event speaker

Isher Judge Ahluwalia

Dr Isher Judge Ahluwalia, an eminent Indian economist, is Chairperson of Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), a leading think-tank based in New Delhi engaged in policy oriented research. She was Chairperson of the High Powered Expert Committee on Urban Infrastructure and Services, the Government of India, from 2008 to 2011. She was awarded Padma Bhushan by the President of India in the year 2009 for her services in the field of education and literature. Dr. Ahluwalia's research has focussed on policy oriented challenges facing the Indian economy in the areas of urbanisation, sustainable public service delivery, macroeconomic issues, and industrial growth and productivity. Dr Ahluwalia has written a number of books, the latest being "Transforming Our Cities: Postcards of Change" (HarperCollins, 2014), and a co-edited volume titled "Urbanisation in India: Challenges, Opportunities and the Way Forward" (Sage India, 2014). She is also the co-editor together with Prof. IMD Little of "India's Economic Reforms and Development: Essays for Manmohan Singh" (OUP, 2013), which is an updated version of the original volume published in 1998.
Dr Ahluwalia was Chairperson, Board of Trustees of International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington D.C., from 2003 to 2006 and was on the Board of Trustees of International Water Management Institute (IWMI) from 2010 to 2016.
Dr Ahluwalia received her B.A. (Hons) from Presidency College, Calcutta University, M.A. from the Delhi School of Economics, and Ph.D.



event speaker

Rajat Kathuria

Rajat Kathuria is Director and Chief Executive at Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), New Delhi. He has over 20 years experience in teaching and 15 years experience in economic policy, besides research interests on a range of issues relating to regulation and competition policy. He has worked with the World Bank, Washington DC as a Consultant and carried out research assignments for a number of international organizations, including ILO, UNCTAD, LirneAsia, World Bank and ADB. He has published in international and national journals, besides in popular magazines and newspapers. He is founder member of Broadband Society for Universal Access and served on the Board of Delhi Management Association. He is on several government committees and on the research advisory council of SBI. He has an undergraduate degree in Economics from St. Stephens College, a Masters from Delhi School of Economics and a PhD degree from the University of Maryland, College Park.




Men Speaker

Bustanul Arifin

Bustanul Arifin is Professor of Agricultural Economics in the University of Lampung (UNILA), Senior Economist with the Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (INDEF), and Professorial Fellow at School of Business in Bogor Agricultural University (IPB). He has over 30 year-experience on a comprehensive range of research in food and agricultural policy, institutional change, and sustainable development strategy. He earns a Ph.D. in resource economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA) and Sarjana in agricultural economics from IPB in Indonesia. He has served as Director of INDEF and Adviser to the House of Representative, Chairman of Expert Group of Food Security Council and Member of the National Innovation Council. Dr. Arifin has published 40 titles of books in economics and development issues, over 80 articles in scientific journals, presented over 100 research papers in international conferences, and over 500 research papers in national conferences in Indonesia. He also contributes his expertise as: Chairman of Statistical Society Forum and Member of National Commission of Agricultural Extension. Dr. Arifin is a well-known analyst on economics and development issues for national television and radio stations, and has written about 1,000 articles and columns in magazines and newspapers.




Men Speaker

Andreas-Bauer

Andreas Bauer is the International Monetary Fund's senior resident representative for India, Nepal, and Bhutan. During his 15+ year career at the IMF he has worked as a mission chief and senior economist on a range of countries, mainly in Latin America and the Middle East. Before taking up his current position in New Delhi, he headed a unit in charge of international monetary and financial issues, and institutional strategy at the IMF's Washington headquarters. Earlier in his career, Mr. Bauer was an emerging markets analyst for Credit Suisse and held senior positions in the Ministry of Finance of Chile, including chief of staff to the minister. He holds an economics degree from University of St.Gallen (Switzerland) and an MA in Applied Macroeconomics from Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile.




