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.

N C Narayanan's most intimate collaborators are his PhD students and some of their titles are listed below

Ongoing

• Gautam Ganapathy – Public water utility reforms in India: The Case of Kerala Water Authority

• Paresh Chhajed – Understanding adoption of faecal sludge management (FSM) for sanitation service delivery in small towns in India.

• Sruthi Pillai – Emerging forms of environmental governance to address water pollution in small towns

• Ranjith K (Co-Guide) –Scientized Nature and Environmental Justice: A study of Environmental Movements in western Ghats, Kerala

• Swaran (Co-Guide) - Social and Environmental Determinants of Nutri Cereals Cultivation and its effects on food security.

• Biwanath Sinha – Scaling up issues of systems for rice intensification (SRI)

• Bharat Kakade- Watershed management projects in India: An assessment of the institutional models.

Completed

• Neelam Rana – Persistence of Centralised Imagination A Study of Policy Process of Urban Sanitation in India.

• Neha Singh - Political Economy of Water Transfers in Udaipur, Rajastan

• Lekshmy Sukumaran - Scope of Bamboo as an Alternate Construction Material for Housing in Kerala

• Soma KP (Co-Guide) – Genderscapes and Natural Resources Policy Regimes in South Rajasthan: A Feminist Political Ecology Perspective

• Vivek K (Co-Guide) - Technical, Financial and Policy Issues for Decentralised Solar PV Intergration in Kerala