Fieldwork in my own country

I was born and raised in India, yet it was my doctoral training in Copenhagen that finally took me to remote villages in Odisha, Telangana and Tamil Nadu: parts of my own country I had always known about, but never truly seen.

I went there to study the India Water Project, a partnership between the Denmark-based Poul Due Jensen Foundation and Sunlit Future, a solar energy provider based in Auroville, implemented by nine NGO partners across eight Indian states. Its objective was to bring clean drinking water to remote populations through solar-powered pumping systems. When it was launched in 2014, the idea was to install 100 pumps in 100 villages within a year. It was not that simple. It took three years of learning and troubleshooting, including returning to the first installations to repair and rebuild them, before the project reached its first 100 villages. Over the following decade it grew to 618 villages and more than 200,000 people. In 2024, the foundation ended its funding to turn its attention to Africa.

Coverage is not the same as change

The central lesson of my research is that the success of a project like this cannot be measured by coverage alone, in villages reached or taps installed. It depends on whether communities develop the social capacity to govern, finance and maintain a system long after the implementing organisations step back. These lessons are not confined to one project. They hold equally for India's national flagship schemes, the Jal Jeevan Mission for drinking water and the Swachh Bharat Mission for sanitation, whose progress is still largely counted in household connections made and toilets built. Taken together, they point towards a flexible framework for scaling what actually works, and what works is most often the social component: inclusive committees, fair contribution systems, and everyday routines of care that keep infrastructure alive. Where village committees were formed before the pumps arrived, with women and lower-caste households given real seats and real authority, systems were still running eight years later. Where installation came first and governance was an afterthought, technically functioning pumps became liabilities within two to three years.

In villages stratified by caste, class and gender, "community participation" is not a safeguard in itself. Left to default, governance structures tend to reproduce existing hierarchies. Dominant-caste households at the centre of the village capture decision-making and receive the most reliable supply, while Dalit and Adivasi hamlets on the periphery are reached last, if at all. This is elite capture, and it can occur in full compliance with a project's formal requirements. In one village I studied, a public well known for its clean water remained closed to Dalit residents, who were not permitted to come within 150 metres of it. Participation, I argue, has to be actively designed: through a minimum share of women on committees, caste-inclusive leadership, transparent village funds, and taps placed deliberately in peripheral hamlets.

Who carries the water

The heaviest cost of inadequate water and sanitation falls on women and girls. In rural India, more than half of women and adolescent girls spend four to five hours a day collecting water. Menstrual taboos can bar them from the nearest well, sending them to unsafe ponds, sometimes after dark, and the absence of toilets exposes them to daily indignity and risk. Every hour spent carrying water is an hour taken from school or paid work. Girls drop out, their opportunities narrow, and poverty is passed from one generation to the next.

This is why I resist treating grand challenges in silos. Water, sanitation, caste, gender, energy and livelihoods are entangled, and an intervention that addresses one in isolation tends to leave the others to undo it. The most important innovation of the India Water Project was not the solar pump but the governance model around it, built over decades by locally embedded NGOs, one of which now supports the Government of Odisha in implementing India's national rural water mission. I describe this relational, often invisible work as the ethical infrastructure of development. Without it, even the best technology remains socially fragile.

Close to industry

Before my PhD, I spent three years at the Indian School of Business working close to industry. I spoke with investors, development finance institutions, chief sustainability officers, urban planners and start-up founders, among many others, to build teaching cases from first-hand insight on the ground. The cases were written to teach students how to reason through dilemmas in which competing objectives cannot easily be reconciled: What is the problem? Who are the actors? What interests shape their decisions? What does each course of action cost, and for whom?

I co-authored six cases for Harvard Business Publishing and Ivey Publishing, two as first author. The one closest to my heart, Shakti Plastics: Enabling A Circular Plastics Value Chain, published by Ivey, won an award and is now taught internationally. I also designed the first sustainability elective for the flagship MBA at the Indian School of Business, Marketing for a Sustainable Planet, and an online course on the fundamentals of climate change for journalists covering COP26.

Alongside the cases, I coordinated sustainability research projects funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Environmental Defense Fund and EY, working with senior faculty, policymakers, corporations, civil society organisations and development practitioners.

• Opportunities to scale climate technologies in India · Environmental Defense Fund, 2021–2022. As lead researcher, I mapped the opportunity landscape for climate technology in India and helped convene executive roundtables with policymakers, development finance institutions, climate-tech investors and industry leaders. The work led to the white paper Opportunities to Scale Climate Technologies in India.
• Corporate climate action in India · EY, 2021–2022. As co-applicant and lead researcher, I studied the antecedents and consequences of climate change from the perspective of Indian CEOs, and co-authored two teaching cases and a final report for EY.
• Improving Indian diets through market systems · Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation planning grant, 2021–2022, with the University of Sheffield and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. I carried out a landscape analysis of farmer food markets and agricultural innovations for smallholder access to nutrient-dense foods. The planning grant was later followed by INFUSION, a five-year programme funded by the Gates Foundation and the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.

What I am working on now

I am a postdoctoral researcher at CBS, working on repair business models and infrastructures for the textile economy. The contract is short, so I am also, quietly and not so quietly, looking for my next long-term home.

Beyond the CV

I am a small-town Indian, and no, I am not the tech or finance bro the West seems to expect of me. Academia has been my chosen path since I was an ambitious undergraduate. One internship at an advertising agency was enough to make up my mind that I would never work in an industry that feeds on people's insecurities, in a culture where everyone breathes down everyone else's neck and the yelling never quite stops.

As for the parts of me that make me less of a productive, money-making machine and more of a human being, I dance. I write personal essays on Medium now and then. I have recently fallen for cosy reading groups. I am, unapologetically, a girl's girl. And my love for food is, frankly, erotic.