SPEAKERS

Prof. Rohini Pande

Rohini Pande is the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. She is also the faculty director of Inclusion Economics at Yale. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Econometric Society fellow, and a former co-editor of American Economic Review: Insights. Pande received the 2018 Carolyn Bell Shaw Award from the American Economic Association for promoting the success of women in the economics profession and the 2022 Infosys Prize in Social Sciences. Formerly, Pande was the Rafik Harriri Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School.

Pande’s research, which has influenced policy in South Asia and globally, focuses on how institutions shape power relationships and patterns of economic, political, and environmental advantage in low-income countries. She is interested in the role of public policy in providing the poor and disadvantaged political and economic power, as well as how notions of economic justice and human rights can legitimize and enable such change. With Inclusion Economics India Center, she is working with Indian state governments on gender-inclusive rural development and digital policies and with Inclusion Economics Nepal Center she is evaluating policies to strengthen quality of policy-making by elected local governments.

Pande received a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics, a BA/MA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University, and a BA in Economics from Delhi University.

Prof. Adrija Majumdar

Adrija Majumdar is a faculty member and the current chairperson in the Information Systems area at IIM Ahmedabad. Her research interests include social media, online communities, crowdfunding, and text mining. Her research articles have been published in international journals such as Information & Management, International Journal of Information Management, Information Systems Frontiers Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Technology Forecasting and Social Change, Communications of AIS, International Journal of Production Economics, etc. She completed her PhD from IIM Calcutta in Management Information Systems.

Prof. Anirban Adhikary

Prof. Anirban Adhikary is the Dean of Faculty and Research, Associate Professor, and Young Faculty Research Chair at IIM Udaipur. His research primarily focuses on sustainability issues in supply chains, exploring innovative solutions to address environmental and social challenges.

Shri Alpan Raval

Alpan Raval is the Chief AI/ML Scientist at the Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a non-profit devoted to developing and deploying AI for social impact across the global South. The institute currently build AI solutions for public health, agriculture and education. Alpan has been working in the applied AI space for over two decades, initially as a professor at the Claremont Colleges in California, and later at D E Shaw Research, Amazon, and LinkedIn. He is an author of a book on network biology, Introduction to Biological Networks.

Alpan holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Maryland, USA and an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

Chetan Savla

Chetan Savla is President – Sustainability and Strategic Projects at Kotak Mahindra Bank.

Within his career with Kotak group of over 30 years, Chetan has led the Sustainability practice for the Group since 2021.

Prior to that, Chetan was Head of Group Strategy at Kotak Mahindra Bank for 4 years and he worked for 18 years as an investment banker with Kotak Mahindra Capital Company. As a part of his work in investment banking, Chetan led over 80 capital market transactions to raise over USD 18 billion for corporate India, as well as advised Indian and global companies in their M&A transactions.

Chetan is a 1991 MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.