I am a development and environmental governance scholar whose research examines the political and social consequences of resource extraction and energy transitions. My work is grounded in long-term research in India’s coal-mining regions, particularly Jharkhand, and engages broader debates on climate governance, political ecology, Indigenous environmental justice, and just transitions.
I study how extractive frontiers are produced and transformed through interactions between states, corporations, communities, labour, and informal economies, and how these relations change as regions are simultaneously shaped by continued extraction and the global transition away from fossil fuels. A central concern of my research is how climate and energy policies are experienced, negotiated, and contested from below, particularly by Indigenous communities whose land, livelihoods, and political institutions interconnected with resource extraction.
My current research explores the governance of coal transitions, post-coal land and livelihood futures, and the uneven politics of climate action in the Global South. Conceptually, I am interested in questions of extractive precarity, resource frontiers, grounded energy security, resource citizenship, and climate governance from below.
Methodologically, I combine long-term ethnography with qualitative and household research, oral histories, participatory approaches, political-ecological mapping, and policy and legal analysis. I am particularly interested in methodological approaches that connect situated community knowledge with analysis of wider transformations in environmental and climate governance.
Through this work, I seek to contribute to comparative and global scholarship on how climate transitions reshape territories, political authority, livelihoods, and possibilities for environmental justice.