BRIEF DESCRIPTIONS OF CANDIDATES FOR INSEE ELECTION 2008Candidate for President
Sudarshan Iyengar
I am trained in Economics. Ph.D. thesis was on Economics of Irrigation. I have worked and published on land use and status and use of common property resources. I have studied, evaluated and supported organisations working on natural resource development and Management. With this experience I have gained some insights in ecological and environmental economics. I was Professor and Director of Gujarat Institute of Development Research, Ahmedabad and Centre for Social Studies, Surat, supported by the ICSSR. Presently I am Vice Chancellor, Gujarat Vidyapeeth, founded by Mahatma Gandhi in 1920, for training youth to work for sustainable rural development based on Gandhian principles.
INSEE has established well at national and international levels. It should now grow beyond a professional network supporting only academic work. In coming years we need to influence national development policies. Environmental governance is still weak in the country. INSEE should continue to hold result yielding roundtables with all stakeholders including political institutions, governments, industry, farmers and citizens. INSEE should in coming decade evolve into a network that helps building research and action capacities in regional languages. The network should work to introduce ecological economics in school and university curricula. I will try to work in these areas and direction.
Candidates for Executive CommitteePurnamita Dasgupta
I am currently Associate Professor, Ford Foundation Chair in Environmental and Resource Economics, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. I joined the emerging discipline of environmental economics as an M Phil student (1991). Since then, I have been teaching and conducting research on environmental and natural resource economics for almost two decades on various issues such as valuation of ecosystem services; poverty, conservation and access to natural resources; institutional reforms for managing ecosystems, and climate change. I held the L.M. Singhvi Visiting Professorship at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, UK in 2007.I am a life member of INSEE. INSEE has been instrumental in cultivating my interest in Ecological Economics. Research on resource - environmental systems requires interdisciplinary skills. My own research has benefited from several sciences such as ecology, epidemiology, forestry, meteorology and sociology. Promotion of INSEE participation in national and international programmes, particularly in policy circles, requires some emphasis. INSEE has made a crucial beginning in bringing together researchers across disciplines, and I wish to further its cause in promoting interaction between the ecological sciences and the social sciences, and between scholars and practitioners, for ensuring a sustainable development pathway.
Deshmukh, Bijlee
(Current EC member)
<Description not received>
Nilanjan Ghosh
I am an applied economist and an econometrician by training, specializing in environmental and resource economics, and commodity markets. Presently, I head the research and publications initiatives at MCX Academia of Economic Research (MAER), a research centre set up by Multi Commodity Exchange of India Limited. My doctorate is from IIM Calcutta. I have been the Lead Author for the chapter “Our Future Today” in UNEP’s flagship project, Global Environmental Outlook 4, and also edited a book “Scenarios and Indicators for Sustainable Development” with Prof. Joachim Spangenberg. I have been the Joint Secretary of the Indian Society for Ecological Economics for 2006-08.The immediate need for INSEE is to work for the success of the forthcoming biennial conference. The post-conference proceedings publication is also another important activity. There is an active need to spur up publications activities of INSEE, first through the publication of a journal and second the publication of a textbook in ecological economics, in the Indian context. There is also to increase the membership base and to diversify the membership profile, as a majority of the members are economists. I plan to bring in more ecological scientists, social scientists, corporate members and students into the fold.
Kinsuk Mitra
President, Winrock International India
<Description not received>Nandan Nawn
Since 2001, I have been teaching at National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata. I offer the LLB students courses in Economics, Law and Economics, and Ecology, Policy and Law. The latter attempts to offer critical insights to the study and analysis of society-ecology interaction. My formal interaction with nature/ecology dates back to my MPhil dissertation on ‘Trade Policy as a Tool for Controlling Environmental Degradation’ in 1997 [from Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University]. My ongoing PhD thesis is on ‘A Comparative Study of Modern Chemical Based Agriculture and Organic farming in Terms of Sustainability’,INSEE’s mandate includes dissemination of research outcomes and its policy implications, and also the promotion of curriculum that overlaps both natural and social sciences. My foremost task would be to work on the latter agenda. I believe that for ecological sensitivity to be part of the culture, the mode must be an interdisciplinary one and needs to spread at different levels including undergraduate education. Being associated with a university that imparts professional legal education integrating other social science subjects, I believe that I am in a position to initiate this activity. This will increase the membership of the society as well.
