About Our Director

Dr Padmini Ram has extensive experience working on Public Policy at grassroots and international levels. Her experience includes working for a grassroots level NGO in India, working at the Department of Economic and Social Affairs at the United Nations in New York, and with American Red Cross (Greater New York Chapter), among others. Apart from affordable housing, she has worked on several other issues relating to public policy – such as Disaster response management, Maternal and Infant Health, Education through sports, ICT for development, Watershed management, HIV-AIDS projects. She is an Anthropologist by training and interested in qualitative research methods.

In her previous engagement Dr Ram has worked as Assistant Professor at the Department of Economic Studies, Christ University, Bengaluru, India, and was the Principal Investigator for CLARE, an industry-academia collaboration on the informal economy between a Social Enterprise, LabourNet, and Christ University. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and has taught graduate and undergraduate students, as well as professionals at universities in India and abroad. As a TED speaker, she delivered a talk on the informal economy titled “Informal or Illegal? Voices from the Fringe!”. Her research papers have been published in international SCOPUS-indexed journals. She has authored the book “The Affordable Housing Market in India” published by Routledge. She has also authored several book chapters and is a journal reviewer for leading publications. As an academic and practitioner, she is interested in the informal economy and studies it from the perspective of economic sociology, political economy, and public policy. 

Urban Ethnographers has been birthed by her desire to reimagine the way we think about the informal economy and the institutions that govern these narratives. At our boutique consultancy, we strive to bridge the distance between policy and practice and reimagine informal sector spaces in new ways.