Bina AgarwalNobel Conference 46

Bina Agarwal, Ph.D., professor of economics and director, Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi, India

Bina Agarwal has written and researched in areas including land, livelihoods, and property rights; environment and development; the political economy of gender; poverty, and inequality; and agriculture and technological change. In 29 years of teaching students as well as government officials, she has focused on the interconnectedness of gender, poverty, and development.

Agarwal earned a B.A. in economics from the University of Delhi, India (1970) and a B.A., reading for the Economics Tripos, from the University of Cambridge, U.K. (1972). After working as a research associate in regional planning and social development in Delhi for two years, she returned to Cambridge to earn an M.A. in economics (1977). She was awarded a Ph.D. in economics from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, a year later. She joined the Institute of Economic Growth in 1981.

In 2005 Agarwal was named the first recipient of India’s Ramesh Chandra Award of Excellence for outstanding contributions to agricultural economics. She received the Padma Shri, the President’s national award for education and economics, from the government of India in 2008, and the Leontief Prize from the Global Development and Environment Institute of Tufts University in 2009. Author of five books (including Cold Hearths and Barren Slopes: The Woodfuel Crisis in the Third World [1986] and A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia [1994]) and co-editor of four more, she has a new book, Gender and Environmental Governance: The Political Economy of Women’s Presence within and beyond Community Forestry, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.