Pranab Mukhopadhyay
I am an Economist at the South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics and on the faculty of Goa University's Economics department. I hold a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and my areas of research interest are environment, development and macroeconomics. I have published in Environment and Development Economics, Economic and Political Weekly and am a co-editor of the volume Promise, Trust and Evolution: Managing the Commons of South Asia (with Rucha Ghate and Narpat S. Jodha, published by OUP, Clarendon, 2008).As a life member of INSEE, I would like the society to continue to promote research, training and policy dissemination in areas critical to the environment and social well-being. INSEE should organise more specially designed training programmes for members, faculty and researchers in areas outside their own disciplines. This would help in linking their own expertise with that of scholars from other disciplines and promote greater inter-disciplinary research.
R. Parthasarathy
I am currently Director, Gujarat Institute of Development Research, Ahmedabad. I have both research and teaching interests. I explore relations between natural resource management and social distributions of equity, economic development and impacts of policy and development organizations. Exploratory studies on social and economic concepts and the impacts of scientific research on public discourses relating to environmental problems are being also of interest. This focus also relates the impacts of institutional relations on the management of irrigation and river basin and in the context of fisheries and forests. Currently, I am also leading a Tribal Resource and Research Centre at GIDR. Besides memberships in several committees, I was a Shastri Faculty Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia, Canada and a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California, Berkeley, under the World Bank aided Post-doctoral research fellowship in Environmental Economics. I also teach Environmental Economics and Natural Resources Management to Post-graduate and Graduate students and guide dissertations at CEPT University, Ahmedabad. Besides supporting and improvising the many important current activities of INSEE, I would like INSEE to launch a journal and encourage multi and trans-disciplinary research through small grants.Seema Purushottaman
My academic journey in ecological economics began in 1988 and by 2000, it entered a phase of adaptive, need based research. My research questions became trysts with the argument: sustainability for tackling poverty. Thus I turned to areas where economic policies or regulations could make a favourable dent in natural resource management, and hence poverty. Focus has been on interactions between natural resources and ecosystem people, the state and/or profit seekers. My current engagement is with interdisciplinary research collaborating with colleagues from various aspects of ecology to understand what conservative use and management of forests, land and water resources means to an egalitarian society.
My team at ATREE has been working in the socio-ecological systems of production landscapes, currently focussing on how perverse incentives drive unsustainable land use and agrarian distress. Insights from these case studies could add new dimensions to the INSEE newsletter. ATREE has an interdisciplinary PhD program in Conservation Science and is establishing an academy of sustainability studies to help equitable conservation action through capacity building for integration of vertical and horizontal tiers involved. INSEE could be part of relevant programs here or disseminate learning from this unique initiative.Amita Shah
Trained as economist, I am presently a faculty member at Gujarat Institute of Development Research in Ahmedabad. My research over the past 15 years has focused on evolving a holistic perspective of development wherein sustainability of natural resources assumes a central role. The major areas of my research work include sustainable management of land and water resources; natural resources-poverty interface; valuation of dry land ecosystems/protected areas; promotion of sustainable agriculture; and impact of agricultural trade on environment.I have been actively involved in the activities of INSEE; organised a training programme on Watershed Development, served as the returning office for INSEE-election in 2004; coordinating a theme on Agriculture in the last ISEE-conference, organised by INSEE. INSEE should now take up the following: (i) Widening the net of training programmes by linking up with the UGC, Industry Associations, and the National as well as State level Institutions for Public Administration. (ii) Building closer linkages with other academic associations such as agriculture economics, water resources management, forest management, and trade & industrial management by creating formal spaces within their conferences/ important meetings, etc. (iii) periodically informing the policy makers on ecological/environmental implications of major policy initiatives by forming working groups of experts.
Madhu Verma
I am an Environmental Economist working as Professor - Faculty of Environment and Development Economics at IIFM, Bhopal. My Ph.D. is in the area of industrial economics and post doctoral research in the area of wetland valuation from UMass, Amherst and on water resource valuation and accounting at U.C. Berkeley, USA. My area of interest includes economic valuation, natural resource accounting and conservation and development finance and conduct action and policy research. I consider my most important contribution to be the work for the state of Himachal Pradesh on Economic Valuation of Forest Resources which led to imposition of an ecological cess in the state when the forest area is diverted for non forestry sector.
I have been associated with INSEE since its inception. I see INSEE becoming a body of experts who have an eco-centric approach to development and are able to offer holistic solutions. I wish to rope in more experts from environmental law, ecology, sociology, statistics, finance and practitioners from various sectors, so as to create a team of multidisciplinary experts to offer training, research, consulting and teaching activities. This will achieve the objectives of capacity building, analyzing and offering solutions and at the same time generating monetary resources for INSEE to take forward its mission.