Speakers

Dr Balwant Singh Mehta is Professor at the Institute for Human Development (IHD), New Delhi. His work spans development economics, labour and gender studies, poverty, inequality, child well-being, education, and technology. He has authored 12 books, 20 monographs and more than 100 research articles in leading national and international journals. His contributions have earned him several honours, including the Amy Mahan International Fellowship (UPF, Spain), a Research Fellowship at SiRC (Singapore), the Emerging Researcher Award from IDRC (Canada) and a Post-Doctoral Fellowship from ICSSR. He is also an alumnus of the ILO Training Centre, Turin.  He has completed advanced training in labour economics, econometrics, statistics and machine learning from the University of Michigan, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the University of Southampton, the University of Amsterdam and IIITs in India. Dr Mehta has led over 60 research studies with major national and international organisations, including NITI Aayog, the Ministry of Labour and Employment, UNICEF, ILO, UNDP, IDRC, Harvard University, and the Asian Development Bank.  He serves as Associate Editor of The Indian Journal of Labour Economics and writes regularly for leading national dailies. His recent books that have received wide recognition include Inequality of Opportunity and Poverty in India Using a Machine Learning Approach (Springer Nature), Indian Youth’s Journey from Education to Decent Work (Springer Nature) and Future of Work: Opportunities and Challenges (Routledge).

Dhanya MB is an economist working as Fellow (Faculty) at VV Giri National Labour Institute. She has more than two decades of research experience in the domain of labour market studies and has done her PhD in Economics on the topic of Self-Employment through microfinance and Rural Women Empowerment (2004-2008). She is the Coordinator of the Centre for Labour Market Studies and Integrated Labour History Research Programme, two of the major research centres of the V.V. Giri National Labour Institute (VVGNLI). Ministry of Labour & Employment, Government of India deputed Dr Dhanya to look after the work of India’s G20 Presidency 2022-23 in addition to VVGNLI’s existing work from August 2022 to 2023. She has been involved in policy initiatives of the Government of India on various subjects such as Member of the Taskforce to study the rise of automation and future of work (2024), Working Group member for the National Chief Secretaries Conference (2024), Member of the Employment Working Group (EWG) of the G20 Indian Presidency 2023 and also Prepared G 20 Issue Paper on Gig and Platform Economy and Social Protection, Working Group member on ratification of ILO Convention-Forced Labour Protocol 2018, Drafting of National Employment Policy (2018-19), Member of Tripartite Working Group to facilitate the process of the ratification of the ILO convention No 87 & 98 (2013-14) to mention a few.

Gayatri Nair is Assistant Professor of Sociology, at the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi, India. Her research interests lie in urban informal labour with an emphasis on the question of caste, gender and technology. With a focus on political economy, she has published work that interrogates the role of caste and gender in shaping ‘traditional’ livelihoods and new forms of work specifically platform-based gig work; also detailing how workers organise. This work has appeared in journals such as Contemporary South Asia, Journal of South Asian Development and the Sociological Bulletin. Her recent book is 'Set Adrift; Capitalist Transformations and Community Politics Along Mumbai's Shore’ published by the Oxford University Press (2021).

Manujunath G. is presently Additional Labour Commissioner (Industrial Relations)-Government of Karnataka. Academically he is PhD from National Law School of India University, Master of Women’s Studies, M.A in Economics & B.A – Double Gold Medalist and First Rank holder from Bangalore University. He has been awarded with many national and international fellowships. He is specialized in Law against Sexual Harassment, Industrial Relations and Labour Law Jurisprudence, Informal Labour & Social Security, and Corporate Social Responsibility.

Anamitra Roy Chowdhury teaches economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. His areas of interest include development economics, labour economics, Indian economy and macroeconomics. He has published research articles in International Labour Review, ILO-Working Paper, Global Labour Journal, Economic and Political Weekly, Social Scientist, Canadian Journal of Development Studies and Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, among others. His book titled Labour Law Reforms in India: All in the Name of Jobs was published by Routledge in 2018.

