Sudhir Rajan

Dr. Rajan has an interdisciplinary doctarate in Environmental Science and Engineering and around 25 years of experience working with technical objects of social sciences in relation to conflicts regarding energy access and climate change policy, institutional and emergent processes and reforms. His primary focus across sectors has been on understanding and responding to a variety of challenges relating to institutions and governance for infrastructure and the environment. He is currently working on a project near Chennai to understand peri-urban dynamics and also to engage local farmers, village leaders, community groups and district and state officials to record their own experiences in managing cascading water tanks and drainage channels in order to build institutional capacity in the area and safeguard sustainable strategies. He is a Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Madras and is writing a manuscript on the ‘long’ or ‘trans-temporal’ history of corruption in India.
He is author of The Enigma of Automobility: Democratic Politics and Pollution Control and a co-author of The Suicidal Planet: How to Avoid Global Climate Catastrophe. He has previously worked at the California Air Resources Board, the International Energy Initiative and Tellus Institute. He is Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras and Area Coordinator for Land Use at the Indo-German Centre for Sustainability.