

Chetan Choithani is an Assistant Professor in the Inequality and Human Development Programme of the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS). Prior to his present employment at NIAS, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Urban Studies Institute of Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University.
Chetan obtained his PhD in Development Geography from the University of Sydney in 2016 as a recipient of the Australian Government’s competitive Prime Minister Postgraduate Award. Before his PhD, he completed a Master of Population Studies from the International Institute of Population Sciences, and a Master of Arts in Globalisation and Labour from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.
The broad disciplinary domain of Chetan’s work is development studies. Within this area, his research and teaching interests include migration and urbanisation, food and nutrition, livelihoods, gender, and social policy and how they relate to development, particularly in the Indian context. He has published his work on these issues. He is the author of the book Migration, Food Security and Development: Insights from Rural India, published by Cambridge University Press. His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in leading journals including World Development, Global Food Security, Gender, Place and Culture, Economic Geography, Geographical Research, Journal of Peasant Studies, and Economic and Political Weekly. Chetan has done extensive fieldwork in remote parts of India, and his research uses primary, field-based insights to engage with and inform larger issues of development.
Chetan has received competitive funding for his research. He is currently working on two research projects. He is the co-investigator on a research project that looks at the relationship between climate change, agrarian livelihoods and labour migration in India, funded by Columbia University President’s Global Innovation Fund. Second project, funded by Australian Consulate in Chennai through Australia Alumni Grant Scheme, examines the interlinkages between migration, urbanization and food security in India. Prior to this, he was involved in two major research projects. The first of these included Australian Research Council funded project on food security in India with colleagues from Australian and Indian academic institutions. The second project, funded by Dutch National Science Foundation, looked at urbanisation and development linkages at the lower echelons of India’s urban hierarchy, at rural-urban transition zones, and lives and livelihoods at these transition places with colleagues from University of Amsterdam and Georgia State University.