The CDPM consists of IIMU faculty having deep interest in development-oriented research and teaching. The following faculty members are part of the team.
Centre for Development Policy and Management
Saurabh Gupta is a sociologist and social anthropologist by training. At present he co-heads the Centre for Development Policy and Management at the Indian Institute of Management, Udaipur (IIMU). He has previously held academic positions at the Hans Ruthenberg Institute, University of Hohenheim, Germany (2011-17), and the Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), UK (2006-11). He has worked as a visiting faculty in international development at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London. He has research experience in South Asia on issues relating to watershed development, natural resources management, state-NGO relationships, governance, and welfare policies. Saurabh has done extensive fieldwork on agricultural transformation in Ethiopia and Ghana, and sustainable livelihoods for Abaca producers in the Philippines. His current research focuses on sustainability-driven entrepreneurship in agri-business sector in India. He is the author of the book ‘Politics of Water Conservation: Delivering development in rural Rajasthan’ (Springer International, 2016), and his research has been published in journals such as the World Development, Development and Change, Development Policy Review, Journal of South Asian Development, Sustainability, Food Security, Water Alternatives, Journal of Cleaner Production, and Sustainable Production and Consumption.
Saurabh received his PhD in Development Studies from the University of London, UK. He holds an MA degree in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
Research Specialisation: Governance, Welfare Policies, Natural Resources Management, Agricultural Transformation, Rural Livelihoods, Social Enterprise, NGOs and Civil Society
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Organizational Behavior and Human Resources Management
Dina Banerjee is a behavioural scientist with sociology as her mother discipline. At present she co-heads the Centre for Development Policy and Management at the Indian Institute of Management, Udaipur (IIMU). Before IIMU, she worked as a faculty in the Department of Sociology and the Organizational Development and Leadership Program, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, USA (2011-2015), and as a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Engineering Education, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA (2009-2011). Her current development-oriented research projects are threefold. First, via an extensive field work in five tea estates of Assam, she explores work-life experiences of the women contractual tea plantation workers. At the intersection of gender, tribal identity, and poverty, the purpose of this project is to delve into the coping mechanisms in the face of severe adversities and the dynamics of agency thereby.
Second, she studies the impact of casteism within the science, technology, engineering, and mathematic (STEM) academia in India, focusing specifically on the attrition and retention-related experiences of the Dalit scholars. And third, Dina examines the interplay of gender, caste, and class in the context of organizational leadership in India. By means of in-depth interviews with multiple Dalit women who hold eminent leadership positions in various organizations , this study investigates the challenges that leaders face and how they navigate and negotiate their ways through leadership expectations vis-à-vis gender, caste, and class identities.
Her papers are published in journals like Personnel Review, Gender, Work, and Organization, Journal of Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies, Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, The Journal of Leadership Education, Sociological Viewpoints, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, Reflective Practice: International and Multidisciplinary Perspectives, International Journal of Contemporary Sociology, and International Journal of Contemporary Sociology: A Discussion Journal of Contemporary Ideas and Research.
Dina did her PhD in Sociology from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. Her first Masters is in Sociology (specializing in Industry, Labour, and Organization) from the University of Calcutta, Kolkata. Her second Masters is in Public Relations from the Rajendra Prasad Institute of Management & Communications, Mumbai, India. And her third Masters is in Sociology (specializing in Gender) from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA.
Research Specialisation: Gender, Marginalization, Intersectionality, Trauma, Labour Market, Career, Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Identity, Agency-Structure Interaction, and Work-Life Experiences.
Operations Management, Quantitative Methods and Information Systems
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Ujjwal Das is currently an Associate Professor in the OM, QM & IS area of IIMU. His academic discipline is Statistics. His research areas include analysis of missing data, inflated categorical data, time to event data, high-dimensional data; personalized medicine, semi-parametric regression modelling. He has a keen interest in the applications of statistical methodologies in social sciences. Before joining IIMU, Ujjwal served as a senior research statistician in Phase I drug development of Abbvie Inc. in North Chicago.
He holds an M.Sc. in Statistics from Calcutta University, a PhD in Mathematical Sciences from Northern Illinois University. Prior to work in the pharma industry, he was a post-doctoral research fellow in University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Research Specialisation: Application of statistical methods, machine learning techniques, natural language processing, and large datasets.
