Speaker

Associate Professor of Sociology & Anthropology, Ashoka University
Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research

Mekhala Krishnamurthy is an Associate Professor of Sociology & Anthropology at Ashoka University and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR). At CPR, Mekhala leads the State Capacity Initiative, a major interdisciplinary research and practice programme committed to addressing the challenges and possibilities of building state capacity in democratic and federal India.

Working in close collaboration with governments and a growing team of policy scholars and researchers, this initiative focuses on institutional design, implementation and administrative capacity of the Indian state; the norms, values and organisational cultures of public bureaucracies and public workers; the particular challenges of regulatory and fiscal capacity; and the complex and changing relations between society, politics and state capacity in India.

Over the last twenty years, Mekhala’s research, policy and professional engagements have involved work across a range of field sites and subjects, including informal women’s courts, popular justice and dispute resolution, community health workers and public health and nutrition, agriculture and agricultural markets, and land, water and livelihoods. In the process, her work has placed her at the intersections of and in partnerships between academia, public policy, government, grassroots civil society organisations, the private sector and philanthropic foundations.

Mekhala teaches a range of courses on the anthropology of the everyday state and market, political economy, bureaucracy, and citizenship. She also works on strengthening pedagogical innovation and practice in public administration training and capacity building institutions in India. In addition to her academic scholarship, she is a regular contributor in the print and electronic media. Throughout, it is her commitment to long-term fieldwork in local communities and among frontline workers of the Indian state that grounds and sustains her practice. Mekhala is a UCL Global Excellence Scholar. She is a Non-Resident Scholar at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania.