Vivek
Bhandari

Prof. Vivek Bhandari has spent over twenty five years in academia, while also working closely with the government, corporate, and civil society sectors. From 2006 to 2011, Prof. Bhandari was the Director, and Professor of Social Science at the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA)—one of India’s youngest B-School directors at the time. Before joining IRMA, he was a faculty member at Hampshire College in Amherst, USA for just under a decade. He was a Visiting Scholar, Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010, and has also served as Ratan Tata Chair (Visiting) Professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) from 2012 to 2015. He was Distinguished Professor, Institute of Health Management Research (IIHMR), Jaipur, where he founded IIHMR’s School of Rural Management; and later went on to serve as President of IIHMR University. He is a founding faculty member of the Young India Fellowship Program, now an integral initiative of Ashoka University, New Delhi. He has been visiting faculty at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, for several years. From 2019 to 2021, Prof. Bhandari was a Visiting Fellow at the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad. Most recently, he was on the faculty of Krea University.

Prof. Bhandari, an alumnus of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi (where he completed his BA and MA). He then attended the University of Pennsylvania, from where he received a second MA in South Asian Studies, and his Ph.D. He has lectured extensively, and his writings in the fields of international political economy, management, and development studies have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Asian Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, in edited volumes, and reference works such as the International Encyclopedia for the Social Sciences, the Encyclopedia of Modern Asia, and most recently, in the Encyclopedia of Sustainability. He has provided on-air commentary for National Public Radio (NPR) in the US; and has been interviewed by a variety of Indian newspapers and magazines such as The Times of India, Indian Express, Mint, and the Hindustan Times; as well as Outlook and India Today. He has published columns for magazines such as Seminar, and Democratic World, and also written a children’s book on Gandhi for DK Books (a part of Penguin Random House).

Vivek is a social scientist who specializes in the areas of development studies, social/political theory, and more broadly, the historical evolution of democratic institutions and practices.