I am a researcher interested in questions about how information and knowledge relate to society and development.

I’m currently a PhD candidate in the School of Social Sciences at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru, working under the supervision of Dr. Anant Kamath. My research sits at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and development studies — broadly, I’m interested in how knowledge, expertise, and infrastructure shape (and are shaped by) contested visions of progress.

My doctoral work, tentatively titled “Developmental Publics: Infrastructure, Politics, and Contested Visions of Progress in Keralam,” looks at how Kerala’s much-studied development trajectory. I wish to explore qualitative changes that have happened in the development discourse and development policies. Using the shelved K-Rail SilverLine project as an empirical site, I’m trying to understand how what I call “Developmental Publics” — the multiple, shifting collectivities that form around competing ideas of infrastructure, welfare, ecology, and progress — negotiate, contest, and reshape state-led development.

I trained first in Physics and Electrical and Electronics Engineering at BITS Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus. I also worked briefly in the Quantum Transport lab at IISER, Thiruvananthapuram on the automation of multi-gated device measurements — work that led to a publication on 2D superconductivity.

I found myself drawn to the social and political questions beneath the technical ones — how knowledge gets made, contested, and put to use — which took me through a Master’s in Political Science (IGNOU) and then in Development Studies at TISS Mumbai, where my dissertation examined the Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad, a people’s science movement, and how it responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Along the way I’ve also worked on climate-smart agriculture policy at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW).

You can find my full CV here, or reach me through the links below.