Archives: People

Champaka Rajagopal is a senior researcher, educator, practitioner, focused on urban policy, governance, planning and infrastructure governance. She is a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, India, Professor Affiliae at the Urban School, SciencesPo, Paris, France, Founder, Director of The Entrepreneurship and Partnerships Lab. She also serves as Trustee on the Board of Trustees, IJURR Foundation, UK.

Her research interests lie in investigating state-business relationships, firms, entrepreneurship and innovation, with a focus on commercial and contract laws, policies, governance, mechanisms directed at privatisation. She draws on experiential learning from her more than two decades of engagement with multi-national corporations and international finance institutions, in India and abroad.

Previously, as part of international consultancy firms, she co-led large statutory plans, including the Draft Development Plan for Greater Mumbai 2034 and Revised Master Plan 2015, Bangalore, where the focus was to remove regulatory rigidity and regulatory capture. In her two decades of practice across cities in the global South and the North, with international donors, national-state governments, businesses, markets and communities she has advanced the design of policies, regulatory processes, instruments and mechanisms that deepen democratic processes and respond to place.

Resulting from practice is her article, Reciprocity as Regulation: Exploring Methodologies in Urban Design for the Historical Pete, Bangalore, published in Ed, Harriss-White, Basile, Lutringer, Mapping India’s Capitalisms, Old and New, Springer, 2015. She has authored book chapters and news articles on problems in urban planning through the years.

Champaka has a doctoral degree from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in Governance, Planning and International Development Studies (2021), a Master’s Degree in Urban Design from the University of California at Berkeley, USA (2002) and an undergraduate degree in the architecture of the built environment from the Centre for Environment Planning and Technology, Ahmedabad, India (1997).

Mr Asok Kumar (IAS) retired as a Special Secretary to the Government of India and the Director General of the National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG). His earlier work as the Mission Director of the National Water Mission, popularizing the slogan of ‘Catch the rain, where it falls and when it falls,’ acquired him an appellation of ‘Rain Man.’ During his long and rich career as a civil servant, Asok’s out of the box interventions are often discussed in public administration conversations. Trained as an engineer and later studied public policy at the International School of Business, Hyderabad, Asok was a Chevening Scholar of CRISP (Chevening Rolls Royce Innovation, Science and Leadership Programme) cohort of 2013 at the University of Oxford. As a Senior Fellow at CPR, he will be working on a book on implementing the Namami Gange programme, the Government of India’s flagship programme for cleaning Ganga. Additionally, he will be revisiting some of his research interests around key social reform interventions during his career to engage with policy and public administration questions. He will also be advising the TREADS Initiative’s research programme under the MoU between CPR and NMCG to pursue policy research towards rejuvenating India’s rivers.

Mr Saugata Bhattacharya is an economist with over 30 years of experience in economic and financial markets analysis, policy advocacy, infrastructure and project finance, consumer behaviour and analytics. He has written and published extensively on these subjects. Before joining CPR as a Senior Fellow, Sauagata was the Chief Economist and Executive Vice President at the Axis Bank. Earlier, at IDFC, he worked as a specialist with the Policy Advisory Group and participated in several key committees of Government of India, including the Prime Minister’s Task Force on Infrastructure. At CPR, he will be playing a lead role in the ongoing work with the Government of Andhra Pradesh – supporting its Data Analytics Unit. He will also be pursuing his research interests in macro-financial forecasting reviewing global and domestic developments, MSME sector, digital public infrastructure in banking, financial and insurance sectors, and urbanization.