Dr Shashi Ratnaker Singh

Dr Singh is a Dr Manmohan Singh Fellow at St. John’s College, University of Cambridge, and is currently positioned as a Research Fellow at the Department of Geography. He is additionally affiliated with the UK-India Education and Research Initiative as a Visiting Fellow on India’s Political Economy at King’s College, London. In India, he is affiliated with Centre for Public Policy at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and the NTPC School of Business.

Dr Singh is a Human Geographer with inter-disciplinary academic training in Environmental Sciences, Environmental Law, Development Studies, and Human Geography. His research interests pertain to the Political Economy of Land Acquisition and Resource Development, Public Policies, Environmental Laws, and Indigenous People Development. His journal publications are on land acquisitions, displacement, compensation frameworks, mining and resource revenue sharing, public sphere, and justice. Dr Singh works at the intersection of environment and development issues.

Prior to Cambridge, Dr Singh was associated with The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), Delhi, as an Associate Fellow and Convenor of Land and R&R Area under the Social Transformation Division. During his professional tenure, he worked on eight green field projects in mineral rich states of India, where his role was to design compensation and rehabilitation policies for the project’s displaced households. He was also part of a ‘subject expert group’ on land acquisitions constituted by the Indian government in 2011. As part of the aforementioned group, he contributed towards drafting of new legislation titled ‘Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition Resettlement and Rehabilitation Act of 2013’, which repealed colonial legislation titled ‘Land Acquisition Act of 1894’. In the last 10 years Dr Singh has conducted several land acquisition and rehabilitation training programs for the Indian government, the World Bank, and corporations involved with large-scale land acquisitions and mining.

Dr Singh’s present line of research is around large-scale land acquisitions, mining, fair compensation models, land tenure recognition, social risk assessments, land conflicts, and governance issues in resource rich regions. He is also interested in the comparative study of resource rich economies in Asia, Africa and Latin America.