I am an incoming postdoctoral researcher in Natural Resources and Environment at Cornell University. I recently filed my doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Los Angeles. Tentatively titled Speculating Sustainability: Start-Ups and the Ethnographic Life of Climate Futures, my dissertation-based book manuscript traces how sustainability-focused digital agriculture start-ups materialize their visions of ecological and economic transformation, the frictions they encounter, and the unintended consequences they generate.

Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork across two agriculture technology start-ups, rural farms, industry events, and bureaucratic workshops, it examines two contrasting cases: a start-up that attempted to rapidly scale sustainability interventions in rice cultivation and generate carbon credits, and a digital organic marketplace that aimed to grow patiently. Start-ups are speculative ventures, shaped by constraints of capital, consumer demands, and the affordances of technology itself. By following how these enterprises pragmatically test what can be achieved, at what scale, and within what timeframe, my book holds critique and desire together: it demystifies techno-utopian promises without retreating into wilderness nostalgia or eco-apocalypse. Instead, it offers critiques from within that remain attentive to lived contradictions of “climate-smart” interventions, while tracing possibilities for more desirable futures from within the fissures of ongoing interventions. Ultimately, my research shows what happens when these global ambitions to address climate change meet everyday agrarian realities in India, and what kinds of futures emerge from the tensions between them. Read more about my research here.

My research has been published in the Economic Anthropology, Economic & Political Weekly, Scroll.in, Wire.in, The Indian Express, and India in Transition. It has been supported by grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and several UCLA-based centers. My research has been awarded the 2024 Eric R. Wolf Award for “exceptional graduate research on work and labor” from the Society for the Anthropology of Work, American Anthropological Association.

Alongside research, I co-direct ZealGrit Foundation, a nonprofit in rural Bihar, India. The organization addresses malnutrition among marginalized communities. I also serve as a contributing editor for the Society for Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropological Association.

Prior to beginning my graduate studies in 2019, I finished my B.Tech. in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 2015, and my M.A. in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics in 2018. I also worked as a Chief Minister’s Fellow in Haryana for a year.