Dr AMIR BAZAZ
Lead – Practice, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), India
Amir Bashir Bazaz holds a PhD in Management, with a specialization in Public Systems. He works on issues at the intersection of economics, climate change mitigation and sustainable development. He has substantial experience of working with various top-down & bottom-up economy-energy-environment modelling frameworks/architectures. His current research interests are low carbon societies/infrastructure, climate change adaptation, urban-climate change linkages. Amir started his career in the manufacturing industry, working across functional responsibilities of projects, production planning/control and engineering. He has been the Expert Consultant to the Ministry of Environment & Forests, Government of India for the National Communication to the UNFCCC project and taught courses in Development & Environmental Economics during his academic engagements.
Dr SUDESHNA MITRA
Senior Consultant – Academics & Research, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), India
Sudeshna Mitra is faculty at IIHS. She works on the political economy of land and real estate, in urban and regional economic development, and urban governance. Her research looks at questions of land use, land values, land based financing, tenure arrangements and land rights, in public- private development partnerships and across different scales of governance. At IIHS, she has been involved in a project which reviewed the National Land Records Modernisation Programme, with a focus on land recording practices and institutional, legal and procedural reforms in the states of Karnataka, Bihar, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat. She is currently involved with research on periurban land dynamics in Bidadi, Bengaluru, and the imperatives and interventions in municipal financing. Previously, she has undertaken research on the periurban land dynamics, emerging from state government strategies to attract investors, in Kolkata and Hyderabad.
At IIHS, Sudeshna is currently coordinating the Urban Fellows Programme, a nine month post- graduate inter- disciplinary taught fellowship. Before IIHS, she taught as Visiting Lecturer at Cornell University, as Tutor at Cornell in Washington (Public Policy) and as visiting faculty at the School of Planning and Architecture (SPA). She has taught courses on Urban Theory, Planning in the Urban, Urban and Regional Economic Development, Land Economics and Locational Theories, International Institutions, Quantitative and Qualitative Techniques of Policy Analysis and studio based planning exercises.
Before Cornell, Sudeshna worked as a consultant and advised city government authorities, parastatals and infrastructure development bodies in India and South East Asia. She worked on market analyses, demand modeling and financial feasibility analyses for Science Parks, Special Economic Zones, Infrastructure Corridors, Airports and Greenfield and Brownfield Townships. She also worked for the Cornell Cooperative Extension, New York State, where an impact model she co- developed to monetise social impacts of the Extension’s work, was used as a part of the municipal budgetary review process.
She is a member of the Board of Studies, for the undergraduate planning programme at SPA. She serves as an external moderator for graduate courses at the University of Western Cape, South Africa. She is also on the Apoorva Rastogi Fellowship Committee for undergraduate women students at SPA.
Sudeshna completed her PhD in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University. She has a Masters in Planning from Cornell and a Masters in Urban Planning from the SPA. She has a Bachelors in Physical Planning from SPA.
Dr SHOBHA ANANDA REDDY
Senior Consultant – Urban Practitioners’ Programme, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), India
Shobha has over 15 years of experience with Environmental Science being the subject all through academics as well as her work expertise. She has multidisciplinary interests and a passion for teaching. She served for 12 years in Mount Carmel College, teaching Environmental Science, Research Methodology and Biostatistics for Undergraduates and Postgraduates. She served as Additional Director & HOD – Environment at MGIRED, where she was instrumental in supporting the Executive Director in successfully implementing novel initiatives such as Remote Village Electrification Programme, Rejuvenation and protection of Rachenahalli Lake, improving the quality and diversity of the training programmes, setting up of E-waste collection centre, etc. She has worked with various environmental consultancy firms as a freelance consultant for Environmental Impact Assessment studies of Mixed development projects, Residential & Commercial complexes, Medium scale industries, mining and quarrying projects for over 8 years.
She has over 45 publications in journals, magazines and newspapers. Her areas of work include – Environmental Management, Sustainable Development, Solid Waste Management, Sustainable Agriculture, Waste Water Management, Renewable Energy Applications for Social Transformation, Sustainable Water Management, and EIA. She is accredited by National Accreditation Board for Education and Training, Quality Council of India as Environmental Consultant for developmental projects. She has been the recipient of ‘Environmentalist of the Year’ award for the year 2013 from the National Environmental Science Academy, New Delhi. She served as a Research Assistant in the Energy & Environment Programme at National Institute for Advanced Studies, IISc, for a short period. She has a strong inclination for Teaching, Research and Practice. She is the founder member of Jalmitra and TREND, volunteer groups working for lakes, environment and natural resource management. She is a member of Western Ghats Task Force, constituted by Ministry of Forests, Ecology and Environment, Govt. of Karnataka.