People Page

Kalaiarasi Ka Sa has a Masters in Climate science and Policy from TERI University, New Delhi and a Bachelors in Geography from Presidency College, Chennai. Her major area of interest includes Climate change adaptation, disaster management and water resource management. Before joining NIAS, she was associated with IORA Ecological Solutions, New Delhi, as research associate, working on initiatives to build strategies to execute Incentive Based Mechanisms (IBM) in forest resource management and gender mainstreaming in conservation of forest resources.

Ishita holds a Master’s in Public Policy from St Xavier’s College and BSc Economics (Hons) from Symbiosis School of Economics. Previously, she was associated with the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay where she worked on a project studying the effects of climate change on the fishing community in Maharashtra. Her research interests include labour, migration and livelihood studies.

Paul Thomas has completed his Integrated Master's in Economics from the University of Hyderabad. He is interested in using interdisciplinary approaches to study societies, specifically the holistic wellbeing of individuals. He likes to play badminton in the evenings.

Pallavi Krishnappa holds a Master’s degree in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Before this, she worked as a researcher looking at the role of fake news and misinformation in election campaigns. Her academic interests currently lie at the intersection of digital technology, gender and questions of access. She also likes to read fiction in her free time.

Kritika has completed her Master's in Social Work (Livelihoods and Social Entrepreneurship) from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and MPhil in Planning and Development from IIT Bombay. For her MPhil thesis, she worked on Urban Commons and Bourgeois Environmentalism. Her research interests include livelihoods, gender, environmentalism and climate change.

Nisar Kannangara is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Inequality and Human Development Programme, NIAS. His research areas include political anthropology, ethnography of housing, and the autonomous adaptation of climate change. He received his PhD in Anthropology from Pondicherry University in 2019. Before joining NIAS, he was a Project Associate with the Kerala Cultural Museum, Directorate of Culture, Trivandrum, Kerala.

Swati Narayan’s research focuses on the analysis of human development and social policies from an inter-disciplinary perspective, across South Asia and especially in India. Prior to NIAS, she was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Development. Previously, she has worked extensively as an independent researcher with a range of international and national non-government organisations and managed South Asian research at Oxfam GB.

She has completed her PhD at the Tata Institute of Social Science (TISS), Mumbai. Previously she has Masters' degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London and TISS. She is also an alumna of the Cambridge Advanced Programme in Rethinking Development Economics (CAPORDE) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

For more than a decade, she has also been an activist with a range of civil society organisations.

Chetan Choithani is an Associate Professor in the Inequality and Human Development Programme of the School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS). Prior to 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, Urban Studies, 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 three funded research projects. He is the Principal Investigator (PI) on a research project, funded by Foundation for Ecological Security, that examines how India’s rural-urban transition that involves transformations of former rural geographies into urban centers affects common natural resources in the country. Second, he is the Co-PI on a research study that looks at the relationship between agrarian livelihoods, climate change and labour migration in India, supported by Columbia University President’s Global Innovation Fund. Third, he is also working with a colleague at the University of Amsterdam on understanding whether and how climate change and rising humid heat affects farm labour in India. He has also received competitive Australia Alumni Grant Scheme award by Australian Consulate in Chennai for a research study that examined the interlinkages between migration, urbanization and food security in India. Previously, 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.