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Aasha Kapur Mehta

Visiting Professor and Chairperson, Centre for Gender Studies

aashaihd@gmail.com

  • M.S. and Ph.D. (Iowa State University, USA)
  • M.Phil. (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
  • M.A. (Delhi School of Economics)


Professor Aasha Kapur Mehta is former Professor of Economics, Indian Institute of Public Administration. She worked at IIPA for 32 years. Prior to this she taught at Kamala Nehru College, Delhi University. She studied at Delhi School of Economics, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Iowa State University, USA. She received the Fulbright Scholarship, the McNamara fellowship, Phi Kappa Phi (for overall excellence in academics), Gamma Sigma Delta (for excellence in agricultural economics), was recognised as an Associate of the University of Birmingham and was nominated for the Gender Economist, Skoch Development Challenger award.

She was invited as an expert to assist NITI Aayog in formulating the Rural Economy chapter for the Vision, Strategy and Action Plan document. She was a Member of the Core Group of the Ad-hoc Task Force appointed by the Cabinet Secretariat for reviewing the performance targets of Government Ministries/Departments included in their Results-Framework Documents for several years. In addition to serving as Member, Group of Feminist Economists constituted by Planning Commission to review the Sectoral Reports of Working Groups and Steering Committees for the Eleventh and Twelfth Plans, she was a Member of Working Groups, and chaired the Subgroup on “Gender Mainstreaming and Effective Accountability Mechanisms” for the Twelfth Plan and the Subgroup on Gender and Agriculture for the Eleventh Plan. She has also invited to serve on several Committees constituted by Ministries such as MoRD, MoPR, MWCD and MoSPI.

She has conducted research and consultancy assignments for Government Ministries such as Ministry of Women and Child Development, National Commission for Women, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Ministry of Rural Development, Government of NCT of Delhi, Government of Punjab, Ministry of Corporate Affairs as well as multilateral and bilateral agencies such as UNDP, UN Women, UNIFEM, UNICEF, World Bank and DFID. She has led the work of the Chronic Poverty Research Centre in India for more than a decade. She has also conducted a large number of training programmes for middle and senior level Government officers. Her books, articles, working papers and reports are on poverty, chronic poverty, poverty dynamics, human and gender development indicators, gender budgeting, deprivation, data gaps, the invisibility of women’s work and women’s contribution to the economy.