Economics
Tushar Agrawal is a faculty in the economics area at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Udaipur. Prior to joining IIM Udaipur, he worked as an Associate Fellow at the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), New Delhi. His areas of research include issues related to education and labour market in India. His current research focuses on inequality in India.
Tushar received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. in Development Studies from Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai.
Research Specialisation: education, labour, inequality and gender.
Finance and Accounting
Nidhi Aggarwal is an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Udaipur. Her research interests include market design, market regulation, derivatives market and impact evaluation. At present, one of the key areas of her research focuses on agricultural markets in India. Her papers have been published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Journal of Financial Markets, Journal of Futures Markets and the Economic and Political Weekly. In the past, she has worked extensively on policy issues related to Indian equity market and commodity markets. She has also been associated as a consultant for the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India.
She obtained her Ph.D and M.Sc in Economics from Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai.
Research Specialisation: Agricultural transformation, commodity markets and rural development.
Business Policy and Stratgy
Pradeep is a faculty at the Indian Institute of Management, Udaipur in the Business Policy and Strategy Area. He has experience of engaging with marginalised communities in India and Australia. His research interests are in the area of social entrepreneurship, community engagement, resource mobilisation, organizational stigma and sustainability. He focuses on research that aims to improve the livelihood of rural poor. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University, he explored the role of social enterprises in enhancing social cohesion in Australian communities. Pradeep’s works have been published in journals such as Organization Studies, Journal of Business Venturing, Information & Organization, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, and others.
Pradeep received his Ph.D. from Indian Institute of management Kozhikode.
Research Specialisation: Social entrepreneurship, community engagement, organizational stigma.
Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
Harsh Kumar Jha is an Associate Professor in the OBHRM group at IIM Udaipur. He has previously held academic positions at Cardiff University, UK and Newcastle University, UK. His research interests predominantly lie in the areas of organizational theory, organizational cognition and interface of business and society. Specifically, these interests can be divided into two broad overlapping streams of research: first, exploring how actors respond to environmental pressures and engage in legitimacy construction, and second, a set of developing interests in social inclusion, entrepreneurship and extreme contexts. Empirically, his research explores a variety of settings, such as professional occupations (law, health care and education), media scandals and extreme contexts (human-animal conflict and subsistence entrepreneurship). Methodologically, he has expertise in both qualitative and quantitative approaches, and is particularly interested in mixed methods research, especially integrating inductive qualitative analysis with machine learning tools (e.g. topic modeling), network analysis tools (e.g. correspondence analysis) and QCA.
Prof Jha’s research has been presented at various international conferences, including AOM and EGOS. Further, his work has been awarded Best International Paper Award (runner up) at AOM 2021; was one of the three finalists for That’s Interesting! Award at EGOS 2022; and was nominated for Carolyn B. Dexter Award at AOM 2020. He is also a member of the editorial board at the Journal of Management Studies and the Journal of Professions and Organizations.
Prior to joining academia, he received a PhD in Management from University of California – Irvine, USA, an MSc in Management Research from University of Oxford, PGDM from SCMHRD, Pune, and BA(Hons) in Sociology from Hindu College, Delhi University. He also worked for more than six years in social care, consumer goods and telecom industries in the UK and India.
Research Specialisation: Discourse Analysis, Social Movements, Professional Occupations, Entrepreneurship, Corporations and Society, Intersectionality, Class.
Shaurya Gupta is an experienced development sector professional specializing in education, program management, and monitoring & evaluation. Currently, he serves as the Centre Manager at the Centre for Development Policy and Management at IIM Udaipur, where his work focuses on development policy, school education, poverty alleviation programs, and development research. Shaurya has collaborated with various government bodies and academic institutions, significantly contributing to research and policy development. His previous roles include impactful work with the University of Leeds, Vidya Bhawan Society, and Seva Mandir. He holds a Master's degree in Development from Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, and a Bachelor's in Journalism from Makhanlal Chaturvedi National University of Journalism, Bhopal.
Research Specialisation: Program monitoring and evaluation, NGOs and social sector management, school education, and early childhood education.