Men Speaker

Fred-Bedore

Fred Bedore is the senior director of business strategy and sustainability for Walmart Stores, Inc.. He is responsible for the integration of sustainability into Walmart's business strategies, the collaboration with the company's sustainable value networks on key sustainability goals and the incorporation of sustainability into the brand and culture of the company.
Fred joined Walmart in 2004 as a buyer in general merchandise. In 2006 he was promoted to a senior strategy manager with the Innovation team where he held multiple roles with a special emphasis on merchandising and supply chain. In 2010, Fred was named a senior director on the corporate sustainability team. During his time at Walmart, Fred has been a part of teams who have won buyer of the year honors and been nominated for the Sam M. Walton Entrepreneur of the Year award.
Fred has an undergraduate degree in Economics from Michigan State University and an MBA with a concentration in Supply Chain from Pennsylvania State University.




Men Speaker

Jaimini-Bhagwati

Dr Jaimini Bhagwati - Reserve Bank of India Chair Professor at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER). He is also currently a Board member of Infrastructure Development Finance Company's Holding company.
Dr Bhagwati was educated at St. Stephen's College, Tufts University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was India's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and India's Ambassador to the European Union, Belgium and Luxembourg. He has held senior positions in the Ministry of External Affairs.
Dr Bhagwati was Joint Secretary (Capital Markets, Pension Reforms and External Commercial Borrowings) in the Ministry of Finance (MoF). During his tenure in MoF he was responsible for improving market integrity and implementing better practices in Indian bond, equity and derivatives' markets and the pensions sector. He has worked for eleven years in Washington DC in the World Bank's Treasury. His responsibilities at the World Bank included bond funding, derivatives transactions and asset-liability management.
Dr Bhagwati has authored research publications in ICRIER, at the World Bank and in several books. He is a columnist in Business Standard (an Indian daily newspaper).




Men Speaker

Ashima Goyal

Ashima Goyal is widely published in institutional and open economy macroeconomics, international finance and governance, with more than a hundred articles in national and international journals. She has also authored and edited a number of books including Macroeconomics and Markets in Developing and Emerging Economies (Routledge: UK. 2017) and A Concise Handbook of the Indian Economy in the 21st Century (OUP: India, 2015). She edits the Routledge journal Macroeconomics and Finance in Emerging Market Economies; has provided consultancy to ADB, DEA, GDN, UNDP, RBI, UN ESCAP and WB; is active in the Indian policy debate; and has served on several government committees, boards of educational and of financial institutions, including the RBI technical advisory committee for monetary policy. Currently she is a Member of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council, a Public Interest Director at IDBI bank, CARE Ratings, and SBI Mutual Fund. She contributes a monthly column to the Hindu Business Line. She was a visiting fellow at the Economic Growth Centre, Yale University, USA, and a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow at Claremont Graduate University, USA. Her research has received national and international awards. She won two best research awards at GDN meetings at Tokyo (2000) and Rio de Janeiro (2001), was selected as one of the four most powerful women in economics, a thought leader, by Business Today (2008), and was the first Professor P.R. Brahmananda Memorial Research Grant Awardee for a study on History of Monetary Policy in India since Independence (2011), which was published by Springer in 2014. She received The Distinguished Alumni Award for 2018 in recognition for contribution and achievements in the field of Economics at the 16th Annual OSA Distinguished Alumni Awards, 20th FLO GR8 Beti Award for Excellence in the field of Economics and Policy, by the Women Wing of FICCI, FLO, and the NGO Beti, as well as the SKOCH Challenger Award for Economic Policy at the 50th SKOCH Summit held in Delhi.
Research Interests: Open economy macroeconomics, international finance, financial markets and regulation, institutions and development.