Anita Gurumurthy is a founding member and Executive Director of IT for Change where she leads research and advocacy on data and AI governance, platform regulation, and feminist frameworks on digital justice. She is a Visiting Fellow at the UN University International Institute for Global Health and serves as an expert on various bodies – including the T20’s digital transformation track and the UN CSTD’s Working Group on Data Governance. Anita has been part of the High Level Committee of the NetMundial+10 under Brazil’s leadership, the UN Secretary-General’s 10-Member Group on Technology Facilitation, and the Paris Peace Forum’s working group on algorithmic governance. Anita is also a Board member of global justice organizations such as the ETC Group, and University centers such as the Tech & Policy Lab at the University of Western Australia. Anita contributes regularly to academic and media spaces.

Anupam Guha is an Assistant Professor at the Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies at IIT Bombay who primarily works on AI, Al policy, Al and labour. Before IITB he has worked from September 2017 to April 2019 as Senior Researcher at Comcast Research, working on computational linguistics/machine learning problems to make their systems respond to language centered around media. He worked with embedding systems, question answering, topic models, and gathering knowledge from human chatter. He has a PhD, batch of ’17, in computer science from the University of Maryland where he worked on multimodal language and vision Al systems and computational linguistics. In his dissertation he investigated coreferences of multimodal entities and events. His current work in Al policy is informed by a technical understanding of Al and its relationship with labour and capital. He works to expand the critical lens on Al from the current instrumental and normative frameworks to one informed by an immanent critique of the political economy of techno-social systems.

Samarth Gupta is an Assistant Professor of Economics at IIM Calcutta. His research interests are in the field of Industrial Organization. In his recent publication, he explored the role of bank branch expansion on entrepreneurship in rural India. 

Pradeep Kumar Choudhury is Assistant Professor of Education and Economics at Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and an Affiliate Associate at South Asia Institute, Harvard University, USA where he was a visiting Research Fellow in 2023-24. His research spans the field of development economics, with a focus on education. His recent research looks at the measurement and explanation of educational and learning inequalities, its interaction with climate, technology, and early life decisions. He graduated from University of Hyderabad and received his PhD in education economics from National University of Educational Planning and Administration, New Delhi.

Sovik Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Commerce and Management at St. Xavier’s University, Kolkata. He specializes in platform economics, energy economics, and development economics. He has contributed extensively to peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes of national and international repute. He is currently an Editor of the Journal of Innovation in Applied Natural Science (Indonesia) and an Editor at the Forum for Global Studies, India. His membership in professional bodies includes being a life member of The Indian Econometric Society, the Indian Economic Association, The Applied Economics Society, and the Bengal Economic Association, among others, as well as a member of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab.

Sunil Khosla is currently affiliated with the VIT-AP School of Social Sciences and Humanities, VIT-AP University, Amaravati, Andhra Pradesh (522237), India. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal. His primary research interests include poverty eradication, impact evaluation, food security, soil health, sustainable development goals, and broader issues in development economics.

Madhabendra Sinha is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Visva-Bharati University, India. Within research areas including open economy macroeconomics, development economics and applied econometrics; he published in reputed journals including Journal of Policy Modeling (Elsevier), Social Indicators Research (Springer), Economic Papers (Wiley), Studies in Economics and Finance (Emerald), Poverty and Public Policy (Wiley), Journal of Asian and African Studies (Sage) etc. He has conducted research / consultancy projects of ICSSR, Asian Development Bank etc. He acts as an Academic Editor of PLOS ONE (Scopus & SCIE) and an editorial board member of Humanities & Social Sciences Communications (Scopus & SSCI).

Shreya Bhattacharya is Research Director at the Center for Advanced Financial Research and Learning (CAFRAL). Previously, she was a Senior Research Analyst at the Digital Inclusion and Governance Lab (DIGLab) at William and Mary's Global Research Institute. She led impact evaluations focused on women's digital and financial inclusion and interoperable payment systems in Uganda, Malawi, Tanzania, and Nepal. She has also worked as an Economist at Amazon, specializing in urban labor markets, labor allocation, and behavioral economics. Shreya holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Houston. Her research interests are in Development Economics, Urban Economics, Political Economy, Digital Economics and Behavioral Economics.  She was a visiting PhD Fellow at the United Nations World Development Research Institute (UNU-WIDER) in Helsinki, Finland.

