Resource experts for Nagari 2022

Water in Urban India

Mridula Ramesh

Mridula Ramesh is the author of the critically acclaimed The Climate Solution and the newly released, Watershed, and the founder of the Sundaram Climate Institute, which focuses on waste and water solutions. She is an active cleantech angel investor, with a portfolio of over twenty start-ups. A graduate with distinction from Cornell University and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Mridula worked at McKinsey in Silicon Valley and is the executive director of Sundaram Textiles. She is part of the board of trustees of World Wildlife Fund, India, and chairperson of the board of governors at National Institute of Technology, Andhra Pradesh. She lives and experiments in Madurai in a (nearly) net-zero-waste home with her husband and two children.

Addressing various factors associated with Water and Urbanism

Vishwanath S

S. Vishwanath is a Civil Engineer and an Urban Planner. He has 34 years of experience in the water, waste-water and sanitation sector helping design rainwater harvesting, aquifer recharge, wastewater recycling and ecosan systems. He is an Adjunct Professor and teaches a course on the theme – “Water”  at the Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, India. He is a Trustee with the Biome Environmental Trust and a Director at Biome Environmental Solutions, an Ecological Architecture practicing firm. He is a member of the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance a global alliance of people and groups working towards sustainable sanitation. He is a member of the International Water Association. He wrote a weekly column called Waterwise for 12 years for The Hindu. He has been a member of various expert committee which helped formulate the Rainwater harvesting policy and law for Bengaluru, the Waste-water policy for Karnataka and the Water Policy for Karnataka, drafted by the Karnataka Knowledge Commission. He was the Secretary General of the International Rainwater Catchment Systems Association for 4 years. He was the Advisor at Arghyam and for the India Water Portal for 10 years

Hussain Indorewala

Hussain Indorewala is a teacher and urban researcher. He teaches planning theory, housing and humanities at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture (KRVIA) in Mumbai. His research work has focused on urban history, infrastructure planning, politics of land and housing, and sustainable transport. He writes frequently in the popular press on urban development, planning and policy. He is the founder partner of the Collective for Spatial Alternatives (CSA), an action research and community planning collective.

Sarita Fernandes



Sarita Fernandes is a coastal, small-island state and maritime policy scholar, with her work and specialisation on land-use changes of coastal zones, conservation of olive ridley sea turtles and coastal disaster management. She also works on ocean governance and marine resource management of maritime zones and stakeholder climate equity into domestic and intergovernmental policies. She studies spatial distribution of different ocean sectors on coastal commons, policy, community-conservation and case-studies of conflict within ocean economic sectors using the same zones.

She has completed her Masters in Public Policy from St. Xavier’s College (Mumbai) and her Post-Graduate Diploma in International Relations and Foreign Policy from the Pherozshah Mehta Bhavan-Department of Civics and Pol. Science in the University of Bombay. Her Masters thesis in public policy included a policy-analysis of the impact of coastal policy (CRZ notifications) on Mumbai’s coastline and her second thesis involved a stakeholder feasibility framework of UNCLOS (United Nations Convention of The Law Of The Sea). Sarita is based out of Goa and New Delhi and is the founder and managing trustee of the Goa Sea Turtle Trust and the Ocean, Coastal and Ecological Alliance Network (O.C.E.A.N).

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