Men Speaker

Ashok Gulati

Ashok Gulati is currently Infosys Chair Professor for Agriculture at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER). He is an eminent Indian agricultural economist and a former Chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), Government of India (2011-14). He is currently also on the Central Board of Directors of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD).
He was Director at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) for more than 10 years (2001-11). He worked as a Chair Professor NABARD at Institute of Economic Growth (1998-2000), and prior to that he was Director/Chief Economist, Agriculture and Rural Development at National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) from 1991 till 1997.
Dr Gulati has been deeply involved in policy analysis and advice in India. He was the youngest member of the Economic Advisory Council of Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee; Member of the Economic Advisory Council of the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh and Member of the State Planning Board of Karnataka.
For his contributions to the field, the President of India honored him with "Padma Shri" award in 2015. Gulati has 15 books to his credit on Indian and Asian Agriculture, besides numerous research papers in national and International Journals. He has been a prolific writer in leading news papers in India, with his current column "From Plate to Plough" in the Indian Express and Financial Express. He did his M.A. and Ph.D. from Delhi School of Economics.




Men Speaker

Radhicka Kapoor

Radhicka Kapoor is a Fellow at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER). Prior to joining ICRIER, she worked at the Planning Commission and at the International Labour Organization, Geneva. Her broad areas of research interests include poverty and inequality, labour economics and industrial performance. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics, a Masters degree from Cambridge University and a Bachelors degree from St. Stephens College, University of Delhi.




Men Speaker

Ulka Kelkar

Ulka Kelkar is the Director of Climate Policy at World Resources Institute (WRI) India. She coordinates WRI India's climate policy work, which aims to support India's pathway to a low-carbon climate-resilient economy.
Ulka has 19 years' experience in interdisciplinary research, capacity building, and outreach on climate change. Before joining WRI she was a consultant climate assessment specialist for the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and developed a roadmap for South Asian regional cooperation on adaptation to climate change. She was a Fellow at the Bangalore-based Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), where she used behavioural economics to understand what might motivate urban households to switch to renewable energy technologies. She worked for 16 years at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), where she used participatory methods and household surveys to assess how rural communities can adapt to climate change. She collaborated with architects and financial analysts to devise business models for low-cost climate-resilient housing in disaster-prone regions of Bangladesh and Nepal. She worked with the corporate sector on measuring greenhouse gas emissions and developing clean development mechanism (CDM) projects. Her research has been published in journals like Global Environmental Change, Climate Policy, and Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change.
She lives in Bangalore with her husband, Siddhartha and their daughter, Mandavi.




Men Speaker

Reetika Khera

Reetika Khera is an associate professor (economics and public systems group) at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. She did her Ph.D at the Delhi School of Economics, her post-doctoral work at Princeton, and taught at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi before joining IIM Ahmedabad. She works on social policy and has published extensively on these issues in international peer reviewed journals, Indian journals as well as written for the popular press.




Men Speaker

Ravichandran Purushothaman

Mr. Ravi ( Ravichandran Purushothaman ) is the President of Danfoss India, the Indian subsidiary of global major in climate and energy solutions since 2013.
With experience spanning over 28 years, Ravi has worked extensively in building businesses in India, Asia pacific and Europe. He has been a key member of the Danfoss Growth strategies in India, Asia Pacific and a key member of the global management teams.
An Engineer in Electronics and communication from College of Engineering Guindy is also an Alumina from IIM Ahmedabad and Singularity University in California. Ravi is very closely involved with industry in building technology road maps, building the network for cold chain alliances and skill development in HVAC & R industry. Strong believer in Industry- University interaction has been working in building University interaction programs. He is currently the Chairman of CII Tamlinadu, member of CII National council for Agriculture and heads the CII National task force for Cold Chain Development in India where he lays emphasis on development of the cold chain sector in India. He was the Chairman of the CII Chennai Zone in 2014-15. He has been a key member in promoting Energy efficiency, Sustainable technologies and Green buildings.
He has an avid interest towards farming during his free time. He is also a Cycling and trekking enthusiast.