Manmeet Kaur received her PhD in Economics from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, where her research focused on the entrepreneurial and innovation dimensions of digital and fintech ecosystems in India. Her research interests lie at the intersection of economics, fintech (or finance), entrepreneurship, and digital technology, with a particular emphasis on startup ecosystems and innovation dynamics in emerging economies. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at IIT Kanpur under the Fellowship for Academic and Research Excellence (FARE).

Mansi Kumar is a Ph.D. candidate at the Urban Studies Institute, Georgia State University. Her doctoral research explores the spatial (im)mobility of women beauty professionals working with digital platforms in Mumbai. She investigates how platform regulations, socio-cultural norms, and urban infrastructure shape women’s everyday movement through the city, while also highlighting the forms of agency they exercise within these constraints. Her dissertation is supported by the Society of Woman Geographers’ Evelyn L. Pruitt Fellowship and the AYSPS Dissertation Fellowship.

Mohammed Anfas is a PhD Scholar in Economics at the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, India. His research aims to explore the labour processes on gig platforms in India, with a broader objective of uncovering evolving labour processes within the capitalist production system and providing evidence-based insights for shaping public policies pertaining to the gig economy. He has been conducting field investigations among food delivery and ride-hailing gig workers in Kerala, India. Additionally, he has worked with different organisations such as the WageIndicator Foundation, Reshaping Work, and Platform Work Inclusion Living Lab.

Taronish Pastakia is a third-year PhD student in the Area of Innovation and Management in Education (IME) at the Ravi J. Matthai Centre for Educational Innovation (RJMCEI), IIM Ahmedabad. His educational background is in Psychology and Cognitive Science. Prof. Ambrish Dongre is a faculty at the RJMCEI, IIM Ahmedabad. His research interests are in development economics with special focus on education and health.

Kadambari is a PhD scholar at University of Delhi. Her work is centered around the spatiality of sex work. Her previous work focused on the tourist guides of Delhi, and helped draft the Writ Petition in Government Approved Tourist Guides Association (GATGA) versus Union of India. As a researcher, she is interested in studying different types of informal labour. As part of her professional experience, she has worked with the survivors of domestic violence, youth, children, sex workers’ collectives and in the post-disaster situation of the flash floods of 2013 in Uttarakhand. In her leisure time, she likes to paint.

Chandrima Bhattacharya is currently pursuing Ph.D. full-time at International Institute of Information Technology(IIIT), Bangalore. She is working on her thesis using principles of economics in the context of the cross-border online Gig work. She has completed her Bachelors in Economics from Presidency College, Calcutta and Masters in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Prior to doing a PhD, she has 16+ years of experience in the Big Four consulting firms, in their transfer pricing division. She has presented at conferences and seminars as part of her PhD and professional career. She has also co-authored articles.

Shreyashi Mitra works as a PhD research scholar in the Department of Economics at The University of Burdwan. Her research focuses on development economics with a particular emphasis on digital inequalities. She is skilled in analytical software such as EViews, SPSS, STATA, R and Python. She has presented her research work at major academic platforms, including the 24th IASSI international conference. She is also a multiple-time UGC-NET qualifier and has cleared WBSET, GATE (AIR 255), and NE-SLET. Outside of academics, she enjoys travelling, gardening, reading and exploring new cultural spaces which enrich her perspective as a social science researcher.

Anu Rao is a Research Scholar at IIT Jodhpur specialising in cybersecurity, optimization modeling, and digital resilience in smart city ecosystems. She has published and presented her work at leading international conferences such as ICIS, and AMCIS. She has contributed actively to the global IS community as a reviewer for ICIS, AMCIS, ECIS, MISQ, and JORS. Anu holds advisory and leadership roles, including serving on the Executive Board of SIG OSRA (AIS group) and participating in AIS doctoral consortia and mentoring programs. She is also a recipient of AIS, and APORS scholarships, conference travel grants, and the MHRD GATE Fellowship. Beyond academia, she has worked on consulting and data analytics projects through virtual internships with BCG and KPMG. Her broader research interests span cybersecurity governance, digital trust, and cyber-physical infrastructures.

Bikash Padhan is a PhD scholar at the Department of HSS, IISER Mohali. His research focuses on the emerging transformations in the world of work, particularly in the context of gig work and digitalisation. He draws on labour process theory to analyse the restructuring of labour relations, workplace control, and worker autonomy in digitally mediated employment.

