Rejeet Mathews

Personal Experience

Rejeet Mathews is Program Director, Urban Development at WRI India, where she has been associated for almost 9 years. Her current work is around spatio-economic planning, the integration of land use and transport, city-region master planning, affordable housing, alternative mechanisms to acquire, plan and service land, revision of town and country planning acts and capacity building. She has provided technical inputs to various committees, reports and policies anchored by city, state and national governments in India.

Rejeet has, prior to WRI worked with the consulting firm Groupe SCE India (now EGIS Geo Plan), and CEPT’s Research and Development Unit (as a GATE Scholar and intern). She has held key responsibilities on projects that range in scale from metropolitan region plans, city master plans, detailed project reports, feasibility studies, urban design, micro level plans and architecture. She has worked largely in India with further on-ground project experience in countries such as Sri Lanka, Pakistan, France and Libya.

Key projects worked on include the Development Plan for Greater Mumbai, the Bangalore Metropolitan Region Revised Structure Plan, the Master Plan for Bhiwadi, Tapookara and Khuskhera Complex; the Revised Master Plan for Bangalore 2015, User Needs Assessment for the Urban Development Authority of Sri Lanka and City Development Plan, Comprehensive Mobility Plan, Heritage Plans and Urban Renewal Plans under JNNURM.

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Purnanjali Chandra

Personal Experience

Purnanjali is a Project Associate in the Urban Water Resilience team under the Sustainable Cities and Transport Program of World Resource Institute India. She oversees the ‘Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL)’ components of different projects. She works on developing MEL logical frameworks, indicators and targets that shall guide the process of data collection, insight generation and reporting in the project. Purnanjali has past work experience in MEL and liaising among multiple stakeholders in projects based on Menstrual Health and Hygiene (MHH) and ensuring improved Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) services for women in marginalized communities across different geographies in India. Purnanjali holds an M.Sc. in Water Policy and Governance from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai and a B.Sc. in Geography from Loreto College, University of Calcutta. Having a keen interest across all sectors of water and related fields of research, she has also had the experience of working on different international research projects as Research Fellow at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee. Purnanjali, is also an avid reader, photographer and writer. She has interned in newspapers namely the Times of India and The Telegraph, ABP Group where she had written multiple articles on diverse genres in the Newspapers.
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Madhura Telang

Personal Experience

Madhura Telang is a Program Communications Associate for the Urban Water Resilience team at WRI India. She creates communication strategies for the team’s initiatives and research. She also creates communication content and design for various media outreach channels to enhance the team’s visibility.

Before WRI India, Madhura worked with Sakal Media Group as a Senior Executive (social media). She authored articles, managed social media and worked on ideation and strategy for a Pune’s English daily. She has also worked with Cognizant Technology Solutions as a content specialist. She managed end-user documentation for clients such as Johnson and Johnson, Salesforce, and Yokohama. She was also a visiting faculty member teaching instructional design at Vishwakarma Institute of Technology and MIT University, Pune. With this experience of working in the corporate sector, e-learning, and news media, she has a deep knowledge of developing diverse content deliverables.

She holds an M.Sc. in Communication Studies (specialized in Media Research) from Pune University and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Fergusson College, Pune.

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Sindhuja Janakiraman

Personal Experience

Sindhuja Janakiraman is a Program Associate for the Urban Water Resililience team in the Sustainable Cities and Transport program.. Her work focuses on urban water resilience, inclusive design and planning, and liveable spaces by applying water sensitive urban design strategies. She deals with multi-scalar spatial design by bringing together innovative global and local ground-up knowledge on water management while liaising with multiple stakeholders.

She has done several research and design projects on future-proofing cities through landscape-based infrastructure development with sustainability at its core.Methodologies such as urban metabolism and systems thinking play a huge part in her process.

Prior to joining WRI India, she worked as a landscape architect and urbanist in Rotterdam on various area development and vision plans for cities and regions, that address blue-green challenges. She has also worked as an architect, a conservationist and a participatory planner in India.

Sindhuja has a Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture with an Infrastructure and Environment Design specialization from Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. Before her Master’s, she was part of the Urban Fellowship Program in Indian Institute of Human Settlements and holds a Bachelor’s degree in architecture.

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Ashwathy Anand

Personal Experience

Ashwathy Anand is a Senior Program Associate with the Urban Water Resilience team. She works at the intersection of water, people and development in cities using her interdisciplinary background as an architect, planner and development practitioner. She was also involved in research on blue-green infrastructure, restoration of waterbodies, waterfront regeneration and innovation in water-waste nexus. Ashwathy has previously worked on design and heritage conservation projects in an architectural firm. She has also worked in a policy think tank in Delhi to research on India’s urban policies such as Smart City Mission and HRIDAY. She holds a Master’s in urban Regeneration from the University of London, UK and a bachelor’s in architecture from the School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal. Ashwathy was part of the Urban Fellowship Program held by Indian Institute for Human Settlements in 2016. Her primary research interests lie in urban regeneration, place-making, urban ecology and environment studies, policy, governance.
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Samrat Basak

Personal Experience

Samrat is the Program Director of the Urban Water Resilience practice. Samrat leads the practice to execute action and implementation research programs, technical advisory supports, policy development support, innovation support, multi-stakeholder outreach and engagement with key decision-makers and actors such as national, sub-national and city governments, utilities and municipal service providers, business and the private sector, civil society, community-based organizations, local and international research institutes, academia, donors, bilateral and multilateral agencies to identify and forecast urban water challenges.

He develops science-based and evidence-driven solutions to achieve resilient water outcomes for all. Samrat’s current work focuses on water sensitive urban development; improvement of citywide climate resilient, inclusive, and sustainable access to Water, Sanitation, Hygiene (WASH) and Healthy Spaces; and data-driven urban water planning and decision-making to assist cities in becoming green, inclusive and resilient.

Samrat has over 18 years of experience in working and managing water projects across India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Ethiopia, Egypt and Saudi Arabia through his earlier employment with ERM (Environmental Resources Management). As a thought leader in corporate water management, his work helped to drive sustainable business growth as well as managing business related water risks in a water-finite world.

Samrat has assisted numerous companies across food and beverage, power, manufacturing, chemical, real estate sectors as well as several financial institutions and investors with water risk assessments, risk mitigation and water strategy innovation. He has technical competence in sustainable and resilient water infrastructure planning, water vulnerability assessment, water sustainability/water stewardship framework development, hydrogeological and hydrological assessment, watershed assessment, water harvesting and aquifer recharge, characterization and remediation of contaminated surface water bodies and groundwater, flood risk assessment and data visualization.

Samrat holds a master’s degree in Hydrogeology from the University of Reading, United Kingdom and a second master’s degree in Applied Geology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He was the recipient of the prestigious Felix Scholarship, as part of his master’s program in UK. 

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