Men Speaker

Sanjeev Sanyal

Sanjeev Sanyal is an internationally acclaimed economist and best-selling author. He is currently the Principal Economic Advisor to the Government of India and also serves as the Co-Chair of the G-20 Framework Working Group. Prior to joining the government, he spent two decades in the financial sector and was Global Strategist & Managing Director at Deutsche Bank. He was named Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2010. He is also a well known environmentalist and urban theorist. In 2007, he was awarded the Eisenhower Fellowship for his work on urban dynamics. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University, Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, Singapore and a Senior Fellow of the World Wide Fund for Nature. In 2016, he served in the Future City Sub-Committee of the Singapore government tasked with building a long-term vision for the city-state and is currently a member of the committee tasked with writing a new National Urban Policy for India (to be published 2018).
Sanjeev attended Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi and Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar (1992-95). His best-selling books include Land of the Seven Rivers, The Indian Renaissance and The Ocean of Churn, all published by Penguin. In addition, he had published around 200 articles, columns and reports in leading national/international publications. He was given the inaugural International Indian Achievers Award for contributions to Literature in 2014. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, London and a Visiting Fellow of IDFC Institute, Mumbai.




Men Speaker

Kumar V Pratap

Kumar V Pratap is Joint Secretary (Infrastructure Policy, Finance, and Energy), Ministry of Finance, Government of India. Earlier, he has worked with the Prime Minister's Office, Ministries of Finance and Urban Development, and Planning Commission (all at New Delhi), and the World Bank and Embassy of India (both at Washington DC). He has given talks at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), London School of Economics, Singapore Management University, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (Singapore), Duke University (North Carolina), University of Maryland (College Park), University of South Carolina (Columbia), World Bank (Washington DC), Indian Institute of Management (IIM, Ahmedabad), IIM (Lucknow), IIM (Indore), and National Academy of Administration (Mussoorie). He teaches a course every year on 'Infrastructure and the Private Sector' at the Indian School of Business (Hyderabad and Mohali).
He has been part of many Government of India committees in the infrastructure sectors including the Task Force for setting up a Road Regulator, and the chair of the Committee writing the Model Concession Agreement for Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in the Urban Water Supply sector. He leads the Indian delegation at the G20 Infrastructure Working Group meetings. He is on the Board of Directors of India Infrastructure Finance Company Limited (IIFCL), Indian Railway Finance Corporation Limited (IRFCL), and ONGC Videsh Limited.
He has published with Oxford University Press, World Bank, University of Melbourne, Economic and Political Weekly, and the popular press including Economic Times and Business Standard. He has written a book entitled 'PPPs in Infrastructure - Managing the Challenges' that has been published by Springer (Singapore) in January 2018. He is a recipient of University of Melbourne's Emerging Leaders Fellowship, University of Maryland's John J Sexton and Doctoral Fellowships, a letter of appreciation from the Indian Prime Minister, and the National Talent Search Examination (NTSE) scholarship.
He has a MBA from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Lucknow (1987) and a PhD from University of Maryland, College Park, USA (2011).




Men Speaker

Imraan Valodia

Professor Imraan Valodia is Dean of the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He was previously based at the School of Built Environment and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal.
His research interests include employment, the informal economy, gender and economic policy, and industrial development.
Professor Valodia has led and participated in a number of large national and international studies. In the recent period, he led an international study, in 10 cities across the globe, of the informal economy using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. In the period 20082011 he led, with Professor Caren Grown of the American University, a pathbreaking three-year research project, conducted in 8 countries, on the gender impacts of direct and indirect taxation. This research was recently published by Routledge as an edited book.
He has published widely in leading international journals. Professor Valodia is a National Research Foundation (NRF) B-rated researcher - a rating given to researchers who enjoy considerable international recognition by their peers for the high quality and impact of their recent research outputs.
Professor Valodia is a part time member of the Competition Tribunal in South Africa. He is also a Commissioner of the South African Employment Conditions Commission and a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (Assaf) Standing Committee on Science for the Reduction of Poverty and Inequality.
In August 2016 Professor Valodia was appointed by Deputy President Cyril Rampaphosa to chair the Advisory Panel on the National Minimum Wage, which presented a Report to the Nedlac social partners in November 2016.