1st Graduate Research Meet

Reetika Khera is a Professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. In the past, she has been Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad, and Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi. She studied at the Delhi School of Economics (M.A. and Ph.D.) and Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex (M.Phil.).  She was a post-doctoral Research Associate at Princeton University where she worked on child nutrition. Before joining IIT-Delhi, she was a visitor at GB Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad, Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics and the Planning Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi. Her research areas include social policy in India, including health and nutrition, education, social protection, employment, poverty, inequality, digital technologies in welfare.

Balaji Parthasarathy is a Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore  (IIITB) since February 2013. He served as the Institute's first Dean (Faculty) from January 2014 until February 2017. In 2012, he also co-founded IIITB's Center for Information Technology and Public Policy. His intellectual interests are rooted in economic geography and economic sociology, and explore the relationships between technological change and innovation, economic globalization, and social transformation. Within this broad focus, his work follows two threads. One thread examines the impacts of public policies and firm strategies on the social and spatial organization of production in the ICT (information and communications technology) industry. Another thread deals with ICTs for Development or ICTD. Here, his interests lie in understanding how ICTs are deployed in various domains of activity to transform social relationships, especially in underprivileged contexts.