate change policy, the patterns of social change needed in transport in the United States for fair climate policy, ethical approaches to addressing climate change and sea level rise, new interpretations of the resource curse in resource-rich developing countries, changes to the periurban landscape in South India and the shifting meanings of corruption in environmental and everyday discourse. His latest book is A Social History of Corruption: Notes from the Indian Subcontinent.

Research Interests:

In very broad terms, my intellectual concerns lie at the interface of the environment and political theory. What normative claims do problems such as pollution, climate change, and loss of biodiversity place on human societies, and how adequate or not are prevalent institutional arrangements to respond to them? What does it mean to describe these in emergent socio-technical formations influenced by power dynamics among other factors? How, for instance, does sovereign, territorial power identify legitimate and effective means of environmental governance, and what strategies does it use to navigate among competing concerns? I am also interested in examining situations, particularly in the context of planetary crises, where such state practices run into trouble at the edges of liberal democratic theory, and in exploring whether these boundary concerns in turn shift the terms of political discourse. What roles might, say, emerging practices of food sovereignty play in escaping contemporary settlement camps and other bypasses?

In the past, I have used liberal political philosophy as a lens to investigate the state’s commitment to sustaining automobility in Western democracies, in the face of severe local pollution concerns. I have explored how bodily dispositions such as automobility constitute globalized phenomena having cultural dimensions but are also associated politically with interlocking elite networks.

I do a fair amount of scenario-based analysis on transport, energy and climate change, primarily as a means to provide my conceptual interests a strong grounding in specific policy questions. In this regard, my team and I have built climate and energy scenarios for India, one of which have a strong normative focus on reducing carbon emissions while raising incomes and livelihoods for the bottom quintile. Other work of this nature includes developing sustainable transport policy both in Indian cities and in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where I have been working in collaboration with respective UNDP offices. Along with Sujatha Byravan, I have been working on sea level rise as a possible driver of political and ethical shifts in the discourse on climate change.

In terms of social and policy impact, my current research, in collaboration with a broader team making up the periurban initiative and PERI-CENE, is to address the many harms arising from bypasses in the hinterland. The pooled threats from industrialized agriculture, new enclosures of land, particularly in developing countries, and risks to local livelihoods from these social forces as well as climate change need to be considered in toto, not by analytically separating climate impacts from all other impacts. Our focus is on creating ‘living laboratories’ of climate resilience through documented trials in community gardening, natural farming and re-use and repair cultures.

Teaching Interests:

• Corruption and Development
• Democracy Theory and Practice
• Foundations of Social and Political Thought
• Indian Constitution: Text and Practice
• Perspectives in Social Sciences
• State and Development

Professional Experience:

• 2007-present: Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras
• 2000-2007: Senior Fellow, Tellus Institute, Boston, MA
• 1999-2000: Consultant, UNDP, New York
• 1995-1999: Director (Operations and Asia), International Energy Initiative, Bangalore, India
• 1989-1994: Air Resources Engineering Associate, California Air Resources Board, El Monte, CA, USA
• 1988: Air Quality Scientist, ENSR, Camarillo, CA

Dr. Upmanu Lall

Dr. Upmanu Lall is the Director of the Columbia Water Center and the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering. He has broad interests in hydrology, climate dynamics, water resource systems analysis, risk management and sustainability. He is motivated by challenging questions at the intersection of these fields, especially where they have relevance to societal outcomes or to the advancement of science towards innovative application.

His current research covers 3 major initiatives that are developed through the Columbia Water Center. The Global Water Sustainability Initiative addresses global water scarcity and risk. The Global Flood Initiative is motivated by the need to predict, mitigate and manage floods at a global scale recognizing their climate drivers, and supply chain impacts. America's Water seeks to develop sustainable water management and infrastructure design paradigms for the 21st century recognizing the linkages between urban functioning, food, water, energy and climate. These programmatic initiatives are backed by research on systems level modeling of hydrology, climate, agronomy and economics.

Dr. Lall has pioneered the application of techniques from (a) nonlinear dynamical systems, (b) nonparametric methods of function estimation and their application to spatio-temporal dynamical systems, (c) Hierarchical Bayesian models, (d) systems optimization and simulation and (e) the study of multi-scale climate variability and change as an integral component of hydrologic systems.

He has published in journals that focus on hydrology, water resources, climate, physics, applied mathematics and statistics, risk, economic development, policy and management science. He is the current editor-in-chief of the journal "Water Security".

He has been engaged in high level public and scientific discussion through the media, the World Economic Forum, and with governments, foundations, development banks, and corporations interested in sustainability. He has served on several national and international panels. He was one of the originators of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, and is a past President of the Natural Hazards Focus Group of the American Geophysical Union.

He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was awarded the Henry Darcy Medal by the European Geosciences Union, and the Arid Lands Hydrology Award by the American Society of Civil Engineers.