I am a joint PhD candidate at IIT Kanpur (India) and La Trobe University (Australia), researching participatory water governance, common pool resources, and pollution politics with a primary focus on the Ganga River basin in India. My doctoral fieldwork spans riverine communities across Kanpur Nagar and Varanasi districts in Uttar Pradesh, where I examine how communities perceive water pollution, engage with regulatory institutions, and organise collective action in contexts where governance architectures are characterised by institutional fragmentation and accountability deficits.
Alongside my primary research, I serve as a CitiObs Fellow under the EU Horizon Europe programme, co-creating knowledge and local action with citizen science groups engaged in urban environmental monitoring. I also work on computational social science projects involving large-scale corpus analysis of climate media coverage using natural language processing and discourse analysis methods.