Satya Oza is a fourth-year doctoral candidate at the School of Interdisciplinary Humanities and Social Sciences, Ahmedabad University. For his thesis, he is studying precarity and agency among gig rickshaw drivers in Ahmedabad, using ethnographic methods. His other research interests include urban informality, labour, housing, technology and transport. He has also worked in research institutions on urban issues such as informal migration, rehabilitation and resettlement and informal housing. 

Debalina Roy is a Research Scholar in Economic Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi. Her research examines the intersections of economy and society in contemporary India, with a focus on informal labour and service economies. Her PhD explores how economic processes, labour practices, and value creation are being reorganised around marriage in post-reform India.

Rohan Yadav is a Ph.D. scholar in Economics at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai. His research focuses on development and energy economics, particularly the socioeconomic impacts of rural electrification and access to infrastructure on household welfare and demographic outcomes. He holds an M.Sc. in Physics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, and a B.Sc.(Hons) in Physics from Banaras Hindu University (BHU), Varanasi.

Anjali Chauhan is a feminist researcher and writer based in Delhi, India. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Political Science at the University of Delhi. Her doctoral research is an ethnographic study that interrogates neoliberalism and its impact on women garment workers in Delhi-NCR, with a focus on the intersections of gender, labour, and state politics. She was awarded a full-term Doctoral Fellowship by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (2022–23) for her ongoing research. She has written widely across academic and public platforms, with contributions to Economic and Political Weekly, Journal of Gender & Development, Asia Labour Review, Journal of Gender, Place & Culture, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, The Telegraph, Deccan Herald, Scroll, Frontline Magazine, Women Writing, among others.

Jayati chatterjee is a fourth-year PhD research scholar in economics at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in IIT Madras, in Chennai, India. She is interested in the area of development economics. She is currently working on her PhD thesis, which focuses on small firms, gender, and digitalisation in India. She published a book chapter in "Strengthening the Ecosystem of Vibrant MSMEs for Resilient Growth in Asia and the Pacific," published by the ADB and ADBI. She also has one publication from her prior work.

Kirtika Trehan is a research scholar and Teaching Associate at the Department of Social Work, University of Delhi, with a focus on conflict resolution education. She collaborates with NGOs like Muheem, working to empower marginalized women and children through education and community development. With over six years of experience in social development, she has also served as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sharda University for three years. Her research and practice emphasize women’s empowerment, digital literacy, and inclusive education in underserved communities.

Aishwarya Prakash is a PhD scholar at the Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Thiruvananthapuram. She has completed my bachelor's and master's in Economics from the Banaras Hindu University. She has also completed an M.Phil. in Applied Economics from CDS. Her research interests lie in understanding social hierarchies, economic institutions, and the intersections of caste, class, and identity in India. She takes a mixed-method approach to her research. Her work critically examines how structural inequalities shape access to resources and opportunities. She is committed to scholarship that challenges dominant narratives and engages with issues of justice and equity in meaningful ways. She also contributes regularly to popular media platforms like The Indian Express and The Scroll.

Rashmi Pal is Ph.D. Scholar in Department of Education, University of Delhi, Delhi. She has completed her B.El.Ed. from the University of Delhi and her M.Ed. and M.Phil. in Education from the Department of Education at the University of Delhi. She is interested in Education and Gender Studies. She has attended workshops from different institutions. She has been a part of the Major Project as a Research Assistant in the Department of Education, which was funded by the IMPRESS Scheme, ICSSR-MHRD. Her experience also includes serving as a Field Investigator in Minor Projects. She has also presented her research at different National and International Conferences. With this, she has published her papers in various esteemed journals.

Bhavana Komma is a PhD research scholar at GITAM (Deemed to be University), Visakhapatnam, and her work focuses on the intersections of digitalisation, gender, and economic participation in India. Her doctoral research explores how the rapid spread of digital technologies is shaping women’s access to opportunities, inclusion, and everyday economic activities across varied socio-spatial contexts. Her broader academic interests encompass digital inequality and the economic and political inclusion of women. Through her research, she contributes to ongoing debates on inclusive digital development in India and seeks to support evidence-based policymaking aimed at reducing gendered inequalities.