Scholars

Bhimraj is reading for a DPhil in Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. His research analyses the legal mechanisms that facilitate environmental injustice based on caste in Chennai city under the supervision of Prof. Liz Fisher.

Bhimraj holds an LLM from the South Asian University and a B.A.B.L (Hons.) from the Tamil Nadu Dr. Ambedkar Law University. He has cleared the University Grants Commission’s Junior Research Fellowship examination and was selected for the ‘Indian Equality Law Visiting Fellowship Programme’, jointly organised by the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. His research interests include environmental laws, anti-discrimination laws and Marxist studies.

Niharika’s research interest is in the environmental justice movement in India. Through the Phule scholarship, she aims to develop a framework studying environmental casteism – a distinct form of exclusionary practice keeping historically marginalised communities away from the climate justice movement. 

She is the first Savitribai Phule scholar at the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, Somerville College. Before joining the centre, she has worked in the development sector in India focusing on tribal and rural development, and climate justice. Niharika is an alumna of the Tata Institute for Social Sciences, Tuljapur where she completed her MSc in Sustainable Livelihoods and Natural Resource Governance. She worked at the BAIF Development Research Organisation in Pune – one of the oldest organisations in India working on rural development issues. She grew up in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh before moving to Delhi for her undergraduate education at Miranda House, Delhi University where she completed her BA in Sociology. 

At BAIF, Niharika coordinated projects in nine Indian states and worked with rural and tribal communities in remote parts of the country. She believes that the Indian development sector needs reform to be more inclusive. Her program at Oxford offers an interdisciplinary approach to study pressing environmental issues and she intends to use it for her research.

Karthik’s research interests include soft chemical routes to Lithium-ion battery cathodes and electrolytes. Previously he has worked on projects based on renewable energy for water treatment at Indian Institute of Science, photocatalytic properties of synthesized solids and has performed studies on Bismuth Oxyhalides

Apoorva is an ecologist, primarily interested in all aspects of human-animal interactions and applied conservation. Her DPhil research draws from interdisciplinary fields of natural and social sciences to investigate farmer-wildlife conflict and co-existence, crop losses and livelihood interventions in transitional forest landscapes. Her research is based out of the Central Western Ghats of Karnataka, India, alongside the marginal farmers of Indo-African Siddi community, local NGOs and government stakeholders. Her study adopts the UN Sustainable Development Goal 2 Zero Hunger and Goal 15 Life on Land.

She is currently an associate at the Linnean Society of London, an honorary member of the Indigenous Peoples’ and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs) Consortium and a steering committee member of the IUCN SSC Pigeon and Dove Specialist Group. Her past work includes community-based species conservation, animal movement ecology, bioacoustics studies and documenting traditional ecological knowledge, both in terrestrial as well as marine realms.

Apoorva holds a Masters in Ecology (2013) from Pondicherry University and is the second Indian woman to have received the Global Fellowship in Marine Conservation by Duke University. For her Master’s research, she was funded by the International Otter Survival Fund (IOSF) to study the conflict situation between Smooth-coated otters and fishermen, and associated socio-economics in the Cauvery River, India. After her Masters and stint at Duke, she received a follow-up grant by Oak Foundation to collaborate with Conservation International, Brazil and founded the Marine Conservation without Borders initiative with her colleagues at Bahia, Brazil.

On returning to India, Apoorva worked as a Research Associate at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) on the India Biodiversity Portal project. She then went on to work as a Research Assistant at the University of Lethbridge, Canada for a year to study the acoustic communication of the endemic Adelaide’s warbler in Puerto Rico. On her return, she found the need to facilitate field research in India, engage local communities and children in field ecology studies, and thus began the Curious Naturalists Initiative in the Western Ghats. She also collaborates as a research affiliate with the Wildlife Information Liaison Development (WILD) Society in India.

Alongside research, Apoorva is also an active participant at policy based global forums such as the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity- Conference of the Parties (UN CBD-COP) and Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) COP representing youth and indigenous communities for wildlife conservation. She is also a trained Natural History Illustrator and sketches the wonders of nature, which inspire her to keep going in the midst of all the socio-ecological crisis.

Gaurav is undertaking a DPhil research at the intersection of electric mobility and climate policy. His work looks at the political economy of transition to electric mobility in India. The research aim is to understand how various factors and entities related to the wider political economy of urban transport have led to the creation and shaping of various policies in respect of electric vehicles in India in the past 10 years.  

Gaurav is an urban and transport planner with over 8 years of experience of working on urban mobility issues in India in a variety of roles ranging from consulting to research and advocacy. Prior to starting his DPhil, he was leading the programme on sustainable mobility for Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi. He’s earlier also worked with Indian School of Business (ISB) and Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services (IL&FS). 

He holds an undergraduate degree in urban planning from School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi and an MSc in Transport Planning and Environment from Newcastle University, UK, for which he was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship. 

After finishing an MSc at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, Oxford University, and an MPhil in Development Studies at the Oxford Department of International Development, both with distinctions, I am now pursuing a DPhil in International Development.

I was awarded Somerville’s 2017 Principal’s Prize for academic excellence. My Masters at Oxford was funded by the Louis Dreyfus-Weidenfeld scholarship, while the MPhil-Dphil is supported by the university’s Indira Gandhi scholarship.

Prior to this, I worked for over 7 years as a journalist with a leading national newspaper The Hindu in Bangalore. I reported on topics ranging from higher education, technology and finance to more specialized focus areas such as the state of labour, work and wages of the vast urban working class in India. My occasional stints with reporting in rural areas got me interested in contemporary development theory. After this academic stint, I intend to return to the field of journalism with grounding and expertise in development studies. As a development expert, with the experience and know-how of mainstream journalism, I hope to be able to make vital interventions. My long-term goal is to be able to lead a team that can steer the agenda on development reporting, both in terms of grassroots reportage and incisive commentary.

My DPhil research focusses on the political economy of social protection programmes in India. It interrogates whether social sector schemes can ‘transform’ the social relations of production in village societies, and probes the determinants of such transformation. My research takes a comparative political economy approach to understanding transformative processes